where's me country?

The Death Penalty

12.31.2006

I cant say I have ever been madly disposed to the death penalty, and for me the execution of Saddam represents the most extreme test of the logic of those for and against it. It should transcend the issues which divide people on the Iraq war itself, it goes beyond the questions of legality, ethics, foreign policy and any other angle that people take on the war itself.

Those are big questions, agreed, but the idea behind the death penalty is, at heart, far more important. It occurs to me that within the death penalty, we have the general capacity to wage war made particular. As a polity, we are generally seen as conferring on our states the right to wage war in our defence, as far as non-democratic regimes are concerned the lines of authority are quite short and the right to wage war is quite liberally engaged irrespective of the considerations of the wider population. So far nothing new.

Consider for a moment though, that in effect the state is given the right to kill as many (or, less often, as little) people as it sees fit in order to achieve its (or our) aims. The relationship however between the killing within the war and the legitimation that is notionally conferred on such wars is often quite blurry. Rarely are we confronted by the lost life, the relatives of the dead or the people who live through the dreadful reality of warfare (and that includes soldiers, press and officers).

The state's capacity to dispense death in a war is so broad, so general, that our legitimation of its acts rarely impacts upon us as an act we have sanctioned. Rather it comes to be seen as an inevitable act, in which we merely have observer status. There are surely deep psychological tomes on whether this is a necessary response to the gruesome reality of death or, perhaps more likely, the accurate grasp of reality.

The core point remains however that the right to wage war passes from the multitude to the elite in such a fashion that the multitude feel almost no involvement in decisions resulting in war and death. The diversity of casualties and the gravity of war makes it the most contentious thing a democracy can consider engaging in. Yet at the same time it is wrapped in concepts so abstract and practices so general that the translation between the field of battle (be it a city, plain or village) and the people can often break down. The whole thing is simply too big.

Yet in the death penalty, the difficulty which surrounds the whole notion of war is neatly transcended thanks to a number of key issues. Foremost among them is the fact that only one is intended to die. In this we now put a face on that which we are allowing the state to destroy. It is impossible to "know" Iraq in any personal sense, it is an entity comprised of a network of people, acts, institutions, cultures etc, yet we may know Saddam. (At this point I want to make clear I'm not defending him, just exploring the issue)

Here is where we employ all of the ideas of 'other-ness' and empathy for which human nature is so rightly famed. Within this situation we have distilled the states right to wage death away from the general, unknowable realm of complex entities such as nation-states, to a person. We are not here dealing with the issue of bombing a whole country but of putting a person to death and for that it is almost as powerful an idea.

The one who stands before an executioner faces a states power as much as the person caught in a missile attack. It has been decided that today is their day to die and it is has notionally been our function to sanction this. We have done so broadly, committing to the idea. In the case of war it is rare that the idea becomes flesh to any full extent. There are snatches of personality, snatches of stories but almost as a rule, war remains abstract and general. It is discussed in general terms with general words and the rare penetration of personhood.

The complete opposite is the case in the death penalty. The state has the power to institute death, that much is the same, yet the one who dies is the specific. The particular. The idea of sanctioning death has been brought before us in the flesh and blood of the one who will die.

We do not spend every waking minute thinking of how right it is for a state to kill, yet at any given moment there is likely to be a war somewhere (and you can be guaranteed that the majority of people living there don't want it). The death penalty has that capacity to slam full force into our consciousness like no other issue. It has the power to make us ask, how and why we allow the state a right to kill.

While it is a stretch to begin to extrapolate from an aversion to the death penalty to an aversion to war, one must consider the value to a government of the consistent right to kill in general and particular. A state will reserve the right to be consistent so as to make the jump from killing one to killing many all the more easier. Societies 'softened' by post-war social-liberalism are likely to be squeamish about the paradox of sanctioning general killing while banning particular killing. Perhaps it is one reason why the US views Europe as unreliable in these matters.

The death penalty has the power to distil all of the elements which are present in war-making into a manageable scenario for humans. In this it is exceptional and instructive. It makes us think whether we will sanction this particular death, whether it is in agreement with our moral, social or religious principles but it also sets a precedent upon which a drive to war draws.

I had hoped to arrive at a conclusion somewhere about here, however all I can do is think that perhaps the death penalty is a necessity if a society is to go to war, the logical consistency makes the whole process easier. The whole idea of the death penalty though, I find abhorrent.

This entry was posted on 12.31.2006 at 12/31/2006 12:22:00 a.m.. There are . If you want, you can leave your own response by clicking here. You may also send this post to a friend of yours via email, or bookmark it for yourself by using icons below;