Melting away crime and agony

        Reunited with my notebooks while organizing the shelves yesterday.  It’s been a while since the last entry.  Leafing through the pages, sentences and sentiments seem strangely aloof. 

        The earlier entries are barely legible, but amid the anarchy of quotes and exclamations, here I discovered something Interesting:

        “Right now, an ex-Nazi commander is being trialed in the International Court.  Jurors are deliberating whether he should be convicted.

        “Should he?  Many men of similar past had sat in that chair before him, men who killed thousands – or even millions – ruthlessly, but who had done so under orders of the legitimate, democratically elected government at the time.  Should they have been convicted?

        “The purpose of court and sentence, or ‘justice’, as modern citizens like to consider it, is firstly, to warn off potential crimes, and secondly, to avenge the victims.  But if that’s all the court-ordered penalty does, I think the means are much too severe for the ends. 

“I think punishment – which is a slightly prettier word for retribution – should be the very last resolve, no matter what we are up against; it’s savage, primal, and destructive.  I think we, as the human race, should wake up and dedicate our best minds to finding alternative measures for dealing with crimes and criminals in our society. 

        “We have developed great civilizations and technologies beyond our ancestors’ wildest imagination, but the core of our legal system, which reflects our philosophies, is still almost as barbarous as the pre-historic era. "

        I still feel strongly about this, which is part of the reason I’m interested in restorative justice.

        Truly I till you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matthew 25:40)

        How we treat criminals should define us. 

       

        As I went on, I explored further:

        “Punishment is barbarous, but punishment works, and it serves our wicked desire for vengeance.  How could we possibly find alternatives for that?

        “I went back to the basics.

        “What are crimes? Why do we want to stop them?

        “Murder, theft, rape, assault, slander, and deceit: they all directly or indirectly impose pain on someone; therefore inflict the whole society with chaos and violence^[1].

        “’There is no right or wrong, just consequences of your actions,’ Becca once told her puerile father.  What if we were to live in a society without set concepts of right or wrong?

        “No general moral absolutes.  No laws, at least none that is forced upon its citizens.  Just consequences of your actions.  Not ‘consequences’ as in the punishments enforced by the government, for in the nature of any punishment lies controversies, injustice, and conflict of values, as we have witness so many times.  Capital punishment.  Crime of desperation.  Crime in extreme circumstances.  Crime without victim.  

“No. 

“What if we all suffer the consequences of our own actions, our own ‘crimes’?

“What if we can feel the suffering of others as our own?

“What if every person can feel the whole society, and the entirety of its pain and happiness?

“This might be similar to what Mozi had in mind, when he wrote of Universal Love.  It’s the eminent vitamin for human society, although it’s probably technically impossible.  Evolution have not yet enable us a keen sense of empathy.

“So again, it comes back to Us, in the 21^st century.

“We’ve blinded and numbed ourselves, to be so convinced that retribution is the only measure against crime.  It’s a deceit on global scale over millenniums.  But one day the human race must open their eyes, and set out to find a way out, however impossible the journey may seem.

“In fact, I don’t think we are as far out as it may seem.  There are already drugs that amplify sensibility to the emotions of others, which often in turn induce empathy. 

“Drug enhanced empathy might be a promising way forward.  If one day we can truly feel all the misery and joy around us, it will probably be an immensely painful and heavy life to live – but a beautiful one, too!”

Footnote:

[1]Legislators and judges often have difficulty distinguishing the more obscure crimes, especially those whose victims are hard to determine.  But often when it’s the culprits that are hard to determined, legal solutions are out of bounds, and in turn the problem have to be mend by social policies.  This very phenomenon shows what we should really focus on is the victims, instead of the culprits.  Victims of individual crimes and victims of the system are more similar then people assume, they are both signs of affliction of our society.