I support the death penalty-though with reservations. They include the existence of an at least functional judicial system, and reasonable certainty the accused is given a competent defence, and is not a victim of racial, economic or class discrimination in his arrest and prosecution.
A number of articles in the NY Times in the last few weeks ("A Life in the Balance," Kevin Boyle, March 16; and "Seeking to End an Execution Law they Once Championed," Adam Nagourney, April 6), and other data I've seen in the last few years, have shown that a significant number of those executed (in the US) were usually the victim of one or more of the above. And anyone who has been to the magistrates' courts in Trinidad would have no doubt that many poor, mainly black, young men are victims of the system.
But those reservations aside, I have no compunction about executing those guilty of capital crimes-though, again, I'm wary about what constitutes a "capital crime," and a broad-brush approach which could too quickly become a collective shout to "exterminate the brutes."
I do believe treason qualifies, and had the law been enforced after 1970 and 1990, we'd be far better off now. But these are subtleties which abolitionists, and other pseudo-do-gooders, paw aside as they proffer arguments about death penalty supporters.
Arguments include, variously, that those who want to exterminate the brutes lack "civility," and are afflicted by an indecent bloodlust. And finally, there's the religious argument about the need to forgive according to Christian injunction.
To charges of incivility and bloodthirstiness I'd answer: "Yeah, so what?" The need for revenge is hard-wired into human beings. Only dopey human beings waste time denying it. Jared Diamond's monumental book, Guns, Germs, and Steel shows that a significant part of the process of human expansion from prehistory to the present is one of mass murder, slavery, and erasing peoples and species.
To counter our innate savagery, culture, and its agent, religion, have been used to design societies and individual lives to channel the natural urge for revenge, into non-lethal rituals. If the rituals become complex, pervasive, and ingrained, a "civilised" society might emerge.
And at some point some "civilised" societies can aver that the death penalty runs counter to their way of life, and abolish it. More power to those them. But that ain't Trinidad, and trying to dress our competing tribes in the ill-fitting value systems of a "civilised society" without working our way there, is why we're in the mess we're in.
Pretensions to civilisation aside, how do we deal with our violent biology? A mechanism religion prescribes is forgiveness, which is the subject of Forgiveness Considered, a book by Fr Henry Charles. It's an unusual book, given the putative Christian injunction of forgiveness and Fr Charles being a priest.
Christians are taught the imperative of blanket forgiveness, turning the other cheek and so on. But that simplifies an irreducibly complex process with a coat of mental cement. In brief, forgiveness can't be achieved by clicking "delete," or dragging trauma into the trash. Human beings are more complicated and cantankerous than that, and, as Fr Charles shows in his book, forgiveness is equally complicated.
In 130 pages, Fr Charles effectively unpacks forgiveness. Beginning with the Bible as his main text, he takes us behind the scenes of biblical events, for example, the selling of Joseph by his brothers into slavery, and examines the lengthy, knotty path to forgiveness in even the most blessed people.
The book's piece de resistance is the proposition that there may be some things that cannot be forgiven. These include the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the painful, and ultimately flawed, process of reconciliation of South Africa's black majority with its white minority, in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the fall of apartheid. (I'd add the PNM regime of 2001-2010.)
What is remarkable is the cath-olicity with which the book approaches its theme. Fr Charles draws upon a variety of texts, from movies (Dead Man Walking), novels (Oscar Hijuelos's Mr Ives Christmas), the aphorisms of Nietzsche, and the pages of the New York Times.
Using these texts, in addition to a few academic writers, he breaks the process into its stages and examines them. What are the challenges to forgiveness? Is the vic- tim under any obligation to forgive the offender? Does forgiveness necessarily entail forgetting? Is forgiveness worth anything unless there is contrition from the offender? Each of these issues is given its own brief chapter, and explored in an engaging, absorbing style.
Forgiveness Considered is an interesting kind of book in that it is not merely to be read; it needs to be discussed, talked about, and passed on to anyone concerned about the state of the country and its febrile, dubious grip on humanity. It could be useful equally in church, a high school classroom or undergraduate seminar.
The real potential value of Forgiveness Considered is that it could return an element of our national education system which has apparently disappeared, if it ever existed: moral education. This is not so much the teaching of morality as the training, or preparation, of students to create an atmosphere where morality can thrive.
In discussing and thinking about issues like forgiveness without the certainty of an answer (the imperative to forgive) looming at the end, students and society are empowered in a particular way. The process of discussion and exchange is in itself transformative.
But here waits the bucket of cold water. If teachers are unprepared for this type of exchange, or the topic, it fails. And we have what we have today: positions on crucial issues like the death penalty, and social and political policy, being determined by cretins on talk radio and Parliament.
