METAPHORS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Hausknecht, Murray
Discussions of the death penalty have a lot in common with the traditional, tiresome arguments about race. In both instances there is a facade of rationality—some races are demonstrably...
...the loss of civility is experienced as a loss of ease with and satisfactions from urban existence...
...Orderliness is restored to that world by ridding it of sinful people...
...The available evidence on race and achievement clearly contradicts racist assumptions, but since the question of race and intelligence is recurrently raised by "respectable" sources, the ideology of race takes on a veneer of reason...
...When the issue, no matter how prominent its place, is part of a platform containing other issues, the latter can serve as countervailing forces to the attractiveness of the death penalty...
...There is in all people, argues Peter Marris in Loss and Change, a "conservative impulse" that attempts to "preserve the continuity of past and present" in our understanding of the world...
...rape and muggings go on, seemingly impervious to human efforts to cope with them...
...In both instances there is a facade of rationality—some races are demonstrably inferior to others and executions deter homicidal crime...
...On the other hand, politicians like New York's Mayor Ed Koch, a former congressman of liberal reputation, can use the metaphor to neutralize the liberal image by displaying their sympathy with those anxious about incivility...
...That is to say, the abortion issue symbolizes the painful experience of social change within the private spheres of life...
...When, however, the issue can be segregated, as in the California referendum, the lure of returning to a golden age becomes very powerful indeed...
...Abortion is a violation or defiance of an inherent biological order in which sex and procreation are inextricably connected...
...That concern centers on the high incidence of crime, particularly street crime...
...In this world crime is a result of sinful people and the larger their number the higher the crime rate...
...Fear, anger, frustration, and the felt need constantly to attend to strangers heighten the tensions and strains of city life...
...THESE METAPHORS can play hell with the ambitions of liberal politicians...
...BUT HOW one talks about social change and its effects can determine political positions...
...Public execution, the ultimate abuse of body and person, is a form of sadistic pornography, and a society that hides its executions from its own sight recognizes, in effect, the questionable moral consequences of capital punishment...
...Some of those involved in the antiabortion movement are less concerned with the morality of abortion as such, though this is certainly a central issue for many, than with the difficulties of coping with the problematic effects of changing sexual and family relationships...
...at best it is an afterthought to the utilitarian argument...
...When the death of a person is a source of entertainment, the value of individual life is reduced and the texture of public life immeasurably coarsened...
...that is, when it is highly rational...
...from the drunkard's loss of sense and inhibition...
...In this view the social control 331 function of punishment is trivial or irrelevant...
...It is particularly appropriate that the lastest controversy appears in the scholarly journals of the economists, since the deterrence argument must ultimately rest on a conception of the murderer as a variant of homo economicus...
...When the present is ambiguous, the past is seen as more stable than it ever could have been in reality...
...The paradox disappears once we realize that in neither instance is the morality of "a taking of life" the main concern...
...A recent attempt to apply the sophisticated tools of econometrics to the problem concluded that capital punishment does have a deterrent effect...
...The reluctance to accept the logical implications of the deterrence argument is not as illogical as it seems...
...The point, of course, is that it is difficult to muster a reasonable argument for the instrumental functions of capital punishment in the prevention of crime...
...But, as Albert Camus once remarked in a classic essay, the typical murderer rises from his bed in the morning not knowing that by day's end he will have killed someone...
...the fundamental problem is social change and the fears and anxieties it evokes in those caught up in it...
...as a result of panic, as in a bungled robbery...
...First, execution for murder is appropriate only when "premeditation" is present, but how is one to define premeditation...
...It also avoids confronting the messy and ambiguous relationships among "social conditions," individual behavior, and crime rates...
...People die as a result of passions aroused by love, fear, and anger...
...Most obviously, it overlooks the problem of the social conditions that produce sinful individuals...
...Here a recent report on the antiabortion movement is instructive...
...That conclusion was immediately challenged...
...Fear is accompanied by anger at being in a situation in which one is forced to be fearful...
...or from the irrational maliciousness of some kinds of muggings...
...There is a noticeable paradox about the politics of abortion and capital punishment...
...In New York Carey received the votes of both proponents and opponents of capital punishment...
...Yet even the most vociferous proponents of the death penalty do not call for the televising of executions as a way of deterring crime...
...ONE REASON why that argument is the prominent one is that the fundamental issue may not be a concern about crime as such...
...The position has its difficulties...
...In other words, to talk of 332 incivility in these terms merely underlines the instabilities that are at the root of the current discontent...
...They are particularly vulnerable because liberals are identified with feminists and the underclasses, precisely those who seem to be creating the disorderliness by desiring to change their place in the natural order of things...
...Just as the antiabortionists are less concerned with "a taking of human life," so those calling for a return to capital punishment are not primarily concerned with, to quote Durkheim again, "repairing the evil [the murder] inflicted on society...
...The metaphors we use to talk about our present discontents and anxieties link past and present...
...Social change is experienced as a disturbance of the familiar and the expected, a loss of orderliness and predictability...
...The certainty of punishment is a critical influence only when the behavior is highly "professional...
...Here, of course, the metaphor connects with racist impulses that run like a dark underground stream through most of the rhetoric about street crime...
...The idea of capital punishment is related to the Biblical "an eye for an eye" with its resonance of a world that is part of a balanced, symmetrical, easily understood natural order...
...When the crime rate increases the urban stranger is transformed from an object of civil indifference to a menacing figure one cannot afford to ignore, and even one's own neighborhood loses its essential quality of predictability and security...
...Since change is a fact of life we may expect the metaphors to be with us for some time, because they help translate fears into what appears to be a rational politics...
...Two Catholic women active in the movement polled other movement Catholics and found, according to the New York Times, "that many of those in the movement see abortion at the deepest psychological level, less as a taking of human life than as a practice threatening to existing social patterns and customs in families, marriages and sexual relations...
...Those who favor "the right to life" are usually those who also favor the death penalty...
...Is the panic response of an inept holdup man an act of premeditation...
...The other difficulty involves the question of whether the death of the murderer is the only "authentic act" that can affirm the value of the sacredness of human life...
...Although one does not hear it frequently, there is another, stronger argument in which the death of the offender, whether public or hidden, is the critical issue...
...The attractiveness of the metaphor depends upon what it ignores...
...On the level of politics, this conservative psychological impulse can be translated into an attempt to return to a golden age or to impose its structure of meanings and actions on the present...
...The ideology of the movement is a symbolic or metaphorical way of expressing fears and anxieties about the consequences of social change for private life...
...Curiously enough, under some conditions the metaphor may be less useful for conservative candidates...
...Public hangings in England drew enormous crowds (and attendant pick-pockets who could themselves be hanged if caught) that treated the executions as public entertainments...
...There is also a pervasive frustration over the sheer intractability of the problem of street crime...
...In last year's New York gubernatorial election the Republican, Perry Duryea, made it the centerpiece of his campaign against Hugh Carey who had vetoed a bill restoring capital punishment earlier in the year...
...In this order women are childbearers and, therefore, must accept their pregnancies and the resulting responsibilities of child rearing...
...Punishment, to borrow Emile Durkheim's words, affirms the fundamental value that the criminal act has violated "by an authentic act which can consist only in suffering inflicted upon the agent...
...In short, to be against abortion means to reject the present disorderly world in which there is no "natural" connection between sex and procreation and in which men and women have no fixed, predictable positions in the world...
...To be in favor of abortion is to embrace an ambiguous and unpredictable world of sex and family relationships, one that is radically discontinuous with the past...
...The mere existence of such solemn and arcane analyses, where the only passion is in defense of technique, lends an air of reason to the proponents of the death penalty...
...While there is no proof of the deterrent effect of capital punishment, the evidence lends itself to argument...
...Capital punishment can only deter homicide when a potential murderer has calculated the pains of being caught and convicted against the pleasures of killing...
...To see an actual hanging, electrocution, or gassing, would have a more telling effect than merely reading that it took place...
...Camus underscores this by noting that if the death of a murderer is to be used to encourage others to virtue, then logic demands that the execution—the dread fate awaiting the murderer— be a public execution...
...Similarly, capital punishment is a way of talking about social change and its effects on the public life of the society...
...Does a drunken quarrel resulting in homicide involve premeditation...
...relationships that, at best, are intricate, complex, and difficult to grasp...
...Metaphors, by their very nature, are freighted with meanings that predispose us to one kind of orientation and action rather than others...
...Calculation and foresight, though, are spectacularly absent in almost all cases of homicide...
...The metaphor of abortion, too, carries implications of a stable social world that is part of a cosmic natural order...
...Rather, talk of the death penalty is a means of expressing the fears and anxieties about the decline of public civility...
...Some metaphors are attractive because there is a good fit between them and a persistent psychological tendency that is especially salient in times of change...
...In any event, the interesting fact is that this moral justification for capital punishment is rarely heard...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
