I have been haunted these past couple of weeks by images of death. Not natural death-the death that is a normal part of life-but unnatural death, violent death, the kind of death that happens prematurely by accident, or fate, or through the cruel miscalcula-tions of human beings in total disregard for the humanity of others. The kind of death that rips our communities apart, disrupts our peace; the kind of death that arouses strong feelings of disgust, or anguish, grief, even rage.
I am thinking of three firefighters--and of their families-who lost their lives this past week while battling a hardware store blaze apparently unwittingly started by the horseplay of children. I am thinking of five children in Houston, all drowned this past week by their own mother who apparently had sunk into a black hole of utter despair.
I am thinking too of the 168 men, women, and children who died in the conflagra-tion of the Alfred Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995. Senseless deaths, each and every one of them, of ones who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that fateful morning. I think of all the lives that have been grievously touched by that event, of parents and spouses, of brothers and sisters and dear friends, all the hopes for the future that came completely and abruptly to an end on that terrible morning.
And I have been thinking a great deal about Timothy McVeigh-that most recent in a long line of misguided and demented warriors for truth who took it into their own hands to inflict their "truth" upon their fellow human creatures by acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh-how strange to contemplate him now: a young man who just looked as if he might have been the son of any one of us, who grew up in our midst, an all-American childhood, an all-American boy, an all-American terrorist. And we recoil in horror from what he did. His crime was truly reprehensible.
And so we cried out--out of our anguish, out of our pain and grief, out of our horror, out of our impotent rage-we cried out, "Crucify him!" And so we did. After all the tumult and the shouting, all the anguish and the debates, we injected Timothy McVeigh with a lethal cocktail and sent him, as we like to say "to meet his Maker." And some of us felt exhilarated, relieved, satisfied, even cleansed. "Good riddance to bad rubbish," is the way some of us expressed it. And some of us felt strangely uneasy, even a little embarrassed. And some of us felt nothing at all. But howsoever we felt about it, we all had to come to terms with the fact that it was we who had put him to death, you, and I, and all of us, for it was the first federal execution in nearly four decades.
As for me, I felt all the deep conflict of emotional warfare that apparently lies deep within the human psyche just waiting for some such event as this to stir it back to life. I hated what Mr. McVeigh had done. Hated the intense pain and suffering he had inflicted upon so many families. Hated his apparent insouciance and callous disregard for human lives. Hated too the way he shattered our relative security and fragile sense of peace. Some deep part of me rose up within and wanted to strike back, to inflict pain and suffering too. Some part of me wanted to believe in the economic metaphor we like to use in such moments: one who takes human life in this way must "pay his debt to society," we say. And we mean that the "debt" must be paid in the same coin-a life for a life.
In the seemingly endless debate that always ensues around such an event we hear the familiar arguments and justifications repeated over and over. They have even become tiresome. Rarely, if ever, have any of us had our convictions changed by these argu-ments. We say we need the death penalty because it acts as a powerful deterrent to other would-be killers. And we cling to this article of faith in the face of study after study that seems only to confirm the opposite-time and again we are led to conclude that capital punishment has no measurable impact on the homicide rates of the states or counties in which it is in force.(1) In fact the very opposite seems to be the case-where the death penalty is the law, more homicides seem to appear, as if it exercises a strange attraction in contrast to our common-sense expectation.
These same studies however seem to provide no deterrence whatsoever to the public's seemingly insatiable appetite for credulity in the utility of the death penalty. Increasingly, and ever steadily, commitment to capital punishment becomes the single most important litmus test for election or appointment to the judiciary throughout the land, whether or not the individual actually believes it to be effective.(2) At least former Governor Weld of Massachusetts was honest when he confessed," I cannot prove that the death penalty actually deters violent crime; I just have a gut feeling that it does." Of course there is a logical inconsistency in the way we choose to conduct executions. If we truly believed capital punishment was meant to edify or to deter others, we would, as we used to do so well, make a public spectacle of it. Because we judged that to be "inhumane" we now chose to execute people quietly, away from all but a few eyes, as if to acknowledge it is our dirty little secret. "Humane" though this practice may be, it leaves much to be desired if the intent is to deter.(3)
Or we invoke a psychological justification. The death penalty, we say in an argument currently in vogue, helps the surviving families and loved ones to "find closure to this chapter in their lives." Once again we offer this up as if it were self-evidently true.
In fact it flies in the face of all we know about the psychology of deep trauma. "Closure" (if indeed there is such a thing) refers to an emotional healing whose aim, as Gary Wills recently commented, "is to bring inflamed emotions of loss and ressentiment back into a manageable relationship with other parts of one's life."(4) If such healing is ever achieved it is done only by a long process of disengagement from the passions that occur in the immediate wake of the trauma. It is difficult to see how closure can ever be expected to happen by way of reintroducing all the original passions as if they were present once again, tending, in Wills' words again "to reenact the outrage in a person's mind, rather than to transcend it." I suspect it may be closer to the truth what playwright Robert Anderson once stated:
Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which
struggles on in the mind of the survivor for a resolution it
will never find. . . (5)
In the public debate over the death penalty we frequently lose ourselves in the rarefied atmosphere of ethical discourse. We use terms like "lex talionis"-the law of retaliation, or "retribution," or "retributive justice." But however reasonable we make our arguments sound, there is the disturbing sense that they rest upon a deeper, more primitive layer of only partially conscious faith, that they represent some powerful instinctive impulse that rises up from some dark and irrational place within, a profound atavistic instinct whose name we dare not reveal in public discourse: REVENGE.
Of course if it ever does enter the discourse we hasten to deny it has any force or motive power within us, and we seek to snap it back into the Pandora's Box from which we secretly believe is has sprung loose.
No, I think it is better that we acknowledge these deeper instincts within us before we even attempt to find our way out of this labyrinth. I suspect our long held beliefs about the effectiveness of the death penalty proceeds from and reenacts an ancient religious belief system inherent in most societies and social organization. This system is manifest in a variety of rites of ritual purification that reach back into our primeval past but which find expression over and over in countless secular and sanitized versions. Purity systems are found in one form or another in most cultures. Understood at the highest level of abstraction they consist of sophisticated systems of classifications, lines, and boundaries. As on commentator puts it:
A purity system is a cultural map which indicates there is
a place for everything, and everything in its place. Things
that are OK in one place are impure or dirty in another
where they are out of place. The point of these purity
systems is to create a world with sharp social boundaries
between pure/impure, the righteous/the sinner, what is
whole/what is not whole. (6)
It is in this sense then that our public executions might better be seen as ritual acts of purification, that is, rites by which boundaries are reset, differentiations are made, and lines are drawn again. They are events by which we reenact our deep instinct to protect ourselves from contamination, and reinforce the conviction of our own innocence by expunging those whom we have labeled "not like us," "contaminated," "dirty," "impure," "contemptible." By expunging them we lay claim to our own superiority, our basic goodness, our innocence. Such a way of seeing our state-sponsored executions of course places them within framework of religious dramaturgy. It acknowledges the irrational and deeply instinctual nature of some of our most cherished beliefs and attitudes.
As for me, the day that Timothy McVeigh was put to death in my name, I did not feel exhilaration. I did not feel relief. I actually felt more the way Ellen Goodman felt,
columnist for the Boston Globe. This is what she said:
When the news broke into my rhythmic routine, I stopped in
my tracks. There was for a few minutes at least, a solemnity
about death itself that demanded attention. The pool reporters
came out to chronicle the last moments of his life. They talked
about his silence, his open eyes, his haircut. They read the poem
and of course gave all the details of the remote control injection
that made his death so antiseptic and so invisible. Thus ended
the case of the U.S. v Timothy McVeigh, or rather Us v. Him.
Make no mistake. McVeigh will not be missed. Few will
mourn the man most of us came in the end to regard as a
coward. The world will not be diminished by his absence.
But will we be diminished by his homicide? By homicide in
our name?
And in that moment I knew what had made me feel so uneasy at the news of the execution. I felt diminished.
And in that moment also came to mind that ancient story from the fourth chapter of the book of Genesis that I read earlier-this dark, mysterious story that rises up from deep within the history of human consciousness-3000-4000 years old-from some primordial depths, so compact, so spare, so astonishing-rises up from the unconscious so that it resembles more than anything a dream. And in that form it speaks to us of another instinctual force that also resides within, deep and ancient as the beginnings of human consciousness. It is a profound instinct that speaks from a different place in us, one that wars against the tendency toward hatred and revenge. An instinct that knows-- deeply and profoundly knows--that the taking of another life-even if sanctioned by legal procedures, even if justified by appeal to common welfare, even if required by the canons of retributive justice-that the taking of another human life for any reason whatsoever is a profound violation of our own humanity, an act that cannot help but diminish us.
Cain-our brother, who in a fit of righteous indignation rose up and slew our brother Abel. The first homicide, the one that for all time places homicide in its proper perspective. For now we understand that all homicide is really fratricide. It is the killing of our brother, our sister. Cain-whom God sought out, and to whom He posed those most poignant of all questions: "Where is Abel, your brother?" "What have you done?" Cain-upon whom God set His mark to identify his crime. "The mark of Cain"-not to invite the enmity or retribution of others, for God explicitly forebade anyone to touch him. "The mark of Cain"-a powerful reminder to all of what each is capable of in the dark recesses of our imagination. "The mark of Cain," whose chief punishment now is to walk the earth as a "fugitive and wanderer" upon whom no one is to take vengeance. "The mark of Cain"-who will now be condemned, more importantly, to live apart from "the presence of God."
Years ago, in an angry exchange with a person I loved, I blurted out, "If you do not stop I will kill you!" The moment after, I was stunned and horrified at what I had said. I was no closer in fact to following through upon that threat than I was to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. I had never acted in a consciously violent way toward anyone. So I was shocked by the enormity of violent feeling that had taken me over. But in that moment, and for all time I have always known that I am Cain. I had no more intent to commit homicide than you do when you say to yourself "I just wish he were dead," or "I could just wring her neck," or our former Senate Majority Leader intended when he speculated that "Perhaps lightening will strike her before she arrives at the Senate." But in those moments we all know-or should know-that we are all Cain.
St Augustine once said, "Never confront evil as if it arose entirely outside of yourself." And it is because I sincerely believe that he was right that in the aftermath of Timothy McVeigh's execution I felt diminished. It is only when we are deeply aware that we all bear the mark of Cain that we are empowered to turn from a deep urge to wreck revenge and turn instead to an equally powerful urge toward compassion. Dear friends, we are all haunted by those ancient questions in the book of Genesis. That we are haunted by them is a mark of our humanity. They are, as the Bible reminds us, not really our questions at all. They are God's questions, the ones to which we feel deeply accountable, and by which we feel ourselves to be mysteriously addressed:
Where are you?
Where is your brother?
What have you done?
Notes:
1. See: "Facts About Deterrence and the Death Penalty" at web site for Death
Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deter.hlml
2. See: Richard C. Dieter, "Killing for Votes," www.deathpenaltyinfo.org
3. See: Albert Camus, "Reflections on the Guilotine" in Resistance, Rebellion, &
Death, Modern Library Books.
4. Gary Wills, "the Dramaturgy of Death," New York Review of Books, 6/21/01
5. Robert Anderson, "I Never Sang for My Father"
6. Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, (Harper, 1994), p. 50
7. Ellen Goodman,"Killing in My Name and Yours," The Boston Globe, 6/13/01