The Messianic Secret

So let’s say you have a piece of personal, private news that needs, for whatever reason, to become public. Obviously you have to tell people about it, or it will never become public; how do you go about doing this?

Firstly, what do about those people who ought to know, but you’re not really friends with them – do you tell them directly? No. But what about the people are are friends with? You can’t have the people you should tell directly learn about it from others just because you told someone else first.

So what do you do? You tell the people you need to tell about it, and you say that it’s a secret. Then, since humans are bad at keeping secrets, the information will slowly become public – but slowly enough that everyone who needs to be told directly, can be.

This reminds me, strangely, of the Messianic Secret – that oddity in the New Testament whereby Jesus tells everyone to keep his performing of miracles and general Messiah-ship a secret, when doing so makes little sense. There’s different theological debates about the meaning of this, but what’s always struck me as odd about it is that he explicitly says to keep it a secret, but it doesn’t seem like the people who don’t keep it a secret are doing anything wrong. Why is that?

Well, it’s because there’s certain times when telling people something is a secret, and not to tell anyone, doesn’t actually mean they’re not allowed to tell anyone. It means the news is important, and people need to be told in the right way, but doesn’t mean it is literally a secret that only a select few will ever know about. It seems to me that Jesus neither expected nor desired for the people he told to keep it a secret to actually do so.

But then there are some things that actually do need to be kept secret. As in, um, things that most people ought not to know, because they’re embarassing or whatever. Which means there’s no one behavior that is requested by saying “keep this a secret”. So there are two ways to err in the treatment of someone else’s secret; to misinterpret the latter kind as the former, and to misinterpret the former kind as the latter.

The latter form of misinterpretation (i.e. not telling anyone when it’s acutally OK to do so, for those of you who lost track of my latter-former usage) seems clearly the less egregious of the two. Giving away secrets when you ought not to is much worse. But both seem to involve an error of some sort, one that ought to be corrected. I tend more towards not talking rather than talking too much; perhaps I ought to try to be more loose-lipped.

The Paradox of Martyrdom

The concept of martyrdom is, on its surface, a simple one. A martyr is someone who is willing to die for their faith; martyrs are generally considered to be saints – meaning they go to heaven – and deserving of a special respect, since they were willing to die for their faith.

But the motives for martyrdom become confused. A martyr is someone who is willing to die for their faith – someone who is willing to endure something bad, death, because their faith is so strong. But martyrdom itself is considered good, and martyrs are rewarded with a special place in Heaven, and so quickly you have many people who desire martyrdom – not who are willing to be martyred for their faith, but who actively desire to be martyred.

These people’s faith would have to be strong, otherwise they wouldn’t believe that if they martyr themselves they will go to Heaven – but because they believe martyrdom is good, they no longer look at it as “willing to endure something bad because their faith is so strong” – they are willing to endure death, which is no longer considered that bad anyway because they will go to Heaven when they die, so that they can be a martyr.

This attitude has always been around, and it has generally been seen as severely flawed. There are references to it as early as the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a document from the second century AD, which is careful to point out that Polycarp didn’t have this attitude – he tried to hide from the people looking for him, rather than actively seeking out capture and martyrdom.

But something always strikes me as odd about these claims that specific saints did not seek out martyrdom. They were men of deep faith; they would have believed that, if they died a martyr, they would go to Heaven; why would they not seek it out? Because to do so is to seek out Heaven, rather than demonstrate faith in God, and so it makes you not a martyr at all. And so, whenever I read about how a given saint tried to avoid capture and execution, it feels like the saint was evading capture only reluctantly; they actually wanted to be captured, to be martyred, but felt that they had to avoid it because, counterintuitively, avoiding martyrdom was a better way of proving their love of God than being martyred.

I sometimes thing the reason counterintuitive situations like this arise in Christianity is that Christians are so focused on Heaven as where you go when you die, and how you are rewarded in the afterlife for your actions in this life. If there were no Heaven, after all, it would be silly to martyr yourself in order to get there – you would only allow yourself to be martyred because you would rather die – enter oblivion – than renounce God. Martyrdom would still be considered heroic, but it would be a kind of futile heroism, and not one that anyone would ever seek out.

I don’t think we should stop believing in Heaven just because it makes the issue of martyrdom confusing, of course. But I do think we might be better off if we stopped saying that “if you’re good, when you die you’ll to Heaven”, and start emphasizing instead that “if you love God, when you die you’ll be with God” – shifting the focus of hope from faith, the least of the theological virtues, to love, the greatest.

Abortion, Murder, Justice, Law

This is an important article. Read it.

So, Dr. George Tiller was a murderer – or, late-term abortionist, as you probably prefer to call him. He was shot down while in church by a someone who believed he was committing justifiable homicide – stopping a killer before he killed again. But that man was wrong, right? He shouldn’t have killed Tiller, right? It was murder, right?

Legally, of course, it was. But if you’re someone who believes that abortion is truly murder, that it is the taking of innocent human life, you don’t get off as easy as saying “Tiller was murdered, murder is always wrong, so Tiller’s murder was wrong”. Rather – and the article I linked to makes the argument better than I can – it was wrong, but because it was vigilante justice, not because it was murder.

And that brings us (though the linked-to article doesn’t go this far) to an interesting and somewhat disturbing point. Now, vigilante justice is wrong because it subverts the rule of law. It leads to chaos. You can’t kill someone to exact your own justice, making yourself judge, jury, and executioner, and then expect to re-enter society and have everything be fine. Vigilante justice is a rejection of the legitimate authority and an attempt to establish a new one; it is, in its essence, no different than revolution. A revolution of one man.

A revolution of one man to stop abortion is wrong for a number of reasons. But what about a revolution of millions? If everyone who believed that abortion was murder was actually willing to fight for that belief, to prevent the over one million such murders happening every year, they might actually have a chance of winning. Would it be wrong for them to do so? It would cause chaos, for a time. Wars always do. It would also have a real chance of preventing over a million murders each year. How would this be any different from sending an army in to stop a genocide?

What it comes down to, as far as I can tell, is simply a matter of prudence. We don’t fight because the revolt wouldn’t succeed. It would end up causing so much chaos that it wasn’t “worth it”. And as soon as we start talking about “worth it” – about weighing the good and bad results like that – it means there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a revolution. It’s just wrong in the details, so to speak.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not gravely wrong. The man who killed George Tiller did something horrible. But that’s not because he believed evil was good, black was white. It was because he had no sense of prudence. He had a sense of justice, but no sense of law. Law, government, always asks questions of prudence. I think that’s another way of saying philosophy can’t govern, because it’s too impractical. Philosophy helps – the philosopher-king is not a bad idea – but it’s not enough.

Piracy

Firstly, an amusing website: http://www.thepirategoogle.com/

Secondly, regarding the recent increase in piracy off the coast of Somalia; the one good thing to come of it, in my opinion, is that people are reminded of what actual piracy is. It involves armed robbery, hostage-taking, and death. Whether making unauthorized copies of a movie or song is immoral or not, it is nothing like actual piracy in its severity. No internet pirate ever killed someone.

Now, on to the Pirate Bay trial. So, the legal debate itself – whether or not providing links to copyrighted material is illegal when you are not providing the material itself – is interesting, but fundamentally irrelevant. I tend to think the Pirate Bay should have won the trial on legal grounds, but I can understand the case against, given current copyright law. Really none of that matters, though; what everyone really cares about is whether or not piracy itself is wrong. Is it even possible to ’steal’ information?

Well…

Turin’s Manifesto on So-Called Intellectual Property

I like to look at this historically. It used to be that data was intimately bound up with physical property. Before the printing press, copies of books were made by hand; the book was valuable for its content, yes, but primarily because it was rare, difficult to produce, requiring hours and hours of painstaking manual labor. If someone wanted to make a copy of a book they had in their possession, they were free to do so; it would require a lot of work, and the new copy would certainly be theirs, since they created the physical artifact.

Then the printing press came along, and it became easy to make many copies of something – if you owned a large and expensive piece of machinery and could put in enough manual labor to produce a single copy of it. Making one copy and making a thousand copies required the same amount of initial effort, with little extra effort added for each copy. This made it so that, if someone wrote a book, they could publish it and make many copies of it, selling each of them for a slight profit – but that the few other people who had printing presses (not just anyone, since almost no one had such presses) could make their own copies of the book and sell them.

There seems something unfair about this; person A wrote the book, but person B profits from selling it because he just takes the text and prints it, giving nothing to person A. It was because of situations like this that copyright law was invented – giving a limited monopoly on the rights to print copies to the person who wrote the book. Anyone would still be allowed to make their own copies by hand, if they wanted to, but it would require so much effort they would be better off just buying a copy; copyright law’s purpose was to make sure that, when the common man bought a copy of a book, he bought one from the person who actually wrote it.

And copyright was for a limited period of time, because eventually the work would become public knowledge of sorts, and it wouldn’t make sense at that point to restrict access to it. That, or it would be forgotten, and it wouldn’t make sense to stop people from making copies of a book that would otherwise never be read. It’s better not to have laws that destroy knowledge.

In the last few decades there has been a radical shift in how easy it is to make a copy of something. Making an electronic copy of an electronic document takes seconds, and costs next to nothing, and almost any form of data – movie, book, song, whatever – can be made into a digital file. So when someone “pirates” something, breaking copyright law, they’re not anything like the people who set up printing presses to make money from books they did not write; they aren’t making money, the people getting copies of the books and movies and songs aren’t being tricked into paying the wrong person for the content; rather, data has been divorced from physical property, and people are beginning to act accordingly. When books had to be physical objects, it made sense to say that those objects could only be sold by the people who actually wrote the books; now, when books can be costlessly transferred online, it makes little sense to say they still must be paid for, and that it is stealing to create a digital copy of something and give it away for free. Again: Copyright law is a cumbersome legacy from a time when there was no way to transfer information except through physical property.

The basic point I’d like to make is that advances in technology require us to come up with different ways of encouraging the arts. Yes, the existence of internet piracy may cause a problem for the current music and film industries; that doesn’t mean we need to get rid of internet piracy, which is a natural result of the current state of technology. Rather, it means we have to find new ways of making sure artists can make a living from their work.

Before the printing press artists functioned under a patronage system; the poet Vergil, for example, was under the employ of the emperor Augustus. When the printing press came along books could be sold directly to the public for profit, and so capitalism and the arts became bedfellows. Now, with internet piracy making any profit from selling something along the lines of the current system dubious, a new system is needed. What it will be, I don’t know. But something has to change, and getting rid of internet piracy isn’t the answer.

The Problem with Heaven

I have a minor gripe with the way Christian theology is laid out. It’s not that I think it’s wrong – I’m a faithful Catholic, if perhaps not a good one, and tend to believe what the Church says to believe – it’s that the emphasis often seems misplaced.

The issue is with the concept of “Heaven”. Philosophically, I’m not sure exactly what it will be, or what a “resurrected body” is, etc. I do think it’s pretty clearly not going to be what we expect (sitting around on clouds for the rest of eternity – which most people use to mean aeviternality, but that’s a different story), but that’s not that big a deal. But it is a big deal that the idea of a Heaven than you either get into or don’t, and if you don’t you go to hell, encourages a really flawed way of looking at morality.

How this happens is pretty clear. With a Heaven-Hell strict duality, you end up trying to do just the bare minimum to get into Heaven, and not try to be as good as you can for the sake of being good, you end up not being very good at all. You just end up not very bad. That’s not what Christianity is about.

Of course, this is a commonly recognized problem. Look at the text of the traditional Act of Contrition: “I detest all my sins because of your just punishment, but most of all because they offend you, my God”, etc. We’re not supposed to avoid sin because it’ll stop us from getting into Heaven; we avoid sin because it offends God, because it is wrong.

But casting things in terms of getting into Heaven or not predisposes us to look for the bare minimum, because, well, if you’re either in or out, what’s the least you have to do to get in? Find out, do exactly that, and you’ll have a fun, easy life and end up in Heaven. The Catholic Church gets around this somewhat with the concept of Purgatory – putting the emphasis on sanctification, rather than justification, and making clear that just doing the bare minimum might get you into Purgatory, but that you’d be a lot better off doing more than that – but even this leaves the basic Heaven-Hell duality there.

It’s not like I have a solution to this, of course. And I’m not saying we should emend the Bible to not talk so much about Heaven and Hell. But we do need to realize that the point of life is not get-in-or-get-left-out-of-Heaven; the point is to become a good person, and you are who you are when you die, and that not only determines your fate, that is your fate. If you were a bad person, you live with that and that is Hell; if you were a mediocre person, you might get to Heaven, but it won’t be a very big Heaven for you.

This is something that’s been talked about throughout history, but I think it could bear reiteration. Mainly because it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize, or if they do, they don’t have a good understanding of; I know several people who will do things of questionable morality and say, “well, it’s not going to stop me from getting into Heaven, so why not?” That’s exactly what we need to avoid – not because that attitude will stop us from getting into Heaven (it might, or it might not), but because it completely misses the point.

Not a Book Review: Crime and Punishment

We recently read Crime and Punishment in my Literary Tradition IV class. I’m not going to write a book review, though; just go read it for yourself and see how awesome it is. All I have to say about the book per se is that Svidrigailov is an amazing character, the final three chapters he appears in are fascinating, and the book as a whole is fantastic – my only complaint is with how much Dostoevsky has emotions lead to physical effects – fainting, sickness, etc. It’s somewhat unbelievably Romantic.

Anyway, I’m not writing a book review – but the book actually fits nicely with what I was talking about a few months ago and promised to write a post about but never did (I actually started a draft but never figured out exactly what I wanted to say – you might see why from the rest of this post).

I’m talking about the question of, why do we punish criminals?

Is it because it is “just”? Is it because for the good of society we want to deter people from committing crimes? Is it to rehabilitate the criminal? Do any of these really make sense?

I was thinking about it for a while, and in the end, no… they don’t. If by “make sense” we mean have any firm philosophical backing. If we punish because it is just, aren’t we taking on the role of God, making the state into an idol that determines right from wrong? And what about the fact that “justice” doesn’t always lead to what is best for society? If it’s just a purely utilitarian concept of deterrence, don’t we have to say that even if something is intrinsically wrong – take, for example, murder – that if outlawing it doesn’t reduce the murder rate, we shouldn’t outlaw it? That’s crazy. If we’re trying to rehabilitate the criminal to put him back into society, what are we even to make of life sentences and the death penalty? They seem absurdities – but “common sense” dictates that those are the appropriate punishments for murder. And I’m a  big fan of common sense.

What we might want to say is that we can’t say exactly what our reasons for punishing criminals is, but having criminal law is obviously a good idea, and that all of these suggestions for why we punish criminals ought to be taken into account as evidence for why punishing criminals is a good idea… we justify punishing criminals through a “concilience of inductions” or something like that. But this isn’t satisfying either, in my opinion. And it gives us no way to say what is an appropriate punishment other than “common sense”.

—

What the book Crime and Punishment points towards is a mixture of justice and rehabilitation – or, rather, redemption. The final goal is to rehabilitate the criminal – but this can’t be done without justice being satisfied (though justice tempered with mercy). Protecting society from the criminal is a nice benefit, but not the primary purpose of the punishment. This makes a lot of sense to me – but it’s based on a fundamentally Christian framework, with the Christian meanings of justice, mercy, and redemption…

But ah well. This might be the best we’ll get. Government are all founded on unjustifiable assertions anyway…

Fighting Evil?

There are things we recognize as indisputably evil – for example, slavery, the Holocaust. And there have been wars fought whose outcome resulted in the end of these evils – the American Civil War, World War II. So those were good wars, right? Right?

Well…

I’m not saying they weren’t. But, it strikes me as odd that, while both of those wars resulting in the end of an evil, they were not entered into for that purpose. The American Civil War began as a question of states’ rights versus preserving the Union, not as a question of slavery. WWII wasn’t about saving the Jews, it was about stopping Hitler from taking over Europe.

Another example people might not like – the Iraq War’s stated purpose was to remove Saddam Hussein from power so he was no longer a threat to the US. Saddam was also a horrible dictator who slaughtered tens of thousands of people. Why is it that we had to present the war as stopping a threat to us (which it turns out Saddam wasn’t, really) rather than as stopping something that was indisputably evil?

I don’t know the answer to this. Perhaps it’s an imaginary problem.

Tricky Questions

Today is the 26th anniversary of the Roe v.  Wade Supreme Court decision in the United States, which, for all intents and purposes, legalized abortion-on-demand up until birth (though later court decisions were required to make clear that this is what it did). It is seen as a day of mourning and penance in the Catholic Church. In honor of it, I’m going to write a post about abortion.

Recently, I’ve more and more seen pro-choice advocates use this following rhetorical strategy. Pro-choicer: “So, if abortion was outlawed, what would be the punishment for it? Would you try the mother for murder?”
Pro-lifer: “Um…” Pro-choicer: “Aha! See, you realize it would be absurd to try the mother for murder; doesn’t that mean abortion is in fact no such thing?”

A tricky question, this one… it takes advantage of the fact that abortion is currently legalized, and many women have had them. If the pro-lifers say “yes, we would try the mothers for murder”, it sounds as if they are condemning every woman who has ever had a legal abortion as an illegal murderer. Obviously this wouldn’t go over very well. And many pro-lifers are simply too focused on getting abortion illegalized to think about what would happen once it was; they themselves perhaps haven’t thought through the distinction between women who have abortions today and hypothetical women would have hypothetical abortions once it were illegal. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a coherent, reasonable, and just pro-life explanation for what would happen to a mother who had an abortion after it was outlawed.

Firstly, if abortion were outlawed, all the abortion clinics would be closed and easy access to abortion would be cut off. At this point no one could say they did not know abortion was illegal, and it would be just to punish them for it – while it would not be just to punish anyone who has had an abortion under the current state of affairs. This is something that would need to be made clear. It’s a similar situation to how slavery was abolished in the US; current slave-owners were not punished except by the loss of all the property they held in slave form, but if anyone tried to hold slaves in the US today, they would be punished, and severely. I wonder, did anyone in the pre-Civil War era use the argument, “so how would you punish slave-owners?”

So the abortion clinics are gone. But there would probably still be doctors performing abortions. In these cases,  the doctor, not the mother, would be the murderer. The main focus would be on shutting down the doctors who perform the abortions. They would be tried for murder. As for the mother, well, she would probably have to be somehow punished… but to what extent? To the same extent, no more but not less, than if they had committed infanticide. I’ve read that if a mother commits infanticide it is not seen as the same as murder; it’s treated as manslaughter. Abortion would have to be punished in the same way.

Is this unduly harsh? I don’t know. Is punishing maternal infanticide with trial for manslaughter unduly harsh? I hope no one thinks so. But if infanticide had been legalized and people were trying to re-legalize it, people might still use the argument “so how would you punish the mother?” The answer would be the same as with abortion, but people would have the same aversion to saying so – because if infanticide were legal, the mother who killed her infant legally would be just as much a victim of the process as the child himself.

Major Colvin

Last night, I finished watching season 3 of The Wire. The Wire, which portrays various aspects of life in Baltimore, Maryland, is definitely one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched, possibly the best; it has an unfortunate number of sex scenes and general vulgarity, but it’s also extremely well written, well acted, and manages to pretty much completely immerse the viewer.

One element of the season I just watched, which focused on city politics (while also, as in previous seasons, including the drug trade, police work, and general mayhem). There is one character, a police officer, Major “Bunny” Colvin, who decides to essentially legalize drugs in certain sections of the city. Without informing his superior officers, he tells his subordinates to crack down on all drug trafficking everywhere except the free zones, nicknamed “Hamsterdam”, where they will ignore everything except violence (so, drugs, prostitution, etc, are all OK there).

This doesn’t go over well when people find out about it, as you might imagine. But, should it have? What exactly is wrong with legalizing drugs, anyway?

Consider – if it was somehow proven that, by making murder legal, we would actually reduce the murder rate, would we even consider legalizing murder? I don’t think so. But that’s because we see murder as inherently wrong – it deprives another human being of their right to life. Nothing can justify legalizing it – even a reduction in death. Because as it is now, we see the victims of murder and try to seek justice for them, but if murder were legal, we would just be giving up on those who were chosen to die.

But drugs are not the same thing. Whether or not doing drugs is immoral, it doesn’t harm anyone else for the drug addict to use them. That means we don’t have to make this great stand against drug use regardless of the costs. If legalizing drugs reduces drug use or makes it less dangerous or reduce the power of drug traffickers (since if it’s legal, it can be legally imported), we should go ahead and do it. It’s a prudential decision, really. Not like illegalizing murder – which every society has to do if it wants to at all resemble a just one.

Crime and Punishment

A simple question – what is the purpose of punishing criminals?

A common answer is that you want to deter future criminals by showing what will happen when they commit a crime. Punishment as deterrent. Makes sense, right? Well…

The obvious problem with this is that you’re not showing what will happen when they commit a crime – you’re showing what will happen when they commit a crime and are caught. In a sense, this turns it all into a game of odds. As a potential criminal, you just evaluate what you will gain from committing the crime, what you will lose from being caught, and what your chances of getting caught are. If it ends up being an average gain for you, commit the crime; otherwise, don’t.

Following this reasoning, “an eye for an eye” is only effective if your chances of catching the criminal are greater than 50%. Otherwise, he gains an eye if he succeeds, the changes of which are >50%, and he loses an eye if he fails, the chances of which are <50% – the estimated result is a gain of a fraction of an eye.

Of course, most people don’t actually consider taking an eye from an enemy to be exactly equal to losing one of their own eyes. They’d rather have the eye themselves even if it leaves the enemy with the eye. But consider theft – there, you actually do gain something from the crime. Let’s say I’m planning on stealing $10,000. If I get caught, I’ll have to give it back, and I’ll go to jail for, say, 10 years. Let’s throw in that I’ll pay a $10,000 fine. So if I get caught – if I lose the crime game – I lose $10,000 and 10 years of my life. If I win, I gain $10,000.

Sure, that looks like a bad deal, but only if my chances of getting caught are fairly high. Let’s say I value a year in prison at $50,000 per year (in other words, that’s how much I’d be willing to pay to avoid that punishment). So, in defeat, my total losses would be $510,000, and in victory, my total winnings would be $10,000. That means that if my chances of success are over approximately 98%, I should commit the crime – it averages out to a benefit, not a loss. It all depends on how much risk I’m willing to take on, of course, but to reduce risk just ensure that your chances of success are higher. 99%? 99.5%?…

The point is that some people will have those chances at success – or at least they will think they do – and so people will still commit crimes. Even with a literal eye for an eye – at some point, if I want to harm the other person badly enough and I think my chances of success are high enough – I will take his eye even if there’s a chance of it costing me mine. It’s actually an even better deal than the theft because they can’t make me give the eye back.

And, as Saint Thomas More pointed out, you can’t just increase all punishments to be extremely harsh because then people have no incentive to commit lesser crimes not greater. If I’ll get hanged for stealing, why not kill the witnesses so there’s less of a chance of getting caught? If I get caught, I die either way. Might as well decrease the chances of that happening. So you need punishments that are fairly reasonable. But then people only have to have good, not even great, chances of success before it’s worth it for them to commit crimes – 70%? 60%?

So how exactly is punishment a deterrent? It deters criminals who were likely to get caught. It doesn’t deter the ones who will probably succeed. But that’s really what we need to do. They’re probably the more dangerous kind anyway. An executive at a large company who can steal $1,000,000,000 and probably get away with it is far more dangerous than someone who can rob a convenience story, get $100, and have a fairly good chance of getting caught for it. “Deterrence” might stop the latter, but it won’t stop the former.

Anyway, that’s why I’m wary of the idea that punishing criminals is useful as a deterrent. So what is it good for? Education? Retribution? The former sounds absurd (the criminals who get caught aren’t the ones who need to be convinced that crime is wrong) and the latter potentially blasphemous (who are we to decide who is guilty and deserves punishment?). It might well be that deterrence is really all that punishing criminals is good for – the idea being that you don’t have to deter all the criminals, just enough to have some semblance of order in your society. Anarchy tends to be unpleasant.

But I suspect that so long as we have to punish criminals at all, there’s no hope of creating some sort of crime-less society… that would, after all, be a Utopia, a no-place. And any claim that a change in how criminals are punished will somehow drastically reduce crime should be examined very, very carefully. The only way to reduce crime is to reduce the criminals’ chances of success.