Beccaria and Lichtenberg on Section 13.

I'm fully in favor of capital punishment, and I hope I would remain so even were I sentenced to death under the legitimate rule of law in a legitimate state; however, whether I were to be subject or not to torture before hand, I can't think of any good reason to support it, and I have one good reason to forego it: regardless of the advantages of gleaning information from one under torture, the benefit is lost in our becoming torturers. Beccaria argues against capital punishment on that same ground, and I do suggest he is wrong in it.

Torture demeans us, and capital punishment ennobles us. To torture a person is to accept their Humanness and to deliberately degrade it and nullify it for the sake of others. To torture is to shame, other aspects of it being negotiable. To shame is to destroy another's Humanness, which destroys ones own, a far too high a price to pay. One cannot bravely face torture. The point of torture is to deface the person so he has no bravery, no courage, not Humanness left in him, at which point he is tortured fully. Anything to be gained through that is not worth the having. But death is a different occasion. I accept it as occasion for the possibility of an act of courage. Nevertheless, for the executioner, capital punishment is not an act of personal volition and responsibility, per se. Killing people isn't Good; but sometimes killing people is Right. On those occasions of capital punishment, one might consider it an act of ennoblement of all concerned.

When a legitimate authority sentences a criminal to his punishment, then death is a good thing and right. Death shows to the community and to the one punished that Life is our highest value: To kill a criminal is to show that we take the crime so seriously that we will make the payment so severe that it transcends all other of our values in this case. We prize life so highly that we will take it from those who do not deserve it. We will go even that far. We won't defile ourselves by humiliating another for the sake of our own gain; but we will show to all that we value life so highly that we take it and destroy it rather than allow one to have it who has transgressed against us.

Our culture is askew. We seem not to know the difference between insult and outrage, the difference between traduce and trespass. Often we live in fear. Or we have no fear whatsoever.

Cesare Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments. (1738 –1794)

I do not know of any exception to this general axiom, that every member of society should know when he is criminal and when innocent. If censors, and, in general, arbitrary magistrates, be necessary in any government, it proceeds from some fault in the constitution. The uncertainty of crimes hath sacrificed more victims to secret tyranny than have ever suffered by public and solemn cruelty.

Chapter 11: "Of crimes which disturb the Public Tranquillity."

It is impossible to reduce the tumultuous activity of mankind to absolute regularity; for, amidst the various and opposite attractions of pleasure and pain, human laws are not sufficient entirely to prevent disorders in society. Such, however is the chimera of weak men, when invested with authority. To prohibit a number of indifferent actions is not to prevent the crimes which they may produce, but to create new ones; it is to change at will the ideas of virtue and vice, which, at other times, we are told, are eternal and immutable. To what a situation should we be reduced if everything were to be forbidden that might possibly lead to a crime? We must be deprived of the use of our senses: for one motive that induces a man to commit a real crime there are a thousand which excite him to those indifferent actions which are called crimes by bad laws....

Would you prevent crimes? Let the laws be clear and simple, let the entire force of the nation be united in their defence, let them be intended rather to favour every individual than any particular classes of men, let the laws be feared, and the laws only. The fear of the laws is salutary, but the fear of men is a fruitful and fatal source of crimes.

Chapter 41: "Of the Means of preventing Crimes."

http://www.constitution.org/cb/crim_pun41.txt

Stern punishments for trivialities; trivial punishments for inhumanities callously committed. We now know less and less about things more and more important daily. Where the foulest of crimes go unpunished, the slightest of imagined insults brings down upon the man the wrath of the Gnostic estate.

A contemporary of Beccaria understood the problems of our jurisprudence as if he were looking through a time machine:

"Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re-establishing our former ignorance?" Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Our Gnostic minders know too much, and in that they have lost fully the sense of our great Enlightenment. We must relearn our selves.

But if I do get arrested for speaking out, please let me get close to Pamela before I get hanged.

Faith and fantasy

The scenes (in the video clip above, from Israeli tv) of Palestinians celebrating the mass murder last week at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva, has led many to the usual depressing thoughts about the hopelessness of such people caught up in a faith in martyrdom (for a cause that to succeed will require untold billions of deaths, since it is not just the destruction of Israel but of a globalizing modernity that is sought...) and of there ever being a peace that recognizes Israel's right to exist as Jewish state.

Here is a story to lift the spirits of those who remember those who love life. A reader of Pamela's Atlas Shrugs blog writes:

Every morning I take the 35 bus line to work. It's a quickride and usually takes no more than 12 minutes. The thirdstop after I get on by the shuk is directly in front of Yeshivat Merkaz HaRav. This morning I found myself a bit anxious, unsure of what I was going to see as we passed by. As I looked around, I saw death notices pasted all over the street and flowers that had been brought lined the entrance to the Yeshiva. When the bus pulled up to the stop, the driver shut off the engine and stood. With tears in his eyes he told everyone sitting on the bus that one of the boys killed on Thursday night was his nephew. He asked if everyone on the bus would mind if he spoke for a few minutes in memory of his nephew and the other boys that were killed. After seeing head nods all over the bus he began to speak. With a clear and proud voice, he spoke beautifully about his nephew and said that he was a person who was constantly on the lookout for how to help out anyone in need. He was always searching for a way to make things better. He loved learning, and had a passion for working out the intricacies of the Gemara. He was excited to join the army in a few years, and wanted to eventually work in informal education. As he continued to speak, I noticed that the elderly woman sitting next to me was crying. I looked into my bag, reached for a tissue and passed it to her. She looked at me and told me that she too had lost someone she knew in the attack. Her neighbors child was another one of the boys killed. As she held my hand tightly, she stood up and asked if she too could say a few words in memory of her neighbor. She spoke of a young man filled with a zest for life. Every friday he would visit her with a few flowers for shabbat and a short dvar torah that he had learned that week in Yeshiva. This past shabbat, she had no flowers. When I got to work, one of my colleagues who lives in Efrat told me that her son was friends with 2 of the boys who had been killed. One of those boys was the stepson of a man who used to teach in Brovenders and comes to my shul in Riverdale every Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to be a chazan for one of the minyanim.

We are all affected by what goes on in Israel. Whether you know someone who was killed or know someone who knows someone or even if you don't know anyone at all, you are affected. The 8 boys who were killed will continue to impact us all individually and as a nation. Each one of us has the ability to make a profound impact on our world. This coming wednesday morning, I will be at Ben Gurion airport at 7 am with Nefesh B'Nefesh welcoming 40 new olim to Israel. We will not deter. We can not give up. We will continue to live our lives and hope and work for change, understanding and peace.

Sharon Millendorf

Student and Young Professionals Program Coordinator

There are those who love life and those who cheer at death since their cause can only be realized with a monumental destruction of all that goes with Western life.