I wasn’t going to write anything about Saddam’s hanging, since I was trying not to even think about it. But what the hell.
Have you ever seen one of those movies set in the 1800s, where the whole town shows up for public hangings, and everybody is in a festive mood and jockying for a good view? I think we’re worse, collectively speaking. Capital punishment brings out the very worst in a society, and each time we execute someone we further dehumanize ourselves. And many of us actively participate in that dehumanization.
Deviants patrol the perimeters of what is acceptable in a society, and are necessary because those perimeters are always shifting. The deviant, by crossing the line, shows us exactly where it is right now. They give the rest of us the opportunity to indulge ourselves in moral outrage. By expressing moral outrage, each individual clearly defines themself as being inside the line: ie not deviant, not immoral, not worthy of condemnation.
People become competitive in their outrage, presumably because the more outraged they can appear to others, the more moral they will be perceived as being.
You see it in online discussion groups: someone posts a link to a news story about a heinous crime, and everybody starts talking about how that person should be punished. People attempt to outdo one another in conjuring up the most heinous punishment.
“He should be executed for what he did,” someone asserts.
“Death is too good for him,” someone else says, “He should have his balls cut off.”
“Cutting off his balls is too good for him,” another says, “We should cut off his balls with a rusty knife.”
“Cutting off his balls with a rusty knife is too good for him,” someone else chimes in, “We should cut off his balls with a rusty knife and shove them down his throat.”
And so on. By the end of a typical discussion the accused has been tortured, humiliated, mutilated and murdered.
Inevitably several people claim that they’d like to personally carry out the punishment and murder the murderer. (I’ve asked them if they’d also like to rape the rapist, but for some reason they think this would be deviant on their part.)
I always watch these discussions with a mixture of repugnance and fascination, because the participants never seem to recognize the irony in their own – or one another’s – barbarism. Maybe it’s because this kind of collective barbarism isn’t deviant: it’s normal.
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