So long as we believe that Society is right in that calculation, so long, I suppose, shall we continue to advocate punishment; but when we come to believe that Society is wrong, we shall begin to advocate education, employment, social reform, and, above all, human sympathy and understanding as a substitute; with the idea that they may gradually do away with the necessity for punishment.
But pending that consummation so devoutly to be wished, most of us will probably continue to believe that punishment is just and right; and will find it very difficult to think of Society, and of ourselves—as all equally criminal along with the individual whom our social contempt and neglect have de-socialised and made a fit recipient for punitive treatment.
The temptation to think that punishment is just and right has been with us from time immemorial; it is probably arboreal, certainly neolithic; and therefore, to our atavistic instincts, it is supremely sacred. We have got it firmly into our heads that punishment is a superior ordering of consequences. And as the law of cause and effect which we see operating in nature is the basis of our moral sense, we have fallen to the confused notion that punishment is the same. But as a matter of fact the two are entirely different. The law of cause and effect stands for natural consequences; the law of punishment substitutes artificial consequences; and we fly to punishment largely as an escape from the results of our age-long indifference to natural consequences. Having produced the criminal we set to work to destroy his self-respect, as a short cut to the preservation of our own.
That may sound a puzzling statement; but the more we accentuate the difference between the criminal and ourselves—the more, superficially, are we able to get rid of our sense of brotherhood and responsibility. And so, when bishops go on to the platform to advocate the flogging of men who live on the earnings of prostitutes, it helps them to forget that they also are living on the earnings of prostitutes, and are by their support of a capitalist system involving sweated labour and degraded housing conditions—neatly and efficaciously driving the prostitute into the hands of the male “bully”—whom they then flog for extracting his profit from a damaged article which, in the public market of supply and demand, they have already wrung dry. The very monstrousness of the proposed penalty helps us to forget that we are all links in the same chain of circumstances. In the “bully” the degrading brutality of the system finally emerges and becomes patent; just as in war the degrading brutality of our peace system finally emerges. Then we point to it with horror and cry that we are peace-lovers! So we are; we have loved peace at a price which we would not exceed—we ran it on sweated conditions; and we pay for it in war. For there exist, in every nation, sources of wealth, sufficient—if equitably distributed and constructively applied for the good of all—to allay that economic unrest which is the main incentive by which modern nations are led into war. But in every country alike there are interests which refuse to pay that price, and which will, if threatened, precipitate their country into war rather than be held at a ransom which would merely readjust wealth more equitably to the true sources of its production.
War has come to us—not as a punishment divinely imposed—(a splendid old lady of ninety told me the other day that the war was God’s visitation upon us for our divorces and for having given votes to women)—war has come upon us, not as a punishment for these offences against Taboo, but as a natural consequence of our social peace conditions. And at present, in the mentality of nations, punishment (not of the system, but of the criminal act which has finally emerged from it to horrify us) is the only remedy.
And so punishment still appears to us as the very bed of justice—the foundation stone of morality. If you do not insist on it, social order will go to pieces. And as we have attempted scarcely any criminal reform without punishment—and none till the day before yesterday—the contention is accepted as true for lack of witnesses against it.
The standpoint toward human nature of our generally accepted “moral code” is that of a devout believer in corporal punishment—of that kind of parent who says: “I have to flog my boy because he is so untruthful.” And the idea that the untruthfulness is the product of the corporal punishment never enters the parental mind.
But this vengeful exercise of parental authority is only a secondary symptom of belief in a vengeful order of Creation—of a God whose method it was to vindicate the moral law, not by bringing home to ill-doers through natural consequences the defects of certain courses of conduct, but by expressing His moral indignation in exemplary punishments of an arbitrary kind—generally of a miraculous character.
When man first conceived of God, he conceived of Him as a sort of Dr. Busby—one in whose mind the Rod was the beginning and end of wisdom; and the Rod of Heaven operated by intervention, over and above the operations of Nature—the law of cause and effect. Natural consequences did not sufficiently vindicate divine justice. A belief in miraculous and vengeful intervention and a belief in “exemplary” legal punishment go together; and will, I believe, die together.
A great deal of Old Testament teaching is merely an elaborate extension of Punch’s picture of the British workman holding a brick’s end over an unfortunate batrachian, and saying, “I’ll l’arn ye to be a toad!” And all he succeeds in doing is producing a dead toad instead of a live one; the species itself remaining entirely unaltered.