Crime, Punishment and the Creative Arts

Well crafted sentences > criminal sentences

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns us to “beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.” This theme resonates throughout Nietzsche’s work and, emanating from Fyodor Dostoevsky and his contemporaries, themes of crimes and punishment become essential threads of the existentialist tapestry.

The existentialists ask us to face that life is largely what you can live with. A person can be fined, censured, ostracized, or imprisoned but true punishment is self-inflicted. Everything else is the will to power at work. Some people think that without this, society would collapse into anarchy and that a non-trivial number of people must be forced to behave socially. Middlebrow doesn’t share this view and if the old division between Hobbes and Rousseau endures, remains an adamant Rousseauian. Biology wants us to live together. Otherwise, we’d all have been eaten by extremist koalas well before inventing the internet.

Still, the idea that the law is impartial and objective gives us comfort because so little else in life meets those standards. Of course, the law as practiced can’t reach its ideals either. We want to believe that all murderers are treated the same as all other murderers and all embezzlers treated like other embezzlers, but we know this is a fantasy. Some people get away with crimes, others don’t. Some people receive harsh sentences, others receive more lenient punishments. Some people’s crimes stain them for life while others receive presidential pardons.

What Nietzsche saw is that people who put too much faith in the criminal justice system are suspect and that people who clamor for harsh punishments are generally expressing sadistic impulses. If one defendant is sentenced to 10 years for assault and another is sentenced to only 3 for the same infraction, do you see the injustice as the harsher sentence or the lesser one? That seems a key question.

Art has a lot to say about the rule of law and criminal justice. One of my favorite observations is from Alfred Jarry who, in the play Ubu in Chains, imagines that the deposed royal family of Poland might organize an attack on all prisons so that they can kick the convicts out into the cruel world while they lock themselves inside, to be fed and cared for without any burdens of responsibility.

A more serious consideration would be the story of Antigone. As told to us by Sophocles, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta defies the order of Creon, King of Thebes, not to give her brother Polynices a proper burial after he his slain in a battle for control of the city-state.

Polynices had been warring with his own brother for control of Thebes and Creon took power after both brothers were slain. The rule of law being important, Creon had decent reason to deny burial rights to a man who had been killed in a war over the kingdom. But Antigone believed in a higher law that demanded a proper burial for her brother so his soul could pass into the underworld. So, she buries her brother in defiance of the king, is caught, and sentenced to living entombment.

Creon eventually finds his way to mercy, but Antigone has killed herself before she gets the news. There’s a big tension in a life full of reflexive self-consciousness, which is that we want good actions to be rewarded and bad to be punished, but since the world is indifferent and our notions of good and bad are fluid, this almost never happens.

It may seem like a non sequitur but consider The Princess Bride (both the novel and the movie). Both are written by the same genius, but are utterly opposed. In the film, where a tale of swords, love and piracy are told by a grandfather to his grandson sick in bed, the story is all about good being rewarded and evil punished. In the book, the same tale is framed as an academic exhumation of an ancient text and the story turns out differently – the heroes fight valiantly but fail comically.

Art reminds us just how hard it is to get things right in life. Despite the dreams of technocrats, we are so flawed as individuals that we’re better off heeding Nietzsche and resisting all urges to punish. Mercy from error is always better that the alternative.