Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since the human is to realize it can’t be understood.
“The Book Of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa
Within the past month, a couple of unrelated announcements, which, though, somehow, are chillingly related. Or is it uneasily related?
Glenn Beck, possibly losing his eyesight.
Christopher Hitchens stricken with a grave form of cancer.
Fodder for the cold-hearted on both sides of the idealogical aisle.
Not a time for public pronouncements on the part of idealogues seeking to capitalize on the misfortune that has befallen their antithetical brethren.
It brings to mind, to my mind, the concept of fate, justice and “karma.” Loosely speaking.
Though undeclared and quietly guarded, I guarantee there are many more people than we’d comfortably admit who harbor a private spark of elation at the bad fortune that has afflicted either of these two men. In fact, it’s often the religious and virulently devout who shamelessly rejoice in the ill fortune of the sinner or blasphemer who has fallen on their bad side. Invariably preached in the spirit of “God’s will” and other pernicious rationalizations.
There is justice to be witnessed at play in all instances of ill fortune. It is intrinsically evil to herald bad news, even that which befalls your enemies. Hitchens and Beck both have their share of evil detractors and the recent announcements by both these men was surely greeted with some dark celebrations in the minds of lurking onlookers.
Which brings to mind the question of justice.
Justice varies so widely and can be viewed as “just” by almost anyone in almost any situation. How is justice to be meted out fairly when there is such a disjunction in its presentation vs. its perception?
Can we be certain that Hitchens’ cancer is not justice? That Beck deserves to go blind? Naturally the majority would agree that there is little a man could wreak on mankind which would righteously expose himself to such debilitating fates. But there would also be those who, inspired by the harshest sense of punitive punishment, would find it acceptable and even logical that these 2 men are paying the price for living wayward existences.
And there is punishment most would agree on.
Punishment for acts which seem so indelibly cruel and monstrous that very few would find a sense of clemency in their hearts. For instance, I recently read a news report about a man by the name of Jonathan Richardson from North Carolina who was accused of beating, torturing and raping his girlfriend’s 4-year old daughter. This is a most heinous category of crime which most would agree should be punishable by blindness or cancer or other agonizing and life-altering affliction if in fact mankind were able to harness such power.
Punishment ultimately must be doled out by humans when there is doubt that it may occur without their judicial intervention. Punishment and justice are the slipperiest gifts man can bestow upon his fellow man. Civilized man seeks to reduce justice’s arbitrary nature by standardizing its retributive nature and by laddering the vehemence of its expression in corresponding degrees to the severity of the transgression which initiated it.
Man’s subjective and moralistic expectations decide other’s fates and dictates levels of punishment based on the measure of the crime’s severity in congruence to the ratio of normal members of society who would find the crime distasteful or abhorrent (as expressed by the level of distaste it arouses in our civilized senses). Thus justice, punishment, are but mere indicators of a deed’s unpopularity.
Always, there is the presumption that “justice” must counteract the human vision of “bad” or “wrong.” Justice is not blind for it is wagged by our unnatural perspective of humanly morals.
Where does the line of justice get drawn?
If the celebration of Glenn Beck’s blindness fills the hearts in even the smallest fraction of civilized people, why is it assumed his fate is less valid or just than Jonathan Richardson’s? Why is it considered callous to laud the fact that Christopher Hitchens has been stricken with a deadly cancer as just punishment when the same cancer striking Richardson would be applauded?
The cancer is the same.
The fate is the same.
Circumstances are oddly blind.
However, fate is a coldly human contrivance.
Punishment is written and produced by man.
It is served with the presumed endorsement of a lifeless God. Man recognizes, has long recognized, that punishment in the absence of cosmic authority is merely a display of humanly chivalry as it pertains to the treatment of insolent human behavior.
Man would find equally futile the attempt to harness lightning than to attempt to manipulate the laws of fate.
Man punishes man; man asserts pain indirectly in consequential retort to the wrongdoings of man. Unsure of the immediate pleasure or vindication to be derived from the pain’s acute punishment, he can never be convinced that justice is served. Justice cannot be real; not when its allocation is subject to such subjective manners of trust and hope.
The long gray road, spanning all visitations of misery, the journey of punishment and retribution which we sporadically join in order to play the transient role of punisher before we exit the road again. The ideal of punishment is opaque. The range it spans, from this end where it vanishes into irrelevant nothingness, to that other end where the monstrousness of the human heart dwells, the point where man dares to set foot and assume the role of punisher.
Sometimes, questioning the concept of god, questioning fate and purgatory, we must question punishment. If punishment serves no metaphysical purpose, it follows that virtue also serves no function other than the sensory enlightenment of the human desire to achieve an unachievable equilibrium.
Prisons, jails, courthouses…lofty palaces concocted where mankind can park his eternally troublesome instinct to match fate with uncaptured reality in a cascading slope of confused motives. The justice system plays a vestigial role in our quest to impose civilization and order to a crumbling sense of wanton moral aimlessness. Man’s incapacity to capture and furnish justice speaks to its faulty and fallacious nature. Justice is the promiscuous inkling of surrealistic reality masquerading as fact which man can attach himself to while still pretending to maintain saintly neutrality.
Justice is false, and as carved by man, cannot truly exist, for he is an impostor to suppose that he can appropriate natural fate. Justice only lives up to its name when it transcends man’s ability to intercede. Justice is mightiest without his complicit help or noble intentions.
I read once of a teenager who was goofing around (as teenagers do) with some friends at the Kodak Center here in Hollywood, and while daredevilling along the rail of an escalator, fell 2 or 3 stories to his death.
That is a fury of remorseless and incautious justice that man can only dream of unleashing. The only justice is that which is sentenced behind the back of our moralistic fiddling and patronizing sense of grandiosity (divided by our ballooning sense of powerlessness).