The System of Dante's Hell
I was for several years the master of an undergraduate
residential college, so that I am not unaware that college roommates sometimes
treat each other in vile ways demanding redress. Even so, a recent criminal
trial just up the road at New Brunswick (NJ), which ended in the conviction of
a Rutgers undergraduate (Dharun Ravi) for his serious mistreatment of his
roommate, has drawn my attention to the relatively new legal category of “hate
crime”. Ravi grossly abused his
roommate’s privacy by spying on him, and by encouraging others to view his
secretly recorded sexual activities.
The roommate later committed suicide, and though the prosecution neither
claimed nor demonstrated a causal connection, many have drawn the inference;
and the gravity of the circumstance probably contributed to Ravi’s conviction
of the crime of “bias intimidation”, which is a “hate crime” that might lead to
lengthy imprisonment.
I
appear to be in a minority in my disquiet at the very concept of a “hate crime”. I entertain doubts that a jury could
accurately isolate “hate” as the principal motive force behind complex and
ambiguous social actions. (I shall
reserve for another day a yet more fundamental objection: so what if they could?) But mostly, the
confidence with which the press and remote observers diagnose “hate” alarms me.
Several weeks ago in Florida a man named
George Zimmerman shot and killed a youth named Trayvon Martin. I cannot imagine that anyone reading
this blog is unaware of this appalling affair. Even on the basis of sketchy and contested details it is
very hard, prima facie, to imagine
circumstances under which this killing was not stupid and abominable. It is slightly more conceivable,
barely--in light of the possible breadth of a recently instituted “stand-your-ground
law” of which I had never before heard--that the act was not illegal.
Even
as I have been writing this, the latest Newsweek
came in the mail. It documents in
statistical detail the dramatically different ways in which black Americans and
white Americans are inclined to interpret the episode. But in fact as yet we simply do not know
enough to draw safe conclusions concerning the “objective” facts of the
episode, let alone conclusions concerning the mind of George Zimmerman. Inclination in the absence of factual
knowledge is just another, and nicer, term for prejudice. Nevertheless dozens of pundits, several
prominent news personalities, and even some elected members of Congress have
felt perfectly confident in identifying this ghastly episode as a “hate crime.”
That
there are gradations of crime seems too obvious to require argument. Certainly no medievalist is likely to
deny the principle. Most people
are familiar with the so-called “six questions of journalism”. A good reporter ill make clear to the
reader the what of a story, its who, when,
where, why, and how. Yet how many people know the origin of these questions? They derive from what were called the
“circumstances” of sin as detailed in the confessional manuals of the later
Middle Ages. Incest was always a
no-no, but it was worse to sleep with your aunt than with your cousin, and
worse to sleep with your sister than with your aunt. One of the great lines in world literature comes when the
hero of Tom Jones arrives at the (mistaken)
conclusion that Mrs. Waters is actually his Mum: “O good Heavens! Incest—with a mother!” The stroke of genius there is the
indefinite article. Tom is echoing
the casuistry of a printed consanguinity table of an old prayer book!
Our
secular law has long recognized the concept of aggravating and mitigating
circumstances in the commission of illegal acts. The guy who kills somebody to take his sneakers and the guy
who kills his aged wife because he cannot stand to see her descend yet further
into Alzheimer’s are both killers; but few of us would be content to leave it
at that. Yet it would be a very
risky business to start a taxonomy of “sneaker crimes,” “Alzheimer crimes,”
etc. If you feel confident about
what a “hate crime” is you ought to feel equally confident about a “love
crime”. I don’t feel so confident.
The
system of Dante’s hell, based in the ancient Aristotelian ethical scheme,
presents a tripartite hierarchy of dereliction. All mortal sin will get you into hell, but the carnal obsessions
that nearly monopolize our tabloid newspapers—the general Aristotelian category
being incontinence—are of a primitive
nature. Worse in Dante’s eyes are
the sins of violence. The naughty lovers Paolo and Francesca
are in a relatively high rent district of hell when compared with the abode of the
jealous husband who murdered them.
But the worst category is fraud,
which involves not merely the indulgence of appetite or the unleashing of
irascible passions, but the actual perversion of the reason. But applying human reason to evil ends
is not thought crime.
In
my view “hate crime” is. In an
effort to purge ourselves of all
taint of “prejudice,” we presume it virtuous to punish people for what they think–or
what we think they think. So far as I
am concerned punishing people for what they think is not a slippery slope, but
the ski jump at Chamonix. When I
was researching and writing The
Anti-Communist Manifestos I had occasion to meditate on the principles of
Marxist jurisprudence (aka “revolutionary justice”) that founded the gulag
state under Lenin and by the late Thirties under Stalin populated it by the
millions.
