Reformedville

     As Americans find out that innocent people have been in prison and awaiting execution because they were unable to afford a good lawyer, there is a greater sense of the murderous ugliness of profit economics - of a system which has some persons amass wealth through keeping others poor. The US Constitution guarantees everyone “due process of law.” But, Americans are seeing, it is essentially impossible to get this due process, to get a just trial, if you are poor. Not only, as Mr. Siegel pointed out, is there nothing about the profit system in the Constitution - the profit system makes this Constitutional guarantee (as well as others) a mockery for many, many people. There is really no such thing as democracy where there is poverty. Americans are feeling this fact in relation to the courts - not, certainly, with the full awareness that should be, but with more than there ever was. 

     They are seeing too that the justice system so often is horrifically unjust to people who are not white. Courts can be racist because they are composed of human beings, and racism is one of the results of the human desire, so ordinary and so terrible, for contempt. I say simply, and with tremendous feeling: the only thing that will end racism in America is the national study of Aesthetic Realism; because it is Aesthetic Realism which explains contempt and enables people to criticize it in ourselves.  

     In the preface to Self and World, Mr. Siegel writes: 

Contempt is our soothing revenge for a world not sufficiently interested, as we see it, in what we are hoping for. Contempt is not an incident; it is an unintermitting counteroffensive to an uncaring world. [P. 10]

     People generally feel they are in a world they dislike, that is “uncaring” and confusing. There is a big desire to deal with such a world by annulling, wiping out what we see as against us. This wiping out has thousands of forms, but they are all contempt. They are all in opposition to that respect for the world, in its sweetness and bitterness, which is the desire to know, the desire to have thought that is exact and continuous. A common form of the desire to do away triumphantly with a disliked world takes place in beds every night: people feel, whether they put it this way or not, At last I can get rid of everybody, everything; I close my eyes and make them no longer exist! There are other forms. You curse at someone: through a few expletives you have the triumph of summing him up, of annulling his complexity and your need to understand it, of making him into nothing and yourself right. 
 

     The cry of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, “Off with their heads!,” stands for something. It stands for that complete lessening which is our revenge on an “uncaring world.” What it stands for has made the death penalty popular. 

    We are not sure about our own ethics, are not sure how good we are. We do not like being unsure; and we do not like the idea that we have to work to be sure, and have to keep thinking. So if there is someone we can see as very evil and we can have him dealt with utterly, done away with, we can feel we have dealt with the question of good and evil firmly, tidily. This person was bad; we are good; we kill him; no loose ends; that’s that. People have used the death penalty to get to a fake sureness about themselves - a sureness which makes them more unsure, because it is fake. 

     We should ask why, in history, public executions were popular. Doing so is a means of understanding the appeal of capital punishment. There was undoubtedly a pleasure people got in seeing someone executed - it was a spectacle. It was the pleasure of utter contempt: the being able to do away with a person is the being able to look down utterly and feel you are virtuous in the process. Of course, public executions are not what we have now; there is a difference. But there is also a relation: the death penalty makes for a satisfaction. I quote, therefore, the poet Byron telling about an execution he saw in 1817. These are a few sentences from his account, in a letter to his publisher and friend, John Murray. And one can see through the writing that Byron was there, not to have contempt, but to know: 

The day before I left Rome I saw three robbers guillotined …. The first…died with great terror and reluctance, which was very horrible. He would not lie down; then his neck was too large for the aperture …. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty, and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera-glass (I was close, but determined to see, as one should see every thing, once, with attention); the second and third (which shows how dreadfully soon things grow indifferent), I am ashamed to say, had no effect on me as a horror, though I would have saved them if I could.

     So we have even Byron, a person with true feeling for people, saying he did not have enough feeling. We have Byron saying there was in him that contempt of choosing deeply to feel less, to be “indifferent”; and he is ashamed of it.