There was a time when justice was simple: if someone wronged you, you wronged him back. If someone murdered your child or your father or your brother, you murdered him, and maybe some of his friends and family if they stood in the way. If someone took your girl, you took his life. If someone took your food, you beat him to a pulp. Brawls. Blood feuds. Civil wars.
The problem was that it often became quite murky as to where the center of gravity was in these sometimes long sequences of actions and responses. We humans are very good at rationalizing away our own culpabilities and investing our own actions with some kind of obscure virtue or wisdom that others may not apprehend. We seek revenge and won’t hesitate to extract more punishment than might be deserved, to satisfy a craving that is not about the health of a community or some kind of “balance” to human affairs: we want to see them suffer. We want to be seen as the wronged victim because nothing makes you seem more righteous or virtuous than being able to point at someone else who is very, very bad. You thereby entitled to do the crime he or she did, to them, or even more, because it is so outrageous that virtuous, innocent you, was wronged by them.
But years of experience taught people that these kind of blood-feuds only led to disaster, to wars, to destruction, to division and acrimony. Can anyone imagine these disputes ever ending with, “oh, all right, I guess now we’re even”? We’re never even: your revenge was always somehow excessive or unjustified or came at the wrong time.
It is one of the greatest miracles of civilization: rule of law. The idea that crimes should be addressed by the community, not by the wronged party, and that the appropriate punishment should be decided by neutral third parties, not by the relatives or friends of the victim. This was progress: the wiser heads in a community saw that allowing individuals to take revenge for crimes committed against them led to instability and factionalism and hatred and ended up destroying everyone. And the wiser heads prevailed, in the West, at least, in the Magna Carta, and democracy and law and the courts and impartial judges.
Where did it come from? Probably from the idea of God, of something greater than ourselves, who alone was entitled to judge and exact punishment. Try as you might to locate the idea in “natural law”, it’s hard to make the leap to transcendence. Especially once you realize that the oft-cited “eye for an eye” is, in fact, the opposite of Christ’s teachings.
But it’s hard to shake those old instincts. And it’s hard for a lot of people to look beyond their own grievances towards what is good for society in the long term. Over and over again, you hear people insist that a particular sentence given by a court is not enough. He got off lightly. We need tougher sentencing. We need to bring back capital punishment: murdering someone is so wrong, we ought to murder him.
And so we have the victims rights movement. I heard two representatives talking on the CBC this morning. They really feel it is just awful that we have this “rule of law” thing (though they would never put it that way) and that the victims of a crime don’t get to pick out the punishment. No, they would never put it that way: instead they insist that our criminal justice system doesn’t pay enough attention to the victims of crime– it’s always only about the offender, and they are right sick of it.
You might be excused for thinking for a moment that people don’t go to jail anymore and that victims rights advocates are doing nothing more than trying to see to it that wrongdoers are punished.
They will never, ever use the word “revenge”, except, to deny that that is what they really want.
They will say that what they want is a role in the criminal prosecution of the perpetrator. In other words, exactly what it is that our civilization decided long ago was a bad idea.
The primary virtue of rule of law is precisely the opposite of what they want: personal justice. Over the centuries, we have invested enormous resources into a system that is impersonal and objective and rational. It could do better at all of these things but whatever it’s faults it tries to take into consideration the long-term interests of the community, and a degree of compassion and reason and interest in rehabilitation are all in the long term interests of the community.