Crime, Punishment and the "Occupy Movement"

 Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true . . .

 John Cabot - Cape Bonavista

 I must go down to the sea today . . .

During the 1860s, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky worked on and published material that would later be collected into the novel called Crime and Punishment.  By today’s standards, it’s a flawed novel that would have to be heavily edited to become publishable; speeches that go on for page after page, for instance, along with the tendency to wander off into plot tangents and to give near-irrelevancies as much weight as the crucial.

               Rereading it this week, however, I was impressed by the parallels in its dominant motifs to events of the present. Simplified, Crime and Punishment revolves around the central theme of the nature and boundaries of human morality.  Its central characters fall into three categories: evil reprobates (Luzhin), the morally upright (Razumikhin) and, thirdly, the key characters who by choice or necessity, are caught between the two poles (Raskalnikov, Sonya, Dounia).

Central to this latter group, of course, is Raskalnikov, who as a student contemplated the nature of crime, and tentatively concluded that laws relating to moral actions are applied only to “ordinary” people, while a layer of “extraordinary” people are exempt. In conjunction with this “theory,” he postulated in an essay he wrote that morality is relative, i.e. that to murder can be justified by the good it achieves.

There existed a number of protest movements in Russia in the mid to late 1800s, including a Utopian Socialist movement (that undoubtedly became the germ of Soviet socialism),  anarchist gangs and nihilist groups to name a few. All were expressions of discontent with the state of affairs in the country, a country of extreme wealth alongside abject poverty, of the “poor man’s nihilism”—drunkenness.

The “Occupy” movement as we are witnessing it is a protest against the state of affairs in North America today. Unfocussed and ad hoc as it may be, politicians and corporations may well ignore or dismiss it at their peril. The rage felt by many as a result of economic collapse and the resulting loss of jobs, foreclosures, etc. hasn’t found clear goals yet, but the anger is not gone just because the tents are.

Although they may not have discovered it yet, participants in the Occupy movement are protesting a morality that condones crimes in the “extraordinary” while punishing the “ordinary,” and perpetrates the notion that the end justifies the means, even when the means requires that thousands will die in phony wars, that millions will be reduced to poverty because the “extraordinary” have been greedy beyond what countries’ economies will bear.  They’re protesting the fact that the “ordinary” must pay for the immoral acts of the “extraordinary.” They’re protesting that a petty thief can be thrown in jail while Bush and Cheney and the oil barons are excused.

Canada is preparing itself for the onslaught by building more jails to house the rebelling “ordinary.” 

We are led by an extraordinary prime minister; his foresight is amazing.

It’s, in part, what Crime and Punishment is about.

There really is nothing new under the sun.

Crime and Punishment

 Erst muss Ordnung sein

Speaking of Bark . . .

I’m sure that the set of motive/opportunity circumstances for pretty much every crime is unique, so it’s somewhat foolish to talk about crime as if it were one thing. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Raskalnikov—a student who has had to quit lessons because he has no money—lives in a garret and while feverishly ill, is tortured by the injustice of his situation and resentful of the old woman who holds all his former valuables in pawn. In this condition, he first dreams about and then premeditates her brutal murder and robbery, which he then carries out methodically.

               Except for one thing. The old woman’s daughter walks in on his crime and he sees no way out but to crack open her skull with his axe. So confused, guilty and agitated is he by this time that he botches the robbery in his attempt to flee and ends up with little except his guilt to take home with him.

               That, in short, is the anatomy of one crime, albeit fictitious.

               I see no authentic way to equate Raskalnikov’s crime to those of Clifford Olsen, Robert Pickton . . .  or Osama Bin Laden, for that matter, except that all four knew that the consequences for their crimes—if apprehended—would be enormous. None of the above, it seems, were deterred either by the prospect of a life of remorse and guilt or the possibility that they might well be executed or imprisoned-for-life for what they had done.

               Slowly but surely, Canada is allowing the Harper government to pull us back to medieval concepts of crime and punishment, namely, if thirty lashes won’t deter criminals from committing crimes, then let’s see how they like sixty lashes! I can only assume that both Stephen Harper and Vic Toews are aware that the crime bill they’re championing will be both futile and expensive. The obvious conclusion is that they have also discovered that 39% of the population is enough to win a majority and that with law and order, jet fighter and economy-before-environment policies, they can be assured of 39% of the vote, no problem.

               If there is a key to solving problems of crime, terrorism and environmental degradation, it is surely in the area of prevention, not retribution.

               Mind you, prevention wouldn’t be cheap either. For instance, we know that a combination of poverty-amidst-wealth alongside exclusion breeds high crime rates, relatively speaking. Raskalnikov’s crime was hatched in the futility of poverty without prospects. Bullying in schools is symptomatic of the competitive and exploitative, them-and-us  environment in which our children are raised. Tackling realities like those makes building pipelines to Texas child’s play. It won’t be cheap.

               An imaginative approach to poverty in Canada is way overdue; it’s time to take down the “Stop Bullying” placards and put up the “Prevent Bullying” signs; it’s time for a serious, communal rethinking of our child rearing, community institution and educational objectives.  

               Every crime involves a unique set of circumstances and it’s likely that degenerates like Olsen and Pickton will appear again, a new, sterner crime bill or better preventative programs notwithstanding.  But heaven help us if we don’t even give prevention a good try.

It’s time for informed, sincere leadership. I’m guessing that 100% of the population could rally behind it.

                  

Black Hats

Gros Morne

I wear a big, black leather hat I found in a roadside shop in Arizona a few years ago. I like it. When it rains, I don’t need an umbrella. When it’s hot, I take my shade with me. It gathers a few smiles as I walk down the street in Saskatoon and a smile is always nice. People need to be amused and I’m happy to oblige.

In Howard Jacobson’s 2010 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question, an Orthodox Jewish lad wearing a black hat and side curls is surrounded in the street by high school kids taunting “Look! It’s a Jew!” The difference between him and me (besides the side curls, of which I have an obvious dearth) is probably that when I walk down the street, most people think: “There goes one of us wearing a funny hat—amusing.” When the Orthodox Jew walks down the street in a black bowler, it’s: “There goes one of them in a funny hat; let’s knock it off!”

If you can get past frank dialogue about sex and the use of related words we’ve designated “smutty,” you might want to pick up The Finkler Question and spend some time with it. I won’t review it critically; a competent jury selected it to be the best of the novel-writing craft for 2010 and their judgment is good enough for me. It is at the same time a fascinating study of what it’s like to live in one us and them world.

And how us vs. them we’ve become—or have always been: Arian vs non-Arian; black vs. white; Arab Muslim vs. the West; real born-again Christians vs. false non-born again so-called Christians; Jews vs. Gentiles; conservatives vs. liberals vs. social democrats; the smart vs. the stupid; heaven-bound vs. the world; Americans vs. pretty-much-everybody else by now (except the Harper government). I won’t dwell here on the fundamentals of tribalism, of clannishness except to say that from a biological, anthropological standpoint, the instinctive needs for “us and them” come first; the methods by which we make the distinctions are inventions that follow.

For a more amusing description of this, just read Dr. Suess’ The Sneetches. It’s a much quicker read than The Finkler Question and probably even more insightful.

Or watch the World Series and listen critically to the words of the opening and seventh-inning anthems: God gave this land to me (no he didn’t; he gave it to the aboriginal people—you stole it from them) and God bless America, my home sweet home. Always with the: we, the chosen ones.

Meanwhile, in Rosthern the winter vs. summer distinction is being dramatized this morning by a few inches of snow and a minus three temperature. It’s interesting to note here that snow falls on everybody; it’s not clannish. I’ll be wearing my black hat today; it actually keeps the otherwise-unprotected top of my head quite warm. Knock it off if you dare.

How am I gonna feed all these people?

Last Monday, we’re told, the earth’s population passed the 7 billion mark. We were also told that population was being added at the rate of 4.4 per second, so by today, the number would be 2,661,120 more than that, or 7,002,661,120 and counting—that is, if we weren’t also dying at the rate of . . . X per second. (For an interesting read on the meaning of 7 billion people, see http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/10/27/f-population-big-numbers.html).

               It was Thomas Robert Malthus (1776-1834) who pioneered world-wide demographic studies that predicted almost 200 years ago that population would rapidly outstrip the earth’s ability to feed everyone. The starvation he predicted didn’t appear as early as prognosticated, but when we hear about African famine, we’re reminded that parts of the earth are periodically in just such a dilemma.

               On the other hand, we’re assured that there is food enough for all; that it’s merely a problem of difficulty in transporting it from place to place to meet emerging need. But if you or I were faced with an Ethiopia-like famine, this information would bring little consolation.

               An obvious conclusion is that the world is not overpopulated, but that parts of it certainly are. Where I live, in a small town in Saskatchewan in 2011, rising population is still linked to progress, the store shelves are always brimming with cheap food and the nagging problem is not starvation, but obesity.

               Rosthern, Saskatchewan is not overpopulated. Parts of Africa may be.

               Many animal species are territorial; they stake out areas large enough to sustain themselves and defend those areas pugnaciously. Inuit would traditionally limit their households to sustainable numbers by birth control or, if necessary, infanticide. Apparently the instinct to balance population to local environment exists but has been largely extinguished in the course of human development. The ability to reach and sustain such a balance is as important a human skill as is agricultural knowhow. The relevant point—surely—is to grow enough food, not to grow as much food as is possible. Enough may in future mean: as much as is necessary to feed an area’s population without importation. As fossil fuel energy dwindles over time, its price will inevitably rise and the growing and transportation costs of food will rise proportionally. Poor areas of the world may increasingly be out of luck when droughts, for instance, curtail local supplies.

               Population control is one of a number of measures that is needed. Birth control devices are far lighter, easier and cheaper to transport than grain, meat, fruits and vegetables.

               The other measure will, of course, be the wresting of food production and marketing from corporate hands. But that’s a whole other story.

What time is it?

 West Brook, Gros Morne National Park

 On the set of Random Passage

What struck me most forcefully in reading paleoecologist Curt Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth was his emphasis on our skewed perceptions of time. My example of what he’s talking about is this: if continental drift occurs at an average speed of one centimetre per year, then the final separation of Newfoundland from Labrador took place approximately three million years ago, assuming that the ferry crossing over the Strait of Belle Isle is 30 kilometres at present . . . and increasing by one centimetre per year. (For those of you who don’t think metric very often, a centimetre is the approximate width of a fingernail.)

               It’s little wonder that we can’t feel the earth move beneath us as it does in our imaginations, except when the continental plates grind against each other and earthquakes result.

               Stager's examples relate to the effect of human-activity-driven global warming on, for instance, the inundation of low-lying areas of earth. Florida will gradually disappear, but it will be so slow that people will not have to rush to higher ground. There will be plenty of time—possibly a few centuries—for the population to adapt to the slowly rising waters. The burning question becomes: “If it’s that far away, does it really matter?”

               And, as Hamlet says, “there’s the rub.” Our lives are such a short blip in the story of human life on earth and so fragile that we seldom sense our kinship with people who lived through the last ice age and the people thousands of years from now who will live on an earth shaped—in part—by our activities. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof (Matthew 6:34).” Stager would likely wish that Jesus would take this almost-epicurean aphorism back. When we talk about conservation these days, we hope for a good life for us, our children and grandchildren, and that’s about as far as we seem able or willing to think.

               Three things I can think of this morning prevent us from being responsible parents to future humanity:

1)      Our Politics: those who govern us have trouble thinking beyond the next election. There is little personal reward for a politician who advocates conservation now in the interest of the deep future.

2)      Our religions: a consciousness that assumes the end of everything is near is not likely to concern itself very much with a deep future.

3)      Our ignorance: we need to understand our lives in a bigger context than at present—both in time and space. Reading Stager’s Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth, Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World is about to get a Whole Lot Smaller or The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have helped me gain new perspectives recently.

There may be an even bigger impediment to the awakening of a new vision for the human race, something to do with an overarching awareness of our kinship and an end to racial, ethnic and class differences that hamstring the chances for joint endeavour.

               Therein lies another “rub.” And it's a big one.

              

A Reflection Concerning a New Found Land

It was, for us, a New Found Land although we knew the maps, had seen the pictures and heard regularly of this island that is not-quite-Canada in the news. The rugged beauty of the out ports, the magnificence of Gros Morne National Park, the charming architecture of St. John’s are not exaggerated in the travel brochures.

But like the majority of the planet, you can hardly find a place where the majesty of the created and evolved planet isn’t mitigated by the presence of humans and the things humans make: highways, railroads, cities and towns, docks and ships and salt-box houses clinging to the rocks. For the filming of the CBC mini-series—Random Passage—a cove was found from which no sign of human activity can be seen; such a place is a rarity. What’s unique in Canada about Newfoundland as a province is that every human endeavour there has faced daunting obstacles in the steep, rugged landscape. Quite literally, it means that every structure must cling to the side of a rocky hill, every fish or chunk of coal must be carried uphill and down to reach its market.  

And then, there’s the sea from which Newfoundlanders have traditionally earned their daily bread. A map of the shipwrecks around Cape Bonavista is so cluttered with Xs that they overlap each other. Still, the map doesn’t include the dories smashed against the rocks in storms, their planks scattered on the shore, husbands and fathers and brothers drowned.

For men must work and women must weep

 For there’s little to earn and many to keep

 And the harbour bar be moanin’.

Although written for fishermen off the coasts of Great Britain, the song popularized in Canada by Stan, Nathan and Garnet Rogers summarizes well the agony of out port life on the sea.

               All this complicated further, of course, by the hurricanes that roar up from the Caribbean, blow kisses to Boston and Halifax and vent their nearly-spent fury on the Avalon Peninsula. The remnants of Hurricane Marie blew us off Signal Hill but barely raised an eyebrow among native islanders. The winds that powered the ships were, indeed, fickle and truculent friends.

               So Newfoundlanders are a hardy, friendly, honest lot like everybody says? I’m not going to add to this generalization: I’m sure that kind folk, happy folk, thieves and liars appear in the same proportion in Newfoundland as in Saskatchewan. Furthermore, visitors (tourists) are catered for and pampered because they have—in fact—replaced cod as the staple in much of Newfoundland and should therefore hesitate to judge the smiles and courtesies of their hosts as indicative. I do know that you can pile your firewood along the roadways in Northern Newfoundland without fear of its being stolen, and front doors are seldom locked except in downtown St. John’s. I also know that the off-the-record chats with hosts at the historical sites were highlights of our trip; most seemed relieved to branch off the official discourse into the friendly, dignified stories of the real Newfoundland, its beauty and its warts. Their Newfoundland.

               I took hundreds of photographs, as we tourists tend to do. My favourite is of the young woman who passed by me in St. John’s, walked decisively to the end of a deserted wharf and sat for fifteen minutes gazing pensively out to the harbour mouth. I could say that this photo summarizes the personality of Newfoundland, but for all I know, she was a student from Saskatchewan studying archaeology at Memorial University, as some have done.

               Give me a break; I’m just a tourist!