The human concept of Sin has had its uses no doubt; and our special
invention of a thing called Punishment has also served a purpose.
Social evolution has worked in many ways wastefully, and with
unnecessary pain, but it compares very favorably with natural evolution.
As we grow wiser; as our social consciousness develops, we are beginning
to improve on nature in more ways than one; a part of the same great
process, but of a more highly sublimated sort.
Nature shows a world of varied and changing environment. Into this comes
Life--flushing and spreading in every direction. A pretty hard time Life
has of it. In the first place it is dog eat dog in every direction; the
joy of the hunter and the most unjoyous fear of the hunted.
But quite outside of this essential danger, the environment waits, grim
and unappeasable, and continuously destroys the innocent myriads who
fail to meet the one requirement of life--Adaptation. So we must not be
too severe in self-condemnation when we see how foolish, cruel, crazily
wasteful, is our attitude toward crime and punishment.
We become socially conscious largely through pain, and as we begin to
see how much of the pain is wholly of our own causing we are overcome
with shame. But the right way for society to face its past is the same
as for the individual; to see where it was wrong and stop it--but to
waste no time and no emotion over past misdeeds.
What is our present state as to crime? It is pretty bad. Some say it is
worse than it used to be; others that it is better. At any rate it is
bad enough, and a disgrace to our civilization. We have murderers by
the thousand and thieves by the million, of all kinds and sizes; we have
what we tenderly call "immorality," from the "errors of youth" to the
sodden grossness of old age; married, single, and mixed. We have all the
old kinds of wickedness and a lot of new ones, until one marvels at the
purity and power of human nature, that it should carry so much disease
and still grow on to higher things.
Also we have punishment still with us; private and public; applied like
a rabbit's foot, with as little regard to its efficacy. Does a child
offend? Punish it! Does a woman offend? Punish her! Does a man offend?
Punish him! Does a group offend? Punish them!
"What for?" some one suddenly asks.
"To make them stop doing it!"
"But they have done it!"
"To make them not do it again, then."
"But they do do it again--and worse."
"To prevent other people's doing it, then."
"But it does not prevent them--the crime keeps on. What good is your
punishment?"
What indeed!
What is the application of punishment to crime? Its base, its
prehistoric base, is simple retaliation; and this is by no means wholly
male, let us freely admit. The instinct of resistance, of opposition, of
retaliation, lies deeper than life itself. Its underlying law is the law
of physics--action and reaction are equal. Life's expression of this
law is perfectly natural, but not always profitable. Hit your hand on a
stone wall, and the stone wall hits your hand. Very good; you learn that
stone walls are hard, and govern yourself accordingly.
Conscious young humanity observed and philosophized, congratulating
itself on its discernment. "A man hits me--I hit the man a little
harder--then he won't do it again." Unfortunately he did do it again--a
little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and
reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal
punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it
tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious
cities to the ground.
Therefore all crime ceased, of course? No? But crime was mitigated,
surely! Perhaps. This we have proven at last; that crime does not
decrease in proportion to the severest punishment. Little by little we
have ceased to raze the cities, to wipe out the families, to cut off the
ears, to torture; and our imprisonment is changing from slow death and
insanity to a form of attempted improvement.
But punishment as a principle remains in good standing, and is still the
main reliance where it does the most harm--in the rearing of children.
"Spare the rod and spoil the child" remains in belief, unmodified by the
millions of children spoiled by the unspared rod.
The breeders of racehorses have learned better, but not the breeders of
children. Our trouble is simply the lack of intelligence. We face the
babyish error and the hideous crime in exactly the same attitude.
"This person has done something offensive."
Yes?--and one waits eagerly for the first question of the rational
mind--but does not hear it. One only hears "Punish him!"
What is the first question of the rational mind?
"Why?"
Human beings are not first causes. They do not evolve conduct out of
nothing. The child does this, the man does that, _because_ of something;
because of many things. If we do not like the way people behave, and
wish them to behave better, we should, if we are rational beings, study
the conditions that produce the conduct.
The connection between our archaic system of punishment and our
androcentric culture is two-fold. The impulse of resistance, while, as
we have seen, of the deepest natural origin, is expressed more strongly
in the male than in the female. The tendency to hit back and hit harder
has been fostered in him by sex-combat till it has become of great
intensity. The habit of authority too, as old as our history; and
the cumulative weight of all the religions and systems of law and
government, have furthermore built up and intensified the spirit of
retaliation and vengeance.
They have even deified this concept, in ancient religions, crediting to
God the evil passions of men. As the small boy recited; "Vengeance. A
mean desire to get even with your enemies: 'Vengeance is mine saith the
Lord'--'I will repay.'"
The Christian religion teaches better things; better than its expositors
and upholders have ever understood--much less practised.
The teaching of "Love your enemies, do good unto them that hate you, and
serve them that despitefully use you and persecute you," has too
often resulted, when practised at all, in a sentimental negation; a
pathetically useless attitude of non-resistance. You might as well base
a religion on a feather pillow!
The advice given was active; direct; concrete. "_Love!_" Love is not
non-resistance. "Do good!" Doing good is not non-resistance. "Serve!"
Service is not non-resistance.
Again we have an overwhelming proof of the far-reaching effects of
our androcentric culture. Consider it once more. Here is one by nature
combative and desirous, and not by nature intended to monopolize the
management of his species. He assumes to be not only the leader, but the
whole thing--to be humanity itself, and to see in woman as Grant Allen
so clearly put it "Not only not the race; she is not even half the race,
but a subspecies, told off for purposes of reproduction merely."
Under this monstrous assumption, his sex-attributes wholly identified
with his human attributes, and overshadowing them, he has imprinted on
every human institution the tastes and tendencies of the male. As a male
he fought, as a male human being he fought more, and deified fighting;
and in a culture based on desire and combat, loud with strident
self-expression, there could be but slow acceptance of the more human
methods urged by Christianity. "It is a religion for slaves and women!"
said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same
thing.) "It is a religion for slaves and women" says the advocate of the
Superman.
Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food
and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the
temples, the aqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the
tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and
beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite
of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real
industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and
the women.
A religion which had attractions for the real human type is not
therefore to be utterly despised by the male.
In modern history we may watch with increasing ease the slow, sure
progress of our growing humanness beneath the weakening shell of an
all-male dominance. And in this field of what begins in the nurse as
"discipline," and ends on the scaffold as "punishment," we can clearly
see that blessed change.
What is the natural, the human attribute? What does this "Love," and
"Do good," and "Serve" mean? In the blundering old church, still
androcentric, there was a great to-do to carry out this doctrine, in
elaborate symbolism. A set of beggars and cripples, gathered for the
occasion, was exhibited, and kings and cardinals went solemnly through
the motions of serving them. As the English schoolboy phrased it,
"Thomas Becket washed the feet of leopards."
Service and love and doing good must always remain side issues in a male
world. Service and love and doing good are the spirit of motherhood, and
the essence of human life.
Human life is service, and is not combat. There you have the nature of
the change now upon us.
What has the male mind made of Christianity?
Desire--to save one's own soul. Combat--with the Devil.
Self-expression--the whole gorgeous outpouring of pageant and display,
from the jewels of the high priest's breastplate to the choir of
mutilated men to praise a male Deity no woman may so serve.
What kind of mind can imagine a kind of god who would like a eunuch
better than a woman?
For woman they made at last a place--the usual place--of renunciation,
sacrifice and service, the Sisters of Mercy and their kind; and in
that loving service the woman soul has been content, not yearning for
cardinal's cape or bishop's mitre.
All this is changing--changing fast. Everywhere the churches are
broadening out into more service, and the service broadening out beyond
a little group of widows and fatherless, of sick and in prison, to
embrace its true field--all human life. In this new attitude, how shall
we face the problems of crime?
Thus: "It is painfully apparent that a certain percentage of our people
do not function properly. They perform antisocial acts. Why? What is the
matter with them?"
Then the heart and mind of society is applied to the question, and
certain results are soon reached; others slowly worked toward.
First result. Some persons are so morally diseased that they must have
hospital treatment. The world's last prison will be simply a hospital
for moral incurables. They must by no means reproduce their kind,--that
can be attended to at once. Some are morally diseased, but may be cured,
and the best powers of society will be used to cure them. Some are only
morally diseased because of the conditions in which they are born and
reared, and here society can save millions at once.
An intelligent society will no more neglect its children than an
intelligent mother will neglect her children; and will see as clearly
that ill-fed, ill-dressed, ill-taught and vilely associated little ones
must grow up gravely injured.
As a matter of fact we make our crop of criminals, just as we make our
idiots, blind, crippled, and generally defective. Everyone is a baby
first, and a baby is not a criminal, unless we make it so. It never
would be,--in right conditions. Sometimes a pervert is born, as
sometimes a two-headed calf is born, but they are not common.
The older, simpler forms of crime we may prevent with case and despatch,
but how of the new ones?--big, terrible, far-reaching, wide-spread
crimes, for which we have as yet no names; and before which our old
system of anti-personal punishment falls helpless? What of the crimes
of poisoning a community with bad food; of defiling the water; of
blackening the air; of stealing whole forests? What of the crimes of
working little children; of building and renting tenements that produce
crime and physical disease as well? What of the crime of living on the
wages of fallen women--of hiring men to ruin innocent young girls; of
holding them enslaved and selling them for profit? (These things are
only "misdemeanors" in a man-made world!)
And what about a crime like this; to use the public press to lie to
the public for private ends? No name yet for this crime; much less a
penalty.
And this: To bring worse than leprosy to an innocent clean wife who
loves and trusts you?
Or this: To knowingly plant poison in an unborn child?
No names, for these; no "penalties"; no conceivable penalty that could
touch them.
The whole punishment system falls to the ground before the huge mass of
evil that confronts us. If we saw a procession of air ships flying
over a city and dropping bombs, should we rush madly off after each
one crying, "Catch him! Punish him!" or should we try to stop the
procession?
The time is coming when the very word "crime" will be disused, except in
poems and orations; and "punishment," the word and deed, be obliterated.
We are beginning to learn a little of the nature of humanity its
goodness, its beauty, its lovingness; and to see that even its stupidity
is only due to our foolish old methods of education.
It is not new power, new light, new hope that we need, but _to
understand what ails us._
We know enough now, we care enough now, we are strong enough now, to
make the whole world a thousand fold better in a generation; but we are
shackled, chained, blinded, by old false notions. The ideas of the past,
the sentiments of the past, the attitude and prejudices of the past, are
in our way; and among them none more universally mischievous than this
great body of ideas and sentiments, prejudices and habits, which make up
the offensive network of the androcentric culture.