A Fine Line
In response to my recent post about the fact that no one has a right to be a vigilante, a number of people have argued that I’ve conflated vigilantism and self-defense. The most prominent of these is David French in the National Review:
Of course we give up the right to settle our own grievances, but we don’t give up the right to protect ourselves and our families before the police can arrive. Defending oneself from a home intruder or mugger is not the same thing as exercising a “right to punish criminal behavior.” You are not being punitive; you are being protective.
Thus, most people agree with me that vigilantism isn’t a natural right, but continue to disagree about self-defense. This simply isn’t a distinction that Locke makes in the Second Treatise and to make that distinction today so we can protect a supposed right to self-defense while stopping short of endorsing vigilantism is to misread Locke.
While there might very well be a difference in one’s mind when one prepares to shoot someone to protect oneself rather than to punish the other, the difference is negligible from a Lockean standpoint: Both are examples of people acting as judge, jury, and executioner. The gun owner, rather than a dispassionate third party, is the only person making the determination about life and death for another person.
There might be times when this is an unavoiadable scenario — and so self-defense is preserved as a possible legal defense for homicide — but one of the main reasons human beings chose civil society over the state of nature is to minimize these incidents.
On a less theoretical note, I think it’s important to note that there’s a very fine line between self-defense and vigilantism, as some gun owners today understand themselves to have the legal right to take the law into their own hands whenever they feel themselves to be threatened … whether at home or in public.
The relatively recent proliferation of “Stand Your Ground” laws — since 2005, about half of the states have passed such laws — has moved our understanding of self-defense from the home, where it was traditionally understood that one could defend oneself, to the public sphere, where one previously had a duty to retreat first and respond with violence second. And it has seemingly increased homicide rates in those states.
Perhaps the best example — and one that I think we’re not talking about nearly enough right now — is that of George Zimmerman and Travyon Martin.
It seems that a bunch of people either somehow find it amusing to take pictures of themselves posing as a deceased Trayvon Martin or else they just don’t understand the difference between getting good attention and bad attention for your actions.
As my friend who blogs over at The Noob Yorker rightly points out:
When you mock and belittle the death of Trayvon, you reinforce the racism that underpins our social institutions and in the process produce more events akin those in Florida.
I understand that everyone wants to make the next hot meme and get the internet to pay attention to them for a minute. But, seriously, stop behaving this way. It is awful.
This clip, excerpted from a much longer Bloggingheads diavlog with Robert Wright and Ann Althouse, is about three weeks old. I didn’t watch or listen to it when it first came out because I had the sense that Althouse’s take on the Trayvon Martin shooting would really bother me.
Three weeks later, I finally listened to the diavlog in its entirety. And, lo and behold, I was right about how I’d feel.
I’ll discuss my thoughts in what follows, but I should note first that the clip is only ten minutes long; I hope you’ll listen for yourself.
Althouse begins by opposing the entire idea of latching onto an individual case instead of looking at all of the evidence about violence, gun violence, race, and so on. Her claim is that appeals to emotion by focusing on one case has no place in a democracy because it dampens down the prospect for rational discourse about important issues.
From there, she proceeds as follows: She doesn’t understand Wright’s use of emotive language; she wants to know why the national discourse became all about this case rather than all of the others; she alleges that liberals are exploiting Martin’s death; she worries about due process for Zimmerman and bemoans vigilantes in pursuit of the original vigilante; she doesn’t understand why it matters that Zimmerman was carrying a gun and ultimately shot Martin with it; and she moves the remainder of the conversation to a discussion of whether Zimmerman was originally arrested or just detained and to an argument about the benefit of carrying guns.
Ultimately, Althouse does her level best not to actually talk about the Trayvon Martin killing. In no small part, that’s because she has no response at all to Wright’s argument that there’s a problem for society if a person has a concealed weapon, follows someone who hasn’t done anything wrong, ends up killing him, and avoids some sort of punishment. All she can manage is a claim that Wright’s position isn’t fine-grained enough and that there’s more texture that he hasn’t stated. “We should be more cool-headed,” she says at the very end of this clip.
I’d say there’s a big difference between jumping to conclusions about a case and being emotive about it. Wright doesn’t jump to conclusions and the conclusions he reaches here seem, to me at least, to be pretty cool-headed. What he fails to do, I think, is to really push back against Althouse, to ask her directly how she would respond to his central claim about what the shooting and its aftermath say about our society. She intimates that she actually agrees with his claim, but nothing in the rest of the diavlog demonstrates any agreement.
What’s more, Wright could have said a great deal more to dispute Althouse’s opposition to using individual cases to draw attention to a broader societal problem. For Althouse, this is an appeal to emotion that calls to her mind a totalitarian state. But, for me, the Martin case garnered so much attention because it laid bare the problem of the Stand Your Ground law and the problem of racism that persists (sometimes overtly and sometimes under the surface) in this country. Indeed, Althouse even gets away with talking about carrying guns for protection against thugs in her diversionary discussion of the virtues of concealed weapons. But this is precisely the sort of language — about dangerous thugs (who, we can be sure, are young black men) — that led Zimmerman to follow Martin, that led Geraldo Rivera to speak out against the scourge of the hooded sweatshirt, and that many people used to describe Martin in an attempt to allege that Zimmerman had some reason to follow him.
This is language that needs to be continuously challenged.
Spike Lee Tweets
The “mistake” is outlined in this March 27, 2012 piece from The Smoking Gun:
With Twitter and Facebook continuing to explode with posts purporting to contain the address of George Zimmerman, property records and interviews reveal that the home is actually the longtime residence of a married Florida couple, both in their 70s, who have no connection to the man who killed Trayvon Martin and are now living in fear due to erroneous reports about their connection to the shooter.
The mass dissemination of the address on Edgewater Circle in Sanford—the Florida city where Martin was shot to death last month—took flight last Friday when director Spike Lee retweeted a tweet containing Zimmerman’s purported address to his 240,000 followers.
[…]
The residence on Edgewater Circle is actually the home of David McClain, 72, and his wife Elaine, 70. The McClains, both of whom work for the Seminole County school system, have lived in the 1310-square-foot lakefront home for about a decade, records show.
I wrote this for the new Terrible Apologies blog this morning and thought I’d cross-post it here too because it’s a great example of a bad apology (and not only because an apology in 140 characters or fewer seems weak in and of itself):
The thing is, Lee was just wrong to retweet the address. Even if it had been the correct address, it’s still an incredibly irresponsible thing to do because it seems to be encouraring people to take the law into their own hands.
The word “mistake” implies that the retweet was an accident, like he hit the button unintentionally … in which case it probably wouldn’t have taken so long to apologize, since apologizing for having done something accidentally is relatively easy. It’s much more difficult to say that the emotions he felt about the Trayvon Martin shooting briefly led him to encourage people to harass George Zimmerman at his home.
![According to a report yesterday on WFTV, the FBI may charge George Zimmerman with a hate crime:
Zimmerman admitted to killing Martin in February during a confrontation. However, he claims the shooting was in self-defense. He’s facing a second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But if Zimmerman is charged and found guilty of a federal hate crime involving murder, he could face the death penalty.
When the “Justice for Trayvon Martin” Facebook page reported this news, in two separate posts, the excitement was palpable. At the time I sat down to write this, last night, their initial post that linked to the news story was shared 270 times, drew 1,455 Likes, and was commented upon 306 times. The second post, with its shares, Likes, and comments, is screencaptured above.
The Tumblr community reacted as well, with one post linking to the story drawing nearly 1,500 Likes and Reblogs as of this writing.
The reaction from those who have commented is largely supportive of killing George Zimmerman and, more often than not, the language that’s employed is positively dripping with brutality.
[[MORE]]
Here are some responses from Tumblr to the question of whether another death is really the answer:
First:
F*%k you.
Because yes. It is the answer.
Then this one:
This isn’t the f*%king 40s anymore. Anyone who kills a black child should have the full brunt of the law smashed down on their d&$k
And this:
My humanity does not diminish for my wanting of this man’s death. All I want is justice. In this case, an eye for an eye is not enough. I need limb for limb and blood for blood. Because this is something bigger than Trayvon. While this is about getting him his justice, there are so many others who have never, and will never, get theirs. Make an example of Zimmerman. Show these white supremacist douchef*%ks that if you kill ours, you’ll get yours, and it will not be by vigilante justice but by the very system you uphold, that always protects you. It will come for you, too, because you should no longer hide behind your privilege and racism. So, no, I do not care if it seems callous that I wish death on a person. Zimmerman did what a lot of you apologists would do, and he deserves proper punishment. Time will not change him. He had time. He chose to hide. He chose to play the victim. He chose to play all the angles to pain his victim as the antagonist. I have no care in this world for this mans health, happiness, sanity, or redemption. Let the pits of Hell swallow him whole.
This one:
I don’t necessaily wish Zimmerman the death penalty, but I couldn’t bat an eyelash if that’s where his fate lead. What a disgusting, vile stain on the lineage on mankind. This man stalks a child, lies about the events that ensued later that night, runs away, cutting off all contact from his family and lawyers, capitalizes off of his heinous crime and has the audacity to look a mother in the eyes and say “I’m sorry about the loss of your child”, a loss .. (as if Trayvon is an expendable commodity, which is probably what he thought when he killed him), instead of “I’m sorry I killed your child”. I can’t even begin to describe to sheer horror that runs through my soul when I think there are people that could be that hateful. How can I feel sympathy for such a monster? Take him away, alleviate the world of such a horrid individual.
Here’s another:
kill him! kill the piece of s^$t, he doesn’t deserve to live.
And this one:
i’d save the state some money and do it for them
And this:
I’m pretty much an eye for an eye type of person but I don’t care what happens to him. You can kill him or throw him to the wolves doesn’t really matter
Or this:
f&#k yes. off with his head and put that b#%ch on stake to make an example of him. make him the sacrifice! just like he did Trayvon, and then pray the devil back to hell.
And, of course, this:
yep he doesn’t get to breathe, he doesn’t get to live, unless your alternative is a life time of actual toruture and not throwing his ass in a cell, unless you plan on starving him to death, or trying to get him the closest he can to dying by doing some insanely cruel punishment, then my answer stands the mothaf%#ka should die.
This is all disturbing enough to warrant comment. But it gets really interesting when a few people step in and voice opposition to the carnival of vengeance proposed by people who claim they want justice. Anyone who opposes the idea that Zimmerman is a monster who needs to be tortured and/or killed is immediately accused of derailing the conversation or of being a racist who supports Zimmerman.
But this is just a way of shutting out ideas that might be challenging or difficult.
I’ve devoted a lot of time on this blog to the argument that all of our triumphalism about justice isn’t much more than a very thin veneer covering our real feelings about getting our revenge on someone who hurt us. This, then, is one more example in a long line.
If there’s one thing on which most Americans seem to agree, it’s that a celebration is in order when people are killed. Of course, it’s not just any killing that we like; it’s executions. In the past year, in person, in print, and online, we have come together to publicly rejoice at the deaths of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Muammar Gaddafi. But we’re not only interested in the executions of terrorists and tyrants overseas; a crowd also vigorously cheered the hundreds of executions over which Rick Perry has presided in Texas. There’s just something about death that makes us stand up and applaud … or worse, as those who crave George Zimmerman’s blood helpfully highlight.
There is, in short, something distinct and distictly unpleasant about the way in which Americans think about justice.
When I think about justice, I tend to reflect back on something Socrates said in Plato’s Republic:
[I]f someone asserts that it’s just to give what is owed to each man—and he understands by this that harm is owed to enemies by the just man and help to friends—the man who said it was not wise. For he wasn’t telling the truth. For it has become apparent to us that it is never just to harm anyone (335e).
I recognize that this makes me somewhat unusual, both because I turn to a text written thousands of years ago when I think about contemporary issues and because the vast majority of people seem to think exactly the opposite about justice. For most people, justice involves some sort of gut feeling rather than the sort of reasoned argument that Socrates uses to arrive at his position. It tends to involve someone getting what he deserves and so, when it comes to George Zimmerman, this means exacting vengeance. Thus, when Americans see someone getting what he deserves, being paid back in kind for the harm he has done, they rejoice.
But, of course, I think it’s a mistake to simply equate justice with vengeance, both because I have yet to hear a persuasive argument against Socrates’ claim and because vengeance elevates the worst in us at the expense of what is best.
Instead, I am reminded of Portia’s speech to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d, / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest; / It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: / ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes / The throned monarch better than his crown; / His sceptre shows the force of temporal power [….] It is an attribute to God himself; / And earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice (IV.1).
Even though Shylock believes that harming his enemy accords with both justice and his own best interest, Portia argues that any understanding of justice that is bereft of mercy or compassion can never, ultimately, be in one’s best interest:
Though justice be thy plea, consider this, / That, in the course of justice, none of us / Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy (IV.1).
At bottom, then, it’s the distinct lack of compassion that’s bothering me when I see our increasingly ghoulish displays of glee at the prospect of someone’s death (even when that person has done something terrible). They highlight either an inability or an unwillingness to see the humanity in others and, consequently, yield a diminution of our own humanity. It would be easier for us if there were evil people in the world, rather than normal people who do terrible things. But this is a fiction, one that keeps us clinging to our occasional use of the death penalty despite the fact that it doesn’t accomplish much, that it’s bad public policy, and that it brutalizes us as a society.
When people ran into the streets and cheered Osama bin Laden’s death as if their hometown team had won the World Series, I wrote that the singing and flag-waving demeaned us by highlighting the extent to which the culture of vengeance pervades our society. When a crowd of people cheered about the deaths of more than two hundred of their fellow citizens, I wrote that the justice they were cheering could only be the kind that was done to someone else: “Never to them, never to anyone they care about or have even met.”
And now, when so many people have prematurely tried, convicted, and sentenced George Zimmerman to death with such joy, I’m reminded once again how far removed we are from a time when we might conceive of justice as more than simply the paying back of violence with violence. When we gloat over the dead bodies we’ve managed to pile up — regardless of the reason that led to those deaths — we’re really celebrating the basest part of our nature. As Socrates reminds us:
Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was going up from the Piraeus under the outside of the North Wall when he noticed corpses lying by the public executioner. He desired to look, but at the same time he was disgusted and made himself turn away; and for a while he struggled and covered his face. But finally, overpowered by the desire, he opened his eyes wide, ran toward the corpses and said: “Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight” (439e-440a).
The problem for Americans today, of course, is that we’re not even having this struggle with ourselves. We immediately lamented the fact that we weren’t given any pictures of bin Laden’s body, we passed around pictures of Gaddafi’s corpse like they were actually pictures from a dinner party, and we positively thrill at the prospect of tearing Zimmerman limb from limb for his crimes.
Personally, I’d like to imagine what our country might look like if it was populated by a citizenry that approached the deaths of others with a certain solemnity rather than one that celebrates the corpses produced by our government, to paraphrase Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.
Personally, I’d like to see Americans reflecting on the idea of justice and the proper role of compassion, on why corpses are the only possible validation for so many of us, on what a society that applauds a body count is ultimately missing, on the prejudices and privilege that allow us to cheer and sing when others die … but we’re so very far away from doing any of those things right now because, despite all the killing that’s happening all around us and in our names, our bloodlust somehow still hasn’t been sated.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m43bhuO9aF1qzy2emo1_500.png)
