Spilling blood on the walls of the city

Among my favorite novels is Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War. It follows a long conversation between Alessandro Giuliani, a septuagenarian veteran of World War I, and an earnest yet naïve 17-year-old boy named Nicolò Sambuca.

The novel resonates with me as I reflect upon news of the past few weeks, including the botched execution attempt of Christa Pike, the forthcoming execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, and the murder of three students and a teacher at an Oregon elementary school. Helprin’s narration of 20th-century European atrocities in the novel speaks to our current political, legal, and social pathologies.

As they make a long trek through the Italian countryside in 1964, Giuliani schools the young Sambuca on the history of the Great War and other episodes of ugliness during Giuliani’s lifetime. For the purpose of this column, the overall narrative of the novel is less important than a particular line of dialogue between the two main characters, which echoes in today’s headlines.

Sambuca identified himself as a Communist, even though he had no idea what that meant, other than that it was anti-establishment, cutting against the grain of his parents and other elders. This purposeless thirst for rebellion reminded Giuliani of the first time, as a young man, that he read the Manifesto of Futurism by the Italian futurist—and eventual fascist—Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

History, Giuliani suggests, “is the steady alteration of the dark and the light,” in which “people become resigned and pessimistic.” And “when the fields are left open, in rush the lunatics and idiots…. When greater forces are immobilized, the splinter factions run riot.” Marinetti, Giuliani continues, was one such madman, passages of whose manifesto he could still remember some 55 years later. “‘We sing the love of danger. Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry…. We are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist,’” Giuliani recounts from memory. “‘There is no beauty now save struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war,’” he concludes his recital of Marinetti’s manifesto.

While the rhetoric of the manifesto may have been overwrought, Giuliani suggests, it was not without effect. Because, “[w]hen people write violent absurdities on the walls of a city, the city becomes violent and absurd.”

We live in a time of violent absurdities no less than those of which Helprin writes through the voice of Alessandro Giuliani. And not just violent, but bloody ones as well. For a generation or more, we have been spilling blood on the walls of the city. And, hence, the city has become bloody. This is not merely measured by the events cited above, but by the bloody legacy of a number of precursors to our current predicament.

For example, the most vocal opponents of “fascism” (defined as anything contemporary leftist secularism doesn’t like) utilize fascistic rhetoric and tactics from the 1940s German playbook. And they have sown their seed in the open fields that have been abandoned by the moderate left. Whether we call them “antifa,” “democratic socialists,” or “Islamists,” the American left is characterized by “aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.” From “free Luigi,” to images of bloody swords captioned by “trans rights are human rights,” for the contemporary left, “there is no beauty now save struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war.”

But the fields have been left open not merely by the political left. On the right of the American spectrum, the “splinter factions run riot” in those open fields as enthusiastically as on the left. While President Trump caved to critics of the ghoulish proposal to livestream Nadal Hasan’s execution, it was proposed by his own Secretary of War (aka, Secretary of Defense), and cheered by prominent “influencers” on the right. A very prominent Catholic podcaster suggested dragging Christa Pike to the woods and bashing in her skull with a stone (reflecting the means by which Pike murdered her victim). And from the right, the solution to every school shooting is not fewer guns, but more. And regardless of whether they want it livestreamed or not, a significant majority on the right are cheering for Hasan’s and Pike’s execution.

This is not the place to rehearse the contention among Catholics about the history of capital punishment or the disputes about the 2018 revision of section 2267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (I commend this lively and respectful written debate between and among Ed Feser, John Finnis, and E. Christian Brugger, as well as the exchange between Feser and Robert Fastiggi in the CWR archives.) But a particular justification for capital punishment should not be invoked even by its defenders because, among other things, it spills more blood on the walls of the city.

A simplistic but common defense of capital punishment is that it allegedly has a deterrent effect on other would-be murderers and violent criminals. Even aside from the highly dubious empirical assertion, this evinces an immoral defense of capital punishment, even if it can be justified on other grounds. To inflict a certain kind of punishment on person A for the purpose of trying to persuade some hypothetical person B from committing a like crime is to reduce A to nothing more than a means to some speculative future action. This cuts against the very grain of any notion of justice.

In 1949, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay titled “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” in The Twentieth Century: An Australian Quarterly Review (and republished here). While the concern of the article is broader than the problem of punishment as deterrence, Lewis’s discussion of deterrence is sharp, concise, and right. “When you punish a man in terrorem,” Lewis contends, and “make of him an ‘example’ to others, you are admittedly using him as a means to an end; someone else’s end.” (To be fair, Lewis’s criticism is aimed at justifying punishment as a deterrent per se. He does not deny the theoretical unintended deterrent effect of rendering punishment against the evildoer. Rather, he condemns deterrence as a telos of taking the property, liberty, or life of another.)

Lewis argues that if the purpose of punishment, whether by execution or otherwise, is to deter some future crime, why limit the practice to an actual criminal? “When a victim is urgently needed for exemplary purposes, and a guilty victim cannot be found, all the purposes of deterrence will be equally served by the punishment … of an innocent victim.” As noted above, it is highly unlikely that capital punishment—whether publicly broadcast or not—has any deterrent effect on violent crime. But even if it did, deterrence as a justification is nothing more than spilling more blood on the walls of the city and, thus, making the city ever more bloody.

When we Catholics invoke the language of contemporary exemplars of Alessandro Giuliani’s “lunatics and idiots,” the blood is not only on the walls of the city, but on our hands as well.