17 August 2015 3:37 PM

Why Do People Get So Worked Up About the Death Penalty?

Peter Hitchens

A glancing reference to the death penalty received more responses than almost anything else I wrote in my MoS column on Sunday. Here and on Twitter people were astonishingly anxious to disagree with me, to trundle out ancient arguments on the subject that have many times been exploded here for anyone who was really interested. Most especially I have disposed of the deeply tedious evasion about unintentionally killing an innocent person, which (as any thoughtful person knows) is not in reality considered an obstacle to any other policy whose general effects are considered good.

Why is it that one’s opinion on the execution of a few heinous murderers has become (more or less) the supreme test in our society for who is and who is not a civilised person? There is not the faintest possibility of the death penalty being reintroduced in this country unless and until it becomes a left-wing despotism (it is in such polities that execution is most widely used as a penalty in the modern world – Cuba until recently, the Chinese People’s Republic and Vietnam for example, and of course the USSR ).

It is simply not a live issue in our politics and is most unlikely to become one. As I freely admit the conditions under which I would find it acceptable no longer exist in this country, especially proper independent juries whose verdicts must be unanimous.

I only state my support for it because I refuse to pretend that I accept the feeble, unreasoning, ill-informed and emotive arguments deployed against it, and because (as a former abolitionist) I changed my mind through the study of facts and the exercise of logic. It would be an act of self-betrayal and cowardice to keep my position secret just because it was generally despised. The only parallel is abortion, but the fury on that subject has subsided since the most fanatical  pro-abortionists (young men terrified they might actually have to take responsibility for getting a girl pregnant) realised that the chances of this happening are now virtually nil. The ritual choruses of women claiming that killing unborn babies is a human right don’t ever have quite the same urgency as the adolescent male’s fear of the nappy, the mother-in-law and the shotgun wedding, now vanished.

Asked a little while ago why I described myself as ‘The Hated Peter Hitchens’ on Twitter I explained that this was because it is in fact the case that quite a lot of left-wing persons (who often have the sketchiest idea of who I am or what I think) do regard me as a hate-figure. Asked to explain why this might be, I concluded that it was because I do not act or speak as if I were ashamed of being a moral or social conservative.

I am not apologetic about holding these views, nor am I embarrassed. I regard myself as having a coherent, defensible moral position. I am also quite familiar with the techniques of mockery and raillery used by the left against their opponents, and am happy to use them (rather more fairly and in a more measured fashion) against the Left. Why shouldn’t I?   If I did nothing else but act, speak and think as if I believed what I do believe, and wasn’t ashamed of it, my very existence would still be ‘offensive’ to my critics. I suspect some of them (who say this on Twitter from time to time) genuinely wish I was dead. 

For the modern Left is not just about holding left-wing opinions and propagating them in the hope of achieving a socialist society. It is a sort of secular state of grace, in which the person who adopts the full set of ‘correct’ opinions regards himself or herself as morally good, simply by the act of embracing those opinions. It is, I think, a caricature of the Evangelical Protestant belief in Salvation Through Grace Alone, about which I have always had some doubts (well expressed in the General Epistle of St James, especially the Second Chapter, which I once heard read at a memorial service, and which struck me, that day,  so hard in the heart that I could barely think about anything else for some time afterwards). In fact, it is the Left-Wing attitude of ‘Salvation by Correctness Alone’ which has made me wonder all the more about it. But I digress.

There’s another religious parallel to this, which is the status known as ‘Dhimmitude’ under which Christians and Jews were in the past permitted to live in Islamic countries.  Though much relieved by the Ottomans, under pressure from Western Christian empires, the rules of the ‘Pact of Umar’ persisted in the Muslim world for many centuries  

I won’t go into the full details of its past enforcement, of dress codes, doorway height, permitted mounts, inferior legal status, the carrying of weapons or the exaction of special and punitive taxes, sometimes accompanied by a ritual public slap in the face. Apart from anything else it varied a great deal from place to place, and many of its victims have left scanty records.

Perhaps the most striking restrictions enjoined by this form of tolerance were bans on the repair of existing churches or the building of new ones, or on making noise during funerals. I believe that bells were also removed from churches, and church towers pulled down, to avoid any kind of challenge, either to the call to prayer from the muezzin or to the height and magnificence of the mosque. 

Under these conditions, forbidden to convert or to appeal for help from co-religionists abroad, the Christians of the region were permitted to remain in humble existence, quietly and apologetically practising their rites and ceremonies in crumbling buildings. This was, as anyone with an imagination can work out, a very effective way of seeing to it that the non-Muslim monotheisms shrank and shrivelled under Islamic rule. No wonder few people now realise that Christianity predated Islam in the Middle East , and was once dominant there. 

The parallel is of course not at all complete or exact, and I would rather by far be a moral and social conservative in modern Britain than be a Christian living in the mediaeval Levant or Maghreb under the Pact of Umar. 

But there’s still an interesting similarity. Both systems claim to be tolerant, and (to the extent that they do not actually employ violent persecution) they are tolerant.   But both in practice require an acceptance by the dethroned belief system that it acts at all times as a defeated and humbled thing, not worthy of respect. 

Thus it becomes harder and harder simply to express certain opinions, once universal, such as favouring lifelong marriage over divorce, serial marriage or cohabitation, or (come to that) Christianity over any other religion, or academic selection, or the freedom of parents to exercise authority over children, or national independence, or secure borders, or the blazingly obvious wrongness of abortion on demand.   

But the death penalty is by far the greatest of these. And I think the reason for this is simple. It is the keystone of the arch of an former legal and moral system, which regarded people as wholly responsible for their own actions. 

The stated purpose of the pre-1914 Prisons Commission, for instance, was ‘the due punishment of responsible persons’. Nobody would dare say that now. Prisons hesitate to punish at all, and the punishment is said to consist solely in the deprivation of liberty, which is why the prisons, being chaotic much of the time, are in many cases far more terrifying than they were when they believed in punishment.  Responsibility has been abolished. And a lot of people are very glad, and hope it will stay that way. Even the faintest hint that it might return disturbs and unsettles them.