In this blog post, I’m
just going to share my thoughts on a couple of parts from the book.
Julian Castle, an American sugar millionaire…had, at the age of forty, followed the example of Dr. Albert Schweitzer by founding a free hospital in a jungle, by devoting his life to miserable folk of another race. Castle’s hospital was called the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle...When I flew to San Lorenzo, Julian Castle was sixty years old. He had been absolutely unselfish for twenty years. In his selfish days he had been as familiar to tabloid readers as Tommy Manville, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Barbara Hutton. His fame had rested on lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion. (p.84)
At first, I had thought
it was entirely superficial to describe Julian Castle as “absolutely unselfish
for twenty years”. Like most would, I assumed that the true Julian Castle consisted
of the lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion that
characterized the first forty years of his life. But is a person’s true
identity wholly defined by their external actions or inner feelings? Their past
or their present? If Adolf Hitler had waken up one day many years after WWII
and realized the enormity of what he had done, and essentially viewed himself,
his actions, and the world around him with the same perspective as any one of
us would, would he be a terrible person at that moment? There is no doubt that
he was a terrible person who had
committed unforgivable crimes in the past, but I would argue that his new self,
which would recoil from the thought of even killing one Jew, can be
legitimately considered to be a good person. Of course, the only problem in our
society is the difficulty of assessing whether one’s supposed turnaround is
genuine or not.
Vonnegut also makes
several comments on crime and punishment:
“You know what the punishment is for stealing something?”
“Nope.”
“The hook,” he said. “No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It’s the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it’s the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world.”
“What is the hook?”
“They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who’s dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker.”
“Good God!” (p.93)
Overarching all criminal punishments are four philosophical
and moral justifications that had been established early in the history of
criminal law. These are retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and
deterrence. Retribution is perhaps the most rudimentary justification for
crime, emphasizing that all criminal actions should be punished. However, a
philosophy known as lex talionis, or
“an eye for an eye”, also states that the severity of a crime should correspond
directly to the severity of punishment. The death penalty is the most severe
punishment in a legal institution, is only reserved for the worst crimes.
Perhaps it’s a little over the top, but what if the harshest
punishments were doled out for ALL crimes? From a purely philosophical perspective,
I think that this would be an extremely effective way to deal with crime. I’m
not trying to say that we must kill little kids for stealing candy bars. My
point is that instead of emphasizing that you absolutely cannot commit certain
crimes, while other crimes are merely frowned upon, we should emphasize a zero
tolerance on any crime. If makes sense to say that killing someone is
absolutely horrible, while taking a candy bar isn’t as serious, but the whole
idea is that all crime should be avoided anyway, major or minor. There’s no
such thing as “legitimate crime”. If the crime is justified, then it’s not
really a crime. If a child accidently steals something without knowing it’s
wrong, then it’s not really a crime. In an ideal world, capital punishment for
all intentional crimes is justified. There is one legitimate counterargument
against this however, as Vonnegut points out a couple pages later:
“What was the next thing?”
“It was an iron chair a man had been roasted alive in,” said Crosby. “He was roasted for murdering his son.”
“Only, after they roasted him,” Hazel recalled blandly, “they found out he hadn’t murdered his son after all.” (p.95)
Finally, I think that Vonnegut
did a good job with incorporating ice-nine as a central plot element. Since Vonnegut’s
whole argument is about truth versus lies and science versus religion, it’s
really important that ice-nine (representing science and truth) is fairly
credible, and Vonnegut achieves this with his detailed scientific explanations
of how ice-nine works. Here is an excerpt:
“There are several ways,” Dr. Breed said to me, “in which certain liquids can crystallize—can freeze— several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way…So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.”“Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,” he suggested... “The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.”“Now suppose,” chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, “that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs—what we might call ice-one—is only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four …? And suppose,” he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, “that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine—a crystal as hard as this desk—with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees.” (p.45)