How long was that kid alive, before he started sucking in water? Couple of minutes? Three, four, five? Long time, two minutes? What were you even doing, huh? Chasing a bit of tail? Hey, are you queer? Did you try to fuck him? Or was it just the drugs?
– Succession’s Logan Roy
Growing up, I was a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. I would spend hours on YouTube watching his rhetorical dominance, as he vehemently dished out arguments and critique against opponents who appeared only able to shrink before him, often left speechless, always looking weak and inadequate and unprepared. Powerful oratory, especially with such flair and wit and a British accent, can have quite an influence on an impressionable consumer. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that consuming “Hitchslaps” accounted for a real part of my incipient intellectual drive. Naturally, I came to agree and identify with all of his philosophical positions.
Watching someone else speak and argue, of course, is not quite the same as thinking for oneself, which is a lesson I probably learned too late. When sliced into neat packages, rather than presented as complete debates, this style of video allows one to slide by any serious critical thinking, offering the comforting embrace of certainty and victory. It can make one feel wonderfully superior. There is no need to deal with pesky counterarguments, fuss with charitable interpretation, or least of all commit to further reflection. These, among other reasons, are why I never properly engaged with any particular argument Hitchens made, one of which I’ll try to examine here.
One of his most inflammatory, and perhaps therefore interesting, claims was that Christianity was immoral due to what he called the doctrine of vicarious redemption. He would say something like:
“If I like you enough or love you enough, I can pay your debt. I say there was folly on your part, but I’ll pay it for you. In extreme cases, people have been known to volunteer to take other’s places in prison, or even, one or two very famous cases, on the scaffold. They say I’ll do that for you. What they can’t do is take away your sins, because that would take away your responsibility…I can’t relieve you of that…It’s more than can be promised and more than should be promised…It doesn’t deserve the attention of civilized or thoughtful people.”
Rather than defend Christianity, I want to argue that forgiveness is ultimately necessary for the reproduction of a healthy society. You don’t have to be Christian to acknowledge the need to overcome guilt. Behaving otherwise leads us astray, both socially and subjectively. The ability to move beyond some past sin or crime or offense is not reducible to the opinions and forgiveness of others, as implied by the above critique. Guilt functions to rectify our past, and its being overcome is moral progress rather than the kind of bankrupt permissiveness Hitchens suggested. In other words, I think he had this exactly wrong.
To take the first claim first, debt has no moral valence. The taking on, retirement, or forgiveness of debt is not primarily a moral question, but an economic and financial one. Even in the case of student loans, I’d argue the debate is more about politics and power than the our collective sacrifice to penniless student borrowers.
Prison, on the other hand, is a profoundly moral phenomenon. Prison is insuperable from notions of punishment – many of us feel that the people there deserve to be there, that they’ve incurred a moral debt rather than a material one, in a judgement that goes beyond the mere mechanics of law and order. And while it would indeed be an act of extraordinary kindness and sacrifice to serve a sentence of incarceration on behalf of another, it’s not something we allow in a liberal society. It simply rings false to us that we might volunteer to serve the sentence of, say, Bernie Madoff or Alex Murdaugh.
There are good reasons for this: serving someone else’s time would not serve any of the putative goals of incarceration. These are generally taken to be incapacitation, rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution. These ten-dollars words just mean that we put people behind bars:
· So they can’t do crime again (while they’re incarcerated),
· so the offender/system can improve upon the tendencies that led to the crime,
· to show others that crime is bad and will be punished, and
· as punishment for its own sake.
Exactly none of these ends can possibly be served if the person serving time is not the offender. Obviously, they would then be left to commit further crimes. Other would-be offenders may get the impression that they can simply find a volunteer to go to prison if they get caught, and the collective catharsis of satisfying the instinct to punish (whatever its own moral status) can’t be reached. And while I wouldn’t argue rehabilitation requires jail or prison, someone else serving my time doesn’t advance that goal either. So no, you can’t really serve my prison sentence for me.
Indeed, this prisoner-swapping idea implies a moral system that sounds profoundly more uncivilized and barbaric than the notion of universal forgiveness inherent in “vicarious redemption.” Any “justice” that simply demands a pound of flesh, any pound of flesh, irrespective of the goals I’ve outlined above, is a terrifying one. It would be an architecture built only to satisfy humanity’s ugliest and most reptilian impulse, one of gratuitous punishment. So even if you could theoretically serve someone’s time, it would violate all of our most basic intuitions about justice and feed the ugliest depths of our human nature.
It's only a tiny refinement of this crude impulse which leads us to what I find is a terrifyingly common stance towards punishment. Human beings can be astoundingly ferocious, petty, and vindictive, and display an unyielding punitive thirst, particularly when we identify with a victim or are one ourselves. This is a kind of naïve Promethean ideal, that we can simply eradicate evil through the power of our anger, that our collective outrage could simply reorder the world for the better by virtue of its sheer intensity. This seems to me apparent all over our society; a softer (yet still vicious enough) example may look something like cancel culture zealotry. More salient examples are our world-leading prison population (at least among democratic countries with reliable data), our relentless proliferation of criminal penalties (there oughta be a law!), or in our commitment to imposing collateral consequences.
By collateral consequences, I mean we seem to have an incredibly hard time forgiving people, even after they’ve been punished. Individuals reentering society from prison still face barriers to employment, financing, and basic rights, to say nothing of social stigma and shaming. We seem to recognize, on a rational level, that proportionate justice requires that most offenders eventually rejoin the community. Actually putting that into practice seems to be much more challenging for us, and failing to do so actively retards our better intentions to reintegrate people who we, in our better moments, recognize deserve a second chance. This makes our society a less welcoming, fair, and happy place.
A failure to forgive can have even more dramatic and explosive consequences. Some truly destructive and violent episodes are literally driven by an inability to move on. While they make for great movies, Hatfield-McCoy style beefs are unequivocally negative, almost comically injurious hijackings of our base impulses. Infinitely escalating blood-feuds hopefully require no censure. An eye for and eye leaves the whole world blind, and so on, and so forth. So while we should obviously seek out and hope for the forgiveness of our peers, we also can’t measure ourselves entirely by the good will of those who would judge us.
In this regard, we have to be able to overcome guilt for our own wellbeing, ability to flourish, and self-concept. For many of us, some transgressions, from the most mundane to the most heinous, are condemned most harshly by our own conscience. Whether we lie awake replaying truly despicable episodes, or cringing at our own banal social ineptitude, being stuck in our guilt is a familiar experience to everyone. And stuck is the right word, as guilt keeps us in the past, forever the worst version of ourselves, preventing us both from becoming who we might be and, perhaps, even living up to who we already know we are.
Both socially and individually, then, we require a mechanism to process, overcome, and transcend guilt. In the world of ideal theory, a perfect criminal justice system looks something like the institutionalization of this process: we publicly examine a supposed offense, and we go through a collective process of identifying the wrongdoing. Then we take corrective and rehabilitative action and work together to reintegrate the stronger, safer, more socially responsible individual back into the community. Like I said, ideal theory. But pretending that the ultimate measure of healthy forgiveness is another imperfect, sometimes permissive, sometimes vindictive human being is a moving target; it’s an impossible and arbitrary standard to meet.
And to be clear, forgiveness is obviously hard. Hard enough that I don’t want to deprive us of an outlet, even an ideology, which encourages it. It’s hard to forgive others, and maybe even more so to forgive ourselves. Guilt isn’t just a legal status, it’s a moral one. It means both that we have integrated the norms of our society and that we understand them and wish to embody them, that we are aware we have failed to fulfill the promise of our better nature. It is right that society should erect boundaries around our conduct, and it is also right that they are sometimes tested. We can know we have erred, and learn from it, and vow to be better, and come out the other side as stronger and more complete and ethically grounded people. This makes concrete the morality by which we’re all held to account, and through this we recreate culture and a healthy society. Short circuiting this process would have us entrenched, forever, in our worst instincts, and ultimately rejecting the norms which we once believed in. For if we can’t escape guilt and integrate our past, norms begin to look like mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than the crucial guardrails they ought to be.