Death Penalty—Washington State's First Execution Since 2001

Washington state is preparing to execute a death-row prisoner for the first time since 2001. If all proceedes as planned, the execution will take place on December 3rd.

Today's episode of the radio program The Conversation discussed the issue.

The man slated to die was convicted of aggravated murder in 1993 for killing his wife, his three children, and his business partner.

I don't support the death penalty for many reasons ... but the part of me that understands it has an intellectual kinship with the argument that Joseph Campbell lays out in his mythological explications. He separates personal revenge from societal revenge.

To illustrate this point, he talks about a story of a samurai who spent his life working to avenge his father's death. The samurai finally tracks down his father's killer, after years of training and searching, and he is about to exact revenge when the man spits in his face. The samurai puts down his sword and walks away. Campbell points out that if the samurai had killed the man at that moment, it would have been personal revenge and therefore petty, instead of a more noble revenge for an unjust crime. His killing needed to be based on revenge for his father's death, not anger over having been spit on.

For Campbell, I think the death penalty works the same way. It is a process by which society can cleanse itself of great evil and seek impersonal revenge for the greatest of crimes that have been done within society and therefore to society.

Anyway, I am hoping there will be many more opportunities for dialogue on this issue as the date of execution nears. NPR's Morning Edition will feature special coverage of the death penalty next Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I assume it must be connected to Washington because those dates are December 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. I'll try to update as I find more information.

Life lives on lives

A passage from The Power of Myth. Joseph Campbell discussing an Indonesian myth:

"In the beginning, according to this story, the ancestors were not distinguished as to sex. There were no births, there were no deaths. Then a great public dance was celebrated, and in the course of the dance one of the participants was trampled to death and torn to pieces, and the pieces were buried. At the moment of that killing the sexes became separated, so that death was now balanced by begetting, begetting by death, while from the buried parts of the dismembered body food plants grew. Time had come into being, death, birth, and the killing and eating of other living beings, for the preservation of life. The timeless time of the beginning had been terminated by a communal crime, a deliberate murder or sacrifice.

Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don't kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself? Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact is one of the functions of some of those very brutal rites in which the ritual consists chiefly of killing—in imitation, as it were, of that first, primordial crime, out of which arose this temporal world, in which we all participate. The reconciliation of mind to the conditions of life is fundamental to all creation stories. "