A plea for tolerance?

[mary-j-59.livejournal.com]

Not sure quite what to call this - it's a comment I made on an earlier thread, where it was pretty deeply buried. I'm posting it as a separate comment because it's something I feel pretty strongly about.

Yes, I know - this is a sporking community. We are making fun of the Harry Potter books, and, at times, some of us can get quite irate in our discussions. But - please, please, can we refrain from getting irate towards J.K. Rowling?

Here's what I mean: I'm really not comfortable discussing the character of an actual human being just because I find her books frustrating. I'm a bit of a structuralist. The author is dead once a book has been published, and that cuts two ways. The author is no more privileged in his/her interpretation than any other reader, because the work belongs to the readers now. And there are limits to what we can extrapolate about an author's belief, personality, etc, based on the work s/he has written.

As angry as I get at the awful, mixed messages in these books, I think we must never forget that a real, vulnerable human being wrote them. It isn't right or fair to trash her while trashing the books. (Though I like to think we're not trashing them, but subjecting them to rigorous criticism!) And I'm really not comfortable with speculating about her family life and personality based on the words she's written. Though I do believe all real art is "true" in a deep sense, and reveals the heart of its creator, I still think the art has, and must have, its own validity. You see what I mean?

I hope to be a published author one day. Though I neither want nor expect Rowling's level of fame, I wouldn't like it if anyone psycho-analyzed me on the basis of my stories. I don't think any of us would - and many of us do some type of creative work. Would we like to be called "stupid cows" because a reader found our work stupid? The person is not the work.

So I think it's fine to discuss the image of God in Rowling's stories. I think it's fine to question the heavy use of Christian symbolism given the non-Christian content of the stories. Heck, I've done this myself, repeatedly! It's fine to discuss the mixed messages about race, bullying, authority figures, and so much more. But I'd rather not discuss the psychology and personal life of the woman who wrote the stories. J.K. Rowling is a woman trying to write, and raise a family, and live, in this real world. We shouldn't forget that, no matter how angry her books make us.

Comments

[annoni-no.livejournal.com]

Public Shaming: A Cruel and Unusual Punishment

Public shaming is one of the oldest legal sentences we know of, though the details vary from culture to culture. In ancient Rome a woman convicted of adultery or prostitution was forced to wear a toga instead of a proper stola. In the 17th and 18th centuries in New England, those convicted of adultery were forced to wear a scarlet A on their chest. Use of the stocks as a form of punishment is attested to in the bible, and continued to be used as such through the 17th century.

The main problem with public shaming is this: when you hold someone up to be punished by the public, you are giving each individual member of that public permission to punish that person as harshly or leniently as they see fit. There is no mechanism to even attempt to ensure equity before the law. This is mob justice.

Consider the fates of those sentenced to the stocks. Those who were popular, like Daniel Defoe, were pelted with flowers and made comfortable by an admiring crowd. Most often though, the crowd gathered to ensure the punishment was as miserable as possible. That was the entire point of making it public. The crowd would mock them, insult them, beat them, urinate on them, torment them to the limits of their imaginations and whims. They would throw mud, rotten fruit, excrement, and dead animals at the offender. Some would throw stones and bricks. Sometimes so many threw stones and bricks and other dangerous objects that the offender was maimed or killed.

And that outcome was just fine. If anyone was ever convicted for their part in murdering someone sentenced to the stocks or pillory I've never found an account of it. Because when you turn the administration of justice over to the public, whatever sentence the public carries out, however lenient or cruel, is ipso facto justified and just.

And the problem is worse than just the fickleness of the crowd: when the punishment for deviance is for the populace to make an example of the deviant, then that punishment only works if the crowd makes an example of them. This means that denigrating the convicted is not just a question of personal preference, it is a question of civic duty. A good, upstanding member of the community, in order to maintain that status, is pressured to add their own punishment, and to inflict it with sufficient severity, that they won't be accused themselves of excusing or promoting the convict's misdeeds.

Beyond that, most sentences of shaming didn't and don't have even implied limitations on the time frame in which it may be done like the stocks or pillory do. Those who were branded, or forced to wear the sign of their shame on their person, or attached to their name, were condemned for life. There was no point beyond which they could say that the comment box was closed, all judgments had been finalized, and the sentence completed. For the rest of their lives those who had been convicted in the public court would always be faced with the uncertainty of whether the people they must interact with would punish them further or let them be, or what form that punishment might take if it was inflicted on them anew. Nor would they have recourse for the redress of their own grievances regarding this harassment. It was, after all, their just punishment.

For these reasons among others, public humiliation was outlawed in the U.S. over the 18th and 19th centuries as running afoul of the 8th Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.