Part 42

Privileges of all sorts for fathers who lavish boys upon the world, and perhaps plural votes as well.

A medical certificate as a condition of any marriage, endorsed by the parochial authorities, in which a series of questions addressed to the parties and the medical officers must be answered ("family histories").

As a counter-agent to prostitution, or as its ennoblement, I would recommend leasehold marriages (to last for a term of years or months), with adequate provision for the children.

Every marriage to be warranted and sanctioned by a certain number of good men and true, of the parish, as a parochial obligation.

734.

Another commandment of philanthropy.--There are cases where to have a child would be a crime--for example, for chronic invalids and extreme neurasthenics. These people should be converted to chastity, and for this purpose the music of Parsifal might at all events be tried. For Parsifal himself, that born fool, had ample reasons for not desiring to propagate. Unfortunately, however, one of the regular symptoms of exhausted stock is the inability to exercise any self-restraint in the presence of stimuli, and the tendency to respond to the smallest sexual attraction. It would be quite a mistake, for instance, to think of Leopardi as a chaste man. In such cases the priest and moralist play a hopeless game: it would be far better to send for the apothecary. Lastly, society here has a positive duty to fulfil, and of all the demands that are made on it, there are few more urgent and necessary than this one. Society as the trustee of life, is responsible to life for every botched life that comes into existence, and as it has to atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration. The Mosaic law, "Thou shalt do no murder," is a piece of ingenuous puerility compared with the earnestness of this forbidding of life to decadents, "Thou shalt not beget"!!! ... For life itself recognises no solidarity or equality of rights between the healthy and unhealthy parts of an organism. The latter must at all cost be eliminated, lest the whole fall to pieces. Compassion for decadents, equal rights for the physiologically botched--this would be the very pinnacle of immorality, it would be setting up Nature's most formidable opponent as morality itself!

735.

There are some delicate and morbid natures, the so-called idealists, who can never under any circumstances rise above a coarse, immature crime: yet it is the great justification of their anæmic little existence, it is the small requital for their lives of cowardice and falsehood to have been for one instant at least--strong. But they generally collapse after such an act.

736.

In our civilised world we seldom hear of any but the bloodless, trembling criminal, overwhelmed by the curse and contempt of society, doubting even himself, and always belittling and belying his deeds--a misbegotten sort of criminal; that is why we are opposed to the idea that all great men have been criminals (only in the grand style, and neither petty nor pitiful), that crime must be inherent in greatness (this at any rate is the unanimous verdict of all those students of human nature who have sounded the deepest waters of great souls). To feel one's self adrift from all questions of ancestry, conscience, and duty--this is the danger with which every great man is confronted. Yet this is precisely what he desires: he desires the great goal, and consequently the means thereto.

737.

In times when man is led by reward and punishment, the class of man which the legislator has in view is still of a low and primitive type: he is treated as one treats a child. In our latter-day culture, general degeneracy removes all sense from reward and punishment. This determination of action by the prospect of reward and punishment presupposes young, strong, and vigorous races. In effete races impulses are so irrepressible that a mere idea has no force whatever. Inability to offer any resistance to a stimulus, and the feeling that one must react to it: this excessive susceptibility of decadents makes all such systems of punishment and reform altogether senseless.

The idea "amelioration" presupposes a normal and strong creature whose action must in some way be balanced or cancelled if he is not to be lost and turned into an enemy of the community.

738.

The effect of prohibition. Every power which forbids and which knows how to excite fear in the person forbidden creates a guilty conscience. (That is to say, a person has a certain desire but is conscious of the danger of gratifying it, and is consequently forced to be secretive, underhand, and cautious.) Thus any prohibition deteriorates the character of those who do not willingly submit themselves to it, but are constrained thereto.

739.

"Punishment and reward."--These two things stand or fall together. Nowadays no one will accept a reward or acknowledge that any authority should have the power to punish. Warfare has been reformed. We have a desire: it meets with opposition: we then see that we shall most easily obtain it by coming to some agreement--by drawing up a contract. In modern society where every one has given his assent to a certain contract, the criminal is a man who breaks that contract. This at least is a clear concept. But in that case, anarchists and enemies of social order could not be tolerated.

740.

Crimes belong to the category of revolt against the social system, A rebel is not punished, he is simply suppressed. He may be an utterly contemptible and pitiful creature; but there is nothing intrinsically despicable about rebellion in fact, in our particular society revolt is far from being disgraceful. There are cases in which a rebel deserves honour precisely because he is conscious of certain elements in society which cry aloud for hostility; for such a man rouses us from our slumbers. When a criminal commits but one crime against a particular person, it does not alter the fact that all his instincts urge him to make a stand against the whole social system. His isolated act is merely a symptom.

The idea of punishment ought to be reduced to the concept of the suppression of revolt, a weapon against the vanquished (by means of long or short terms of imprisonment). But punishment should not be associated in any way with contempt. A criminal is at all events a man who has set his life, his honour, his freedom at stake; he is therefore a man of courage. Neither should punishment be regarded as penance or retribution, as though there were some recognised rate of exchange between crime and punishment. Punishment does not purify, simply because crime does not sully.

A criminal should not be prevented from making his peace with society, provided he does not belong to the race of criminals. In the latter case, however, he should be opposed even before he has committed an act of hostility. (As soon as he gets into the clutches of society the first operation to be performed upon him should be that of castration.) A criminal's bad manners and his low degree of intelligence should not be reckoned against him. Nothing is more common than that he should misunderstand himself (more particularly when his rebellious instinct--the rancour of the unclassed--has not reached consciousness simply because he has not read enough). It is natural that he should deny and dishonour his deed while under the influence of fear at its failure. All this is quite distinct from those cases in which, psychologically speaking, the criminal yields to an incomprehensible impulse, and attributes a motive to his deed by associating it with a merely incidental and insignificant action (for example, robbing a man, when his real desire was to take his blood).

The worth of a man should not be measured by any one isolated act. Napoleon warned us against this. Deeds which are only skin-deep are more particularly insignificant. If we have no crime--let us say no murder--on our conscience; why is it? It simply means that a few favourable circumstances have been wanting in our lives. And supposing we were induced to commit such a crime would our worth be materially affected? As a matter of fact, we should only be despised, if we were not credited with possessing the power to kill a man under certain circumstances. In nearly every crime certain qualities come into play without which no one would be a true man. Dostoievsky was not far wrong when he said of the inmates of the penal colonies in Siberia, that they constituted the strongest and most valuable portion of the Russian people. The fact that in our society the criminal happens to be a badly nourished and stunted animal is simply a condemnation of our system. In the days of the Renaissance the criminal was a flourishing specimen of humanity, and acquired his own virtue for himself,--Virtue in the sense of the Renaissance--that is to say, virtù; free from moralic acid.

It is only those whom we do not despise that we are able to elevate. Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime.

741.

Shame was first introduced into punishment when certain penalties were inflicted on persons held in contempt, such as slaves. It was a despised class that was most frequently punished, and thus it came to pass that punishment and contempt were associated.

742.

In the ancient idea of punishment a religious concept was immanent, namely, the retributive power of chastisement. Penalties purified; in modern society, however, penalties degrade. Punishment is a form of paying off a debt: once it has been paid, one is freed from the deed for which one was so ready to suffer. Provided belief in the power of punishment exist, once the penalty is paid a feeling of relief and lightheartedness results, which is not so very far removed from a state of convalescence and health. One has made one's peace with society, and one appears to one's self more dignified pure.... To-day, however, punishment isolates even more than the crime; the fate behind the sin has become so formidable that it is almost hopeless. One rises from punishment still an enemy of society. Henceforward it reckons yet another enemy against it. The jus talionis may spring from the spirit of retribution (that is to say, from a sort of modification of the instinct of revenge); but in the Book of Manu, for instance, it is the need of having some equivalent in order to do penance, or to become free in a religious sense.

743.