Courts Martial, Whippings, Dignity, the Wretched Refuse and Pornography

Photo by Austin Kirk on Unsplash

Courts Martial, Whippings, Dignity, the Wretched Refuse and Pornography

By Joel Levin

Perhaps now isolated at home, imagine a stroll through the stunning United States Naval Academy campus at Annapolis, a campus of lovely buildings, manicured grounds, and everywhere whispers of bravery, service and sacrifice. You come upon one of the most beautiful buildings, made of Jerusalem Stone with a replica of the Western Wall, with a copper dome and roof. This would be the week to see it, because a step in the global advance of humanity was made this week and no one is due more credit than the man whose name adorns that building, Uriah Levy. His efforts, though, are darkened by the retreat this week from that area of moral concern. The current advance and retreat help us to understand what it is to be human. For that, we also need to consider a second building, one forever linked to Levy ‘s cousin, Emma.

First to Levy. A cabin boy in battles against the Barbary pirates, he rose to Commodore, then the American Navy’s highest rank. He was court-martialed and found guilty six times, almost certainly a record never to be equaled. His main crime: being a Jew in the very Protestant American Navy. Six times he was pardoned by successive American Presidents.

Levy’s other sin: he saw his sailors as people, not things, as subjects with moral, if at times imperfect, qualities, not objects that are inert. Because of that, Levy did something quite remarkable. For the first time in a naval history going back several thousand years, he abolished flogging or whipping as a punishment. It was, aptly, a sea change. Corporal punishment – attacking the body – treats people as things or objects and Levy severely curtailed that with the abolition of whipping.

But why is whipping wrong? That is, why shouldn’t we use whipping if it works? Isn’t deterrence the whole point, and whipping almost certainly deters? Why not flog, beat, castrate, even amputate when criminals deserve it? It would almost certainly deter. But deterrence, getting a better result in society at the expense of an individual as individual, even a guilty individual, is to treat him or her as a means to an end, as an object, as less than fully human.

Congress, with Levy’s support, made anti-whipping universal in 1850. This week, 150 years later, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia followed suit. The Saudi Supreme Court, finding the King’s “human rights advances” implied the end of flogging, ended a centuries’ old punishment used recently to administer hundreds of lashes to bloggers, to adulterers, to those possessing or using alcohol, and to women who dared to drive a car. Whipping joined other now largely abandoned indignities that stretched thousands of years – slavery, dueling, debt bondage, honor killing and blood feuds (this process is compellingly discussed by Kwame Appiah) – a survivor of bloody and indefensible human history where the distinction between living people and inanimate goods blurs and where dignity and autonomy are concepts foreign to the overwhelming mass of people.

Part of the fault, although only part, lies with religion where textual justification and theological tradition allow widespread indignities, humiliations and brutality. Certainly, the Saudi Kingdom has long seen religious injunction as the only way. (Of course, any kingdom, with its rank, privilege and status, is itself an affront to human autonomy and dignity). There is, however, another tradition, one that goes back to Levy’s Sephardic (the Spanish Jews and their exiled descendants) mentor, Moses Maimonides. That tradition says that, any time a religious injunction or ceremony or rule violates reason or morality, it is not to be taken literally, but only allegorically. It becomes a story but not a law.  It teaches but does not govern. The Saudis, belatedly but monumental, acted upon that principle this week, and in doing so, followed an old Islamic tradition that can be traced back to the great Islamic thinker Ibn Rushd, Averroes, a native, like Maimonides, of medieval Islamic Córdoba.

So let us revisit what we have hurriedly discussed. Whipping, like other corporal punishments, from slavery to torture, is a violation of basic human dignity, a dignity that makes us not just a physical collection of cells and organs and neutrons, but a thinking, moral, autonomous subject, a human being. Whipping may work, but that utilitarian reason is insufficient to justify it morally. The Naval Academy, with a building named in honor of the Spanish Jewish-American, offers a tribute to a struggle parallel to that against slavery, in defense of the rights of indigenous people, and for treating women as equals: all struggles to universalize being fully human. The Saudis, recognizing at least some of this, and harkening back to an older Islamic creation, put a coffin nail in the corporal punishment process. That said, let us look at another Sephardic, Uriah Levy ‘s cousin Emma, the author of one of America’s great pieces of literature. Let us also consider the contrasting events to abolishing whipping, events that degrade dignity and act in a way contrary to Emma’s plea.

Levy’s cousin was Emma Lazarus, the 19th Century activist, feminist and poet. Her poem, inscribed on another government structure, the Statue of Liberty, lifts petty circumstantial and morally irrelevant descriptions – the “tired”, the “poor”, the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” – to the profound, recognizing all to be autonomous, dignified, subjective individuals and welcome to enter through “the golden door“.

At the same time that the Saudis proclaimed the end of whipping, President Trump announced additional immigration restrictions. Family members of green card holders and adult children of U.S. citizens seeking green cards have now had their rights suspended. Trump supplemented and reinforced his general policy of seeing immigrants as less than fully human, as something inferior out of the box, as those who take but never give. There is no sociological or statistical evidence of a higher crime rate by immigrants (it is, in fact, generally lower), nor ready evidence about using more government services than they pay for (the opposite is true), or increasing the unemployment rate (all economic evidence shows that to be false). It is immigrants’ status as objects not fully human, their other otherness, their “wretched refuseness “, that scars them. Trump understands the profound risk to his policies posed by Emma Lazarus ‘words. Early in his presidency, he sent his henchmen, Steven Miller, to a press briefing to dissipate that risk. Miller tried to separate the Statue of Liberty from its iconic inscription. “The poem that you’re referring to was added later (and) is not part of the original Statue of Liberty.“ One wants to reply that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was an addition to the original Constitution, but that is hardly an argument against its importance or centrality in understanding who we are as Americans or, for that matter, how we view the Constitution today.

This vision of seeing ourselves as a subjective rather objective thing makes use of a distinction we understand in our artistic and entertainment environment. The distinction between nude art and pornographic images is evident in the deep humanity found in Greek figures or Renaissance sculptures or the painted females of Pablo Picasso or Peter Paul Rubens or Frida Kahlo. Theirs are expressions of the human essence – the anger and the despair, the yearning and the hoping, the curiosity and the fear, the shy and the angry, the weight of the world and the anticipation of a new life – found in great art. It is not physical bodies as things, but what representations of those bodies allows us to take and see of their mind or brain or heart or soul that move us. Pornography shares with violence an indifference to the mental in favor of a concentration on the physical, the body as an empty but reactive vessel, degrading rather than uplifting the individual. In art, persons cannot be substituted. They are not replaceable, fungible, impersonal. Rather, being personal – free, autonomous and worthy of our attention – is what matters. With pornography, as with violence, the body becomes an object, freedom vanishes, and any body will do. Whipped bodies can be substituted, one for the other, being impersonal things. This is an observation we all recognize when we think of giving blood or seeing others bleeding. Calling people names or applying dehumanizing or belittling labels is a move toward the pornographic.

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