Payback

Karma is an interesting idea.

It's originally a concept from Hinduism and Buddhism, and claims that good or bad deeds accrue on what amounts to a Life Ledger, and not only will result in positive or negative payback later in this life, but will affect the quality of rebirth you're granted in subsequent lives (in one's saṃsāra, to use the Sanskrit term).  The word karma itself is from Sanskrit, and combines the meaning of "action or deed" with that of "intent."

Here in the West, the idea's been swiped and (usually) disconnected from anything having to do with reincarnation.  It's come to mean "payback," usually of an unexpected sort.  How many times have you heard someone say, "Karma will catch up with him sooner or later"?  Even the Bible has the evocative line, "Who sows the wind, reaps the whirlwind." 

It's an appealing idea, at least for those of us who would like there to be some fairness in the world.  Too often, dishonest, cheating, lying assholes (*koff koff koff Donald Trump koff koff *) get away scot-free, and deserving, hard-working people can't catch a break to save their lives.  Believing that there is going to be some kind of cosmic balancing of the accounts would be mighty reassuring.

A Nepali prayer wheel [Image is in the Public Domain]

Interesting, though, that people's attitudes toward karma vary dramatically depending on whose karma we're talking about.  A study that came out this week in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, by Cindel White, Atlee Lauder, and Mina Aryaie, found that regardless of religious belief (or non-belief), people tend to associate good karma with themselves, and bad karma with other people.

Asked to come up with a karmic experience about themselves, 69% of participants described some good deed that was unexpectedly rewarded; when it was about other people, a full 82% of participants recounted a bad deed that resulted in the evildoer receiving their just deserts.  And this trend held no matter where the participants were from.

"We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical," said Cindel White of York University, who was lead author on the study.  "The positive bias in karmic self-perceptions is a bit weaker in the Indian and Singaporean samples compared with U.S. samples, but across all countries, participants were much more likely to say that other people face karmic punishments while they receive karmic rewards."

Curious finding, if not exactly unexpected.  We all tend to have undeserved confidence in our own rightness.  As journalist Kathryn Schulz points out, when we are forced to confront our own fallibility, we'll all admit we can make mistakes -- but it's always purely in a theoretical sense.  Sitting here, right now, it's impossible to think of a single thing that we're wrong about, meaning that there's a tacit assumption we all have that "okay, I'm fallible, I guess, but at the moment I'm one hundred percent right about everything."

Now, sure, the facile objection is that if you knew you were wrong about something, you'd forthwith cease to hold that particular belief.  But it's not an easy trap to get out of.  Schulz says:

So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right?  One reason, actually, has to do with the feeling of being wrong.  So let me ask you guys something...  How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong?  Dreadful.  Thumbs down.  Embarrassing...  Thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question.  You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong?  Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right?  I mean, it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny...  But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.

I'll give you an analogy.  Do you remember that Looney Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner?  In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine -- he's a bird, he can fly.  But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him.  And what's funny -- at least if you're six years old -- is that the coyote's totally fine too.  He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air.  That's when he falls.  When we're wrong about something -- not when we realize it, but before that -- we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down.  You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground.  So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago.  It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

The White et al. karma study is further evidence that we have a dangerous blind spot with regard to our own capacity for getting it wrong.  Not only do we have the sense that it's other people who make errors, it's also other people who do bad stuff, who should be on the receiving end of the Cosmic Morality Squad's efforts to keep things in balance.  As for us?  We should finally get our Just Reward for being the good people we've been all along, right?

Of course right.

Like I said, it's an certainly appealing concept, because all too often there appears to be no justice at all in this world.  But we have to be careful about how we evaluate our fellow humans, because just about everyone is a confusing amalgam of good and bad, pure motives and not-so-pure ones, sometimes varying on a minute-by-minute time scale.  And that includes ourselves.  Remember the wise words of J. R. R. Tolkien, spoken through the character Gandalf.  Frodo has just snapped out that Gollum deserved to die for what he'd done, and Gandalf responds, "Deserves it!  I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death.  And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

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Delayed justice

Today's post revolves around an ethical question: is it right for a country to seek extradition of a man for war crimes -- if the alleged criminal is 98 years old and has Alzheimer's?

The question comes up because of the case of Michael Karkoc, whom Polish officials claim was a SS commander during World War II who ordered the massacre of 44 civilians.  Prosecutor Robert Janicki is "100 percent" certain that Karkoc was an officer and founder of the "Ukrainian Self Defense Legion," which in 1943 was responsible for the murder of the villagers of Chlaniow in retribution for the killing of USDL commander Siegfried Assmuss.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Upon emigrating to the United States, Karkoc never mentioned his membership in the USDL -- he said he'd "worked in a labor camp."  Investigators found no record of his participation in SS-led groups.  He was granted admission, moved to Minnesota, married, fathered four children, and has lived there ever since.

Now, Polish officials want to see him prosecuted and jailed for his crimes.  "This case shows that there is still a possibility, a chance to bring those responsible before a court and I think we should never give up the chance of exercising justice," said Polish prosecutor Andrzej Pozorski.

As far as Karkoc, it's pretty clear he has no memory of what he did, and is confused by what's happening.  An interview with a reporter for the Associated Press resulted in Karkoc's saying merely, "I don't think I can explain."

So my question is: should he be returned to Poland to face justice?

Generally, there are three reasons to support punishing criminals with jail (or worse):

• Retribution.  They did bad things, they deserve to have bad things done to them.
• To protect the rest of us from evildoers who might commit further crimes.
• To serve as a warning to others not to break the law.

I'm not clear that any of these applies here.  It would be a different thing if the man was capable of understanding what was going on, as in the case of John Demjanjuk, who was elderly but clearly in the possession of his faculties.  Here, we have a person who (if the allegations are correct, which they seem to be) did horrible things 74 years ago.  Had he been apprehended earlier, it would have been entirely just to see him prosecuted.

Now, I'm not sure I see what the point is.

Retribution only makes sense if the person being punished understands why.  It's the reason we have laws preventing the death penalty in cases where the criminal is intellectually disabled.  It's pretty certain that even if he was jailed for the rest of his life, he wouldn't have any real idea why.

The second reason for jailing criminals makes even less sense in this case.  A 98 year old man with dementia isn't a threat to anyone.

The only possible justification comes from the third reason -- to serve as a warning.  To let war criminals know that even if they get away with what they've done for a time, they will not escape forever, and that if apprehended they will face prosecution no matter what.

Which I suppose I can see.  But honestly, even from this argument, it's hard to see what society gains by pursuing this.

I'm finding it hard to come to a clear answer here.  I'm certainly not trying to excuse what he did; the actions of the Nazis are rightly held up as the very worst of what humanity can do.  It's not an argument from humanitarian grounds -- "leave him alone, he's just a little old man" certainly wasn't a standard applied by the concentration camp guards, nor, it must be imagined, by Karkoc himself when he ordered the massacre of the villagers of Chlaniow.

But I'm still having a hard time seeing what the point of prosecution is in this case.

Perhaps one of my readers who is better able to tease apart ethical conundrums will weigh in, here.  Because with the punishment of Michael Karkoc for war crimes, I can't believe that anyone, including society as a whole, really wins.

Redemption, retribution, and justice

Yesterday, on an island in Indonesia, at midnight local time and 1 PM Eastern Standard Time, eight men were brought out into a wooded grove one at a time and were executed by a firing squad.  Each one was given the choice of whether to sit or stand, and to have a hood, a blindfold, or nothing at all.  All eight chose nothing, and to look the members of the firing squad in the eye as they died.  Three of the eight executioners had live ammo in their guns; the other five had blanks.  No one knew which guns were which.

When the prisoner was ready, the firing squad took aim at the man's heart.  The command to fire was given, and seconds later, the condemned man was dead.

The crime the eight committed was possession of drugs with the intent to distribute.  Two were members of the infamous "Bali 9" drug trafficking ring.  Each had been caught entering the country with heroin or cocaine.  Four of the men were from Nigeria, two from Australia, one from Brazil, and one from Indonesia.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Most, if not all, of the men had experienced significant personal changes during their four-year stay in prison, while their cases dragged through appeal after appeal.  One, Australian Myuran Sukumaran, spent his time painting; his final paintings were of a heart, and a haunting self-portrait with a black hole in the center of the chest.  The other Australian, Andrew Chan, and one of the Nigerians, Okwudili Ayotanze, became well known for offering solace and counsel to their fellow prisoners.  All appeared completely repentant for what they had done.

Further complicating matters, the Brazilian, Rodrigo Gularte, was a diagnosed schizophrenic, who thought animals could talk back to him and believed that electromagnetic waves were controlling his behavior.

The whole thing brings up a lot of questions about why the judicial system works as it does.  Why do we imprison, and in some cases execute, people who have broken the law?  It seems to me that there are three answers to this question -- and they lead to different answers regarding how we should treat criminal cases.

The first is that justice is retributive.  Some of the oldest known codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi, are retributive in nature.  If you cause someone to lose a hand, you should lose your hand.  The basic logic is payback; "you deserved everything you got."

The second is to protect society.  By this standard, two people who commit the same crime should be treated differently depending on how much of a subsequent threat each one represents.  And this is considered in sentencing, at least in the United States; someone who is likely to commit further crimes is often given a harsher sentence.

The third is to set an example.  "See what happened?" this standard says.  "You don't want this to happen to you."  It was for this reason that floggings and executions used to be conducted in public, often in the middle of the town square.  Such events were often widely attended, as peculiar as that may seem to modern sensibilities.  The last public hanging in the United States, of rapist/murderer Rainey Bethea, was attended by 20,000, and was such a media circus that the decision was made to conduct executions behind closed doors from then on.

All of which demands that we consider how to deal with cases of serious crimes.  What the eight men  did was terrible; heroin and cocaine are horrible chemicals that destroy lives.  From the standpoint of retribution, the sentence was fair.  And the publicity surrounding the case certainly should act as a deterrent; no one could fail to be moved by the photographs of the hysterical family members of the executed men, and it's hard to imagine anyone considering bringing drugs into Indonesia not being given pause.

But there are still questions.  If the idea of justice is to safeguard society, the focus should be on rehabilitation, not retribution.  From what I've read, certainly Chan and Sukumaran were rehabilitated, and not only would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort again, but might well have been powerful spokesmen against the illegal drug trade.  Apparently a change of heart is what saved Malaysian drug trafficker Yong Vui Kong from being hanged in Singapore; his sentence was changed to life in prison and fifteen strokes of the cane because he had "seen the error of his ways and had repented."

As far as rehabilitation goes, however, you have to wonder how effective that usually is even in non-capital cases.  Recidivism rates are sky-high.  A study by the National Institute of Justice of over 404,000 prisoners in the United States found that 76.6% of them were re-arrested within five years, over half of those arrests occurring within the first year after release.

Add to this the fact that the execution of drug traffickers has barely put a dent in the Southeast Asian drug trade; the region is the second biggest producer of heroin in the world (after Afghanistan).  And the people most often caught are the couriers, who are usually young, poor, and desperate.  The kingpins, the ones who are controlling the operations and getting rich from the profits, are seldom ever brought to justice.

None of that mattered.  Indonesian President Joko Widodo said from the beginning that there would be no clemency granted.  And there wasn't.

I'm not sure why this case resonated so strongly with me.  I was fairly certain what the outcome would be, so it wasn't over any particular curiosity over what would happen.  I think it may have been the personal angle -- I read articles containing interviews with Chan's girlfriend, whom he married a few months ago while he was already in prison.  I saw galleries of Sukumaran's paintings.  I read the statements by the lawyers of the eight prisoners and the pleas by leaders of their home countries to spare them.  I thought about the ethics of executing someone like Rodrigo Gularte, who had a serious mental illness.

And yesterday, while I was teaching my Critical Thinking class, eight men halfway around the world were shot through the heart.  In the final analysis, I have no real idea whether this was just or unjust, ethical or unethical.  Nor can I decide whether President Widodo should have considered any other factors in his decision to allow the executions to proceed.

All I can say is that I'm glad that I will never be in a position to make such a judgment.

Straw man media

I think that mental laziness contributes more to the prevalence of media idiocy than any other factor.

I mean, let's face it.  The simplistic, single-cause vitriol poured into newspapers, magazines, and websites by the likes of Ann Coulter and Ted Rall would get nowhere if the consumers were willing to get up off their metaphorical asses and do the hard work of evaluating the actual arguments these people make.  When what they say constitutes an actual argument, that is, which is seldom.  Most of it seems to be one long free-floating ad hominem, delicately laced with unintentional irony -- such as yesterday's pronouncement by Rush Limbaugh that lesbians were obese substance abusers.

No, he apparently didn't realize why everyone else thought that this was screamingly funny.  I guess oxycodone addiction can make you a little slow on the uptake.

The problem is, once you have a critical mass of consumers who think of media as being pithy sound-bites that loudly confirm what they already thought, you have dulled the whole lot of them to learning anything from what they read.  And wasn't the original purpose of news media to inform?  I sure thought it was.

I was sent an especially good example of this by a friend and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia yesterday.  The whole thing started with an article in the Boston Globe online entitled, "Report Slams State for Lack of Corrections Reform."  In the article, posted last Sunday, writer Wesley Lowery describes a recent study by MassINC, a non-partisan research group that looked into incarceration patterns over the past forty years in Massachusetts.  The group produced a forty-page report that found, amongst other things, a puzzling statistic -- that as incarceration rates climbed steeply, the rate of violent crime was falling equally steeply.

Okay, so far, so good.  But then Michael Graham, radio talk show host and GOP consultant, weighed in with "Boston Globe-Democrat Asks: Why is Crime Going Down If We're Putting So Many Crooks in Prison?"  And in this stunning piece of investigative journalism, we read the following:

So you don’t understand why prison enrollment is going up while crime is going down? You don’t see the connection between more criminals off the street and fewer crimes in your neighborhood?

Okay….

After all, if crime is going down with all the crooks in jail, why are we wasting money keeping them in jail? Let’s let them back out on the streets.

What could possibly go wrong?

So, we have three fallacies at once here:

1)  If-by-Whiskey -- defining a term however you damn well please, and acting as if that definition were the correct one.
2)  Red Herring -- throwing in an irrelevant or misleading statement to throw your opponent off his stride.
3)  Straw Man -- recharacterizing your opponent's argument as an oversimplified or ridiculous parody of its actual stance, and arguing against that.

Mr. Graham has, probably deliberately (although as with the case of Rush Limbaugh, you can never be certain if they see it themselves), confused the rates of crime and incarceration with the raw numbers of criminals in jail and on the street.  It's not an easy point; consider how tricky it is to understand the fact that (for example) right now, the number of people on the Earth is increasing, but the rate of growth is decreasing.  If all that the report found was that the numbers of criminals on the street went down as the number of criminals in jail went up, that would hardly be surprising.  But it is curious that the rate of violent crime is declining as the rate of incarceration is increasing, and that statistic certainly deserves a better answer than the ridiculous If-by-Red-Straw-Herring Man-Whiskey that Mr. Graham saw fit to create.

I think what bugs me, however, is how easily suckered the readers are.  I read the comments following Michael Graham's article, and not one recognized what was, to me, an obvious problem with it -- half of them (the conservatives) responded with a rah-rah-right-on-dude, and the other half (the liberals) with messages decrying the inequities of the American justice system and their cost to society.  Nobody, or at least not in the first few pages of comments, said, "Wait a minute.  Your argument has a hole in it big enough to float the Queen Elizabeth through."  (The ship, not the monarch.)

So, anyway, that's today's frustrated anti-media rant.  It's not like the problem would be easy to fix; clear thinking is hard work, and people seem to like easy answers.  Going har-de-har-har at a blatant straw man is certainly simpler than putting your mind to figuring out what's really going on.  I just wish so many of the media wonks weren't getting rich off of it.