Rory sees an upside

On the whole I’ll try to avoid getting into posting responses that come by e-mail… The burdens of the former blog included not just all the crap I’ve already complained about, but also the need to respond to a number of good comments per day. If someone sends a truly thought-provoking comment, you naturally want to post a response to it, but then the blog quickly becomes a full-time occupation. It can’t be that; the blog will only work for me if it’s primarily a one-way medium where I can post whenever I feel like it. (There are other places in life for intellectual interchange.) The number of work commitments I have is great, both to my own work and to the university-related duties that I very much enjoy.

However, Rory took the trouble to respond, so I’ll post his comments here and let them stand as they are:

“I don’t know if it’s an ‘upside’ of the Puritan attitude to criminals, but it’s probably true that (to put it more broadly) the Christian concern with the soul of the criminal has different consequences than the aristocratic indifference. If, as Tocqueville describes (as Nietzsche does too) that the criminal is just an object that must be dealt with harshly, with no concern for his personality, the Christian legacy leaves two opposed attitudes: the Puritan one, as described; and what we see in Europe and in American liberals. That is, a concern with the soul as the possible site of reform. The aristocratic attitude was very prevalent in Europe, for example, when people were deported to Australia from Britain and Ireland, because they were considered a nuisance (tool-breakers and possible revolutionaries). And I think Puritanism is concurrent with liberal reformism. (There is of course the whole other ballgame of objective forces leading to criminality, but we could be here all day.)”