X-Message-Number: 20518 Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 06:31:34 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #20508 - #20517 Hi everyone! About Tolkien: I read the War of the Rings before it became so popular, and later discovered Tolkien's earlier writings, which now strike me as much better. The problem with the War of the Rings is that it never addresses some REAL critical points. This can be done in fantasy or in a standard novel, but it still must be done. The world has never been cleanly and obviously split into two camps, the Evil and the Good, and never will be. Any novel based on that assumption falls down at once. The problem starts to become clear if we seriously think about why people do what they do. Sometimes they've just been unthinkingly trained to respond as they do... and even trained not to think about how and why they respond. (So we get suicide bombers). Sometimes they may have some missing brain circuits, and be quite unable to restrain themselves from violence (though I note that armies want people who follow orders, and those with missing brain circuits usually don't qualify). To simply say that many have been trained to follow orders misses one point: whose orders and when and why? But it does catch another point: no society, even free societies, wants to have no one who will not follow orders without thinking about them. And an interesting point about punishment. Virtually all of criminal law aims to punish the offender. That's particularly interesting because it completely ignores the fate of the violated, the injured, and those offended against. Even in cases of massive fraud, much more attention goes to punishing the perpetrator than to restoring the wealth of those defrauded. It's not that we don't want the perpetrators to go about doing the same thing, but that somehow they must be caused pain and trouble "equal" to that of their victims. The victims seem to be too often forgotten. A law or set of customs (would we call it law if it never aimed to punish?) would try to prevent repetition of injuries by those who caused them, AND help the victims recover. Yes, this might mean far more restrictions on perpetrators than now, when they simply serve out their sentence. Such restrictions would be genuinely aimed at preventing repetition, not at causing pain and suffering, even just psychological pain, to the perpetrators. It would also probably violate our carefully built-up ideas about the rights of criminals. And it would pay far more attention to the victims than happens now, too. The entire idea of punishment may someday be seen as a sign of a backward society which we have now outgrown: or to put it in contemporary terms, a form of "evil" so widespread that it cannot be escaped. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20518