The Ultimate Meaninglessness of “Crime”

We’ve seen an increasing number of anecdotes trickling out about once-loyal voters rejecting the Administration’s ham-handed deportation policies. Though it’s hard to derive meaningful data from isolated anecdotes, the number of stories like this one and this one about Trump voters getting burned by the administration they once supported. Many stories share a theme: “we” thought the Administration would only deport “criminals,” and we don’t consider ourselves criminals.

On one level, they’re correct: under American statutes, immigration falls under civil, not criminal, law. “Illegal” immigration is a non-category, because the word illegal refers only to crimes, not civil violations. But on another level, this reveals something uncomfortable for many Americans, that “crime” itself isn’t a fixed concept. Many undocumented immigrants don’t consider themselves criminals because they’ve committed no violent or property crime; so the Administration simply redefines “crime.”

Much American political discourse centers on “crime,” especially when Democrats hold the Oval Office. As sociologist Barry Glassner writes, fear of crime is a powerful motivator for tradition-minded voters, a motivator Republicans employ effectively. Glassner writes about how rabble rousers used fear of crime to shanghai the Clinton Administration, but the same applies broadly whenever Democrats hold majority power. We saw it during the Obama and Biden years too.

However, exactly what constitutes crime depends on who does the constituting. My core readership probably remembers John Erlichman, former White House Counsel, who admitted the Nixon Administration simply fabricated the War on Drugs as pretext to harass anti-war and Civil Rights protesters. The notorious Comstock Laws channeled one man’s sense of injured propriety to criminalize porn, contraception, pharmaceutical abortion, and the kitchen sink. Moral umbrage beats harm in defining “crimes.”

This doesn’t mean harm doesn’t exist or states should repeal every law. Murder, theft, and sexual assault are clearly wrong, because they cause manifest harm and devalue victims’ lives, bodies, and labors. But these transgressions only become “crimes” when governments pass laws against them. Legal philosophers might debate whether decriminalizing murder would make murder happen more often. Personally, I doubt it; neither Prohibition nor its repeal affected drinking numbers much.

Prohibition, therefore, proves the moral fuzziness of crimes. Both the Al Capone-style Prohibition, and contemporary drug prohibition, arose not from obvious harm (most pot-heads are too lethargic to hurt anybody), but from moral panic and public outrage. Governments made laws against substances lawmakers found abhorrent, then assumed citizens would avoid those substances, simply because they’re illegal. Then they act surprised when drinking or drugs persist.

This happens because these things aren’t innately crimes; they become crimes because lawmakers make laws. Similarly, while it’s clearly harmful if I steal money from your wallet, other property “crimes” have squishier histories. Squatting, for instance: once legal, it became illegal in America, as James Loewen writes, largely to circumscribe where Native Americans were allowed to hunt and camp. Lawmakers created laws, where none previously existed, to punish transgressors.

Immigration law follows similar patterns. Abrahamic scripture urges the faithful to welcome immigrants because, in that time, borders didn’t really exist. People moved freely, and provided they followed local laws and customs, largely changed nationhood liberally. Though serfdom tied workers to lands and lords in the late medieval period, modern concepts of the nation-state and international borders existed only as legal abstractions. Only during wartime did states enforce borders much.

This Administration can redefine civil infractions, like undocumented immigration, as crimes, because that’s how things become crimes. States will borders into existence by legal legerdemain, then demand that people remain permanently circumscribed by these fictional lines. Perhaps that’s why “the Wall” looms so large in MAGA mythology: because borders don’t really exist, so we need something manifest and palpable to make borders real.

These MAGA voters who feel betrayed because the Administration deported their loved ones, assumed that they weren’t “criminals” because they used a broad, popular definition of criminality. They didn’t perform acts of violence or property destruction, they reckoned, so therefore they weren’t criminals. They didn’t anticipate the Administration using crime’s fuzzy, amorphous nature against them, and therefore were caught unprepared when the definition of “crime” moved to surround them.

Civil society has two responses available. We could eliminate self-serving, avaricious laws, and allow people more discretion. There’s no objective reason people must live within certain borders, except that lawmakers need to control despised minorities. But we know society probably won’t choose that response. More likely, our lawmakers will write harsher, more draconian laws to eliminate this flexibility. Which will then be used against us ordinary people.

I'll Be Back, I Guess, Or Whatever

Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries Vol. 1

The cyborg that calls itself “Murderbot” would happily watch downloaded soap operas, 24/7, if had the opportunity. But it has no such liberty: as wholly owned property of an interstellar mining company, it provides security for survey operations on distant planets. Unbeknownst to its owners, though, Murderbot has disabled its own governing systems. Because it doesn’t trust its owners, and it’s prepared to fight them if necessary.

Martha Wells originally published her “Murderbot” stories as freestanding novellas, but those often make tough selling at mainstream bookstores. So her publisher is now re-releasing the stories in omnibus paperback editions. Readers get more of Wells’ story arc, which combines sociological science fiction with the open-ended narrative we recognize from prime-time soap operas. Think The Terminator meets Peyton Place.

In the first novella, “All Systems Red,” we discover Murderbot’s character and motivation. It works because it must, and being property, has no right to refuse. But it’s also altered its own programming, granting itself free agency which fellow “constructs” don’t enjoy. If nobody finds out, it can watch its downloads in relative peace. Problem is, someone has infiltrated its latest contract, turning fellow security cyborgs against their humans.

The second novella, “Artificial Condition,” follows Murderbot in its quest to uncover who violated the constructs’ programming and turned work into a slaughter. It just happens that whatever transgression made that violence possible, coincides with the biggest secret in Murderbot’s individual history. So Murderbot goes off-grid, seeking information that might shed light on why deep-space mining has recently become such a brutal enterprise.

Wells pinches popular sci-fi action themes readers will recognize from longstanding franchises like Star Trek, Flash Gordon, and Stargate. But she weaves those motifs together with an anthropological investigation of what makes someone human. Murderbot is nameless, sexless, and has no prior identity; it’s a complete cypher. Although it has organic components, they’re lab-grown; no part of Murderbot has ever been even tangentially human.

Martha Wells

Unlike prior artificial persons (Commander Data comes immediately to mind), Murderbot has no desire to become human. It observes humanity as entertainment, and performs its job without complaint. But doing that job has cost humans their lives in the past, a history that gives Murderbot a sense of lingering guilt. This forces it, and us, to ask whether morals and culpability apply to something built in a factory and owned boy a corporation.

The questions start small and personal. Murderbot works for its human clients, and exists specifically to keep them alive. But fellow security cyborgs have turned on their owners in another mining camp. This forces Murderbot to question whether its own survival matters enough to risk actual human lives, even tangentially. It actually says no, but its clients have anthropomorphized their cyborg guard and want it to live.

As details of the crime become clear, so does a larger view of Murderbot’s world. It occupies a world of interplanetary capitalism, where one’s ability to spend lavishly defines one’s survival. Without money or employment history, Murderbot can only investigate the parallel mysteries hanging over its head by trading its one useful commodity: the ability to communicate with technology. With Murderbot around, humanity’s sentient machines start feeling class consciousness.

I’ve already mentioned The Terminator and Star Trek’s Commander Data. Despite its name, Murderbot shares little with either android. It doesn’t want to kill, and admits it would abandon its mission if given the opportunity. But it also doesn’t aspire to become more human. Misanthropic and unburdened by social skills, its greatest aspiration is to be left alone. Yet it knows it cannot have this luxury, and must keep moving in order to survive.

This volume contains two stories, which weren’t written to pass as freestanding. This struck me in the first story: there’s no denouement, only an end. Had I read this novella without a larger context, I probably would’ve resented this, and not bought the second volume. Taken together, though, it’s easier to see the soap operatic motif. Both stories end so abruptly, readers can practically hear the music lingering over the “To Be Continued” title card.

It's easy to enjoy this book. Murderbot, as our first-person narrator, writes with dry sarcasm that contrasts with its setting. It’s forced to pass as human, in an anti-humanist universe where money trumps morality. It only wants privacy, but wherever it goes, it’s required to make friends and basically unionize the sentient machines. Martha Wells uses well-known science fiction building blocks in ironic ways that draw us into Murderbot’s drama.

Further Thoughts on the Futility of Language

Patrick Stewart (left) and Paul Winfield in the Star Trek episode “Darmok”

This essay is a follow-up to my prior essay Some Stray Thoughts on the Futility of Language

The popularity of Star Trek means that, more than most science fiction properties, its references and in-jokes exceed the bounds of genre fandom. Even non-junkies recognize inside references like “Dammit, Jim,” and “Beam me up.” But the unusual specificity of the 1991 episode “Darmok” exceeds those more general references. In that episode, the Enterprise crew encounters a civilization that speaks entirely in metaphors from classical mythology.

Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, in his book Metaphors We Live By, contends that much language consists of metaphors. For Lakoff, this begins with certain small-scale metaphors describing concepts we can’t describe directly: in an argument, we might “defend our position” and “attack our opponents.” We “build an argument from the ground up,” make sure we have “a firm foundation.” The debate ends, eventually, when we “see the other person’s point.”

Such first-level metaphors persist across time because, fundamentally, we need them. Formal debate structures shift little, and the figures of speech remain useful, even as the metaphors of siege warfare become obsolete. While speakers and authors repeat the metaphors, they retain their currency. Perhaps, if people stopped passing such metaphors onto the next generation, they might fade away, but so far, that hasn’t happened in any way I’ve spotted.

More pliable metaphors arise from cultural currents that might not persevere in the same way. Readers around my age will immediately recognize the metaphor when I say: “Read my lips, no new taxes.” They may even insert President George H.W. Bush’s hybrid Connecticut/Texas accent. For several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the “Read my lips” metaphor bespoke a tough, belligerent political stance that stood involate… until it didn’t.

In the “Darmok” episode, to communicate human mythic metaphors, Captain Picard describes the rudiments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, humanity’s oldest known surviving work of fiction. Picard emphasizes his familiarity with ancient myth in the denouement by reading the Homeric Odes, one of the principal sources of Iron Age Greek religious ritual. For Picard, previously established in canon as an archeology fan, the earliest myths represent humanity’s narrative foundation.

But does it? While a nodding familiarity with Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad remain staples of liberal education, how many people, outside the disciplines of Sumeriology and classical studies, read Gilgamesh and the Homeric Odes? I daresay that most Americans, if they read mythology at all, mostly read Bulfinch’s Mythology and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, both of which sanitized Greek tradition for the Christian one-room schoolhouse.

The attached graphic uses two cultural metaphors to describe the writer’s political aspirations. The reference to Elvis on the toilet repeats the widespread cultural myth that Elvis Presley, remembered by fans as the King of Rock and Roll, passed away mid-bowel movement. There’s only one problem: he didn’t. Elvis’ loved ones found him unconscious on the bathroom floor, following a heart attack; he lingered a few days before dying in hospital.

The drift between Elvis as cultural narrative, and Elvis as historic fact, represents the concept of “mythology” in the literary critical sense. We speak of Christian mythology, the mythology of the Founding Fathers, and the myths of the Jersey Devil and prairie jackalope. These different “mythologies” represent, neither facts nor lies, but stories we tell to understand concepts too sweeping to address directly. Storytelling becomes a synecdoche for comprehension.

Similarly, the broad strokes of Weekend at Bernie’s have transcended the movie itself. It’s questionable how many people watched the movie, beyond the trailer. But the underlying premise has become a cultural touchstone. Likewise, one can mention The Crying Game or The Sixth Sense, and most Americans will understand the references, whether they’ve seen the movies or not. The vague outlines have become part of our shared mythology.

But the movies themselves haven’t become so. Especially as streaming services have turned movie-watching into a siloed enterprise, how many people watch older movies of an evening? We recognize Weekend at Bernie’s, released in 1989, as the movie where two doofuses use their boss’s corpse as backstage pass to moneyed debauchery. But I doubt how many people could state what actually happened, beyond the most sweeping generalities.

Both Elvis and Bernie have come unmoored from fact. Their stories, like those of Gilgamesh and Darmok, no longer matter; only the cultural vibe surrounding them survives. Language becomes a shorthand for understanding, but it stops being a vessel of actual meaning. We repeat the cultural references we think we share, irrespective of whether we know what really happened, because the metaphor, not the fact, matters.

Some Stray Thoughts on the Futility of Language

I think I was in seventh grade when I realized that I would probably never understand my peers. In church youth group, a young man approximately my age, but who attended another middle school, talked about meeting his school’s new Egyptian exchange student. “I could tell right away,” this boy—a specimen of handsome, square-jawed Caucasity who looked suspiciously adult, so I already distrusted him—said, “that he was gonna be cool.”

“How could you tell?” the adult facilitator asked.

“Because he knew the right answer when I asked, ‘What’s up?’”

Okay, tripping my alarm bells already. There’s a correct answer to an open-ended question?

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found that fishy, because the adult facilitator and another youth simultaneously asked, “What’s the correct answer then?”

“He said, ‘What’s up?’” my peer said, accompanied by a theatrically macho chin thrust.

(The student being Egyptian also mattered, in 1987, because this kid evidently knew how to “Walk Like an Egyptian.”)

This peer, and apparently most other preteens in the room, understood something that I, the group facilitator, and maybe two other classmates didn’t understand: people don’t ask “What’s up?” because they want to know what’s up. They ask because it’s a prescribed social ritual with existing correct responses. This interaction, which I perceived as a request for information, is actually a ritual, about as methodical and prescriptive as a Masonic handshake.

My adult self, someone who reads religious theory and social science for fun, recognizes something twelve-year-old Kevin didn’t know. This prefixed social interaction resembles what Émile Durkheim called “liturgy,” the prescriptive language religious people use in ceremonial circumstances. Religious liturgy permits fellow believers to state the same moral principles in unison, thus reinforcing their shared values. It also inculcates their common identity as a people.

The shared linguistic enterprise, which looks stiff, meaningless, and inflexible to outsiders, is purposive to those familiar with the liturgy. Speaking the same words together, whether the Apostle’s Creed or the Kaddish or the Five Pillars of Islam, serves to transform the speakers. Same with secular liturgy: America’s Pledge of Allegiance comes to mind. Durkheim cited his native France’s covenants of Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternité.

This confused me, a nerdy and socially inept kid who understood life mainly through books, because I thought language existed to convey information. Because “What’s up?” is structured as a question, I perceived it as a question, meaning I perceived it as a request for clarifying information. I thought the “correct” answer was either a sarcastic rejoinder (“Oh, the sky, a few clouds…”) or an actual narrative of significant recent events.

No, I wasn’t that inept, I understood that when most people ask “How are you today,” it was a linguistic contrivance, and the correct answer is “fine.” I understood that people didn’t really want to know how you’re doing, especially if you’re doing poorly. But even then, the language was primarily informative: I’m here, the answer says, and I’m actively listening to you speak.

However, the “What’s up?” conundrum continues to nag me, nearly forty years later, because it reveals that most people don’t want information, at least not in spoken form. Oral language exists mainly to build group bonds, and therefore consists of ritual calls and responses. We love paying homage to language as communication, through formats like broadcast news, political speeches, and deep conversations. But these mostly consist of rituals.

Consider: when was the last time you changed your mind because of a spoken debate? This may mean the occasional staged contacts between, say, liberals and conservatives, or between atheists and Christians. Every four years, we endure the tedium of televised Presidential debates, but apart from standout moments like “They’re eating the pets,” we remember little of them, and we’re changed by less.

For someone like me, who enjoys unearthing deeper questions, that’s profoundly frustrating. When I talk to friends, I want to talk about things, not just talk at one another. Perhaps that’s why I continue writing this blog, instead of moving to YouTube or TikTok, where I’d receive a larger audience and more feedback. Spoken language, in short, is for building bonds; written language is for information.

Put another way, the question “What’s up?” isn’t about the individuals speaking, it’s about the unit they become together. Bar chats, water cooler conversations, and Passing the Peace at church contain no information, they define the group. Only when we sit down, alone, to read silently, do we really seek to truly discover what’s up.

The Shadows and Glaciers of Northern Norway

C.J. Cooke, The Nesting: a Novel

Sophie Hallerton has just secured a coveted job nannying for an esteemed British widower raising his children in Norway’s remote northern forest. One problem: she isn’t Sophie Hallerton. She’s Lexi Ellis, a chronic screw-up who stole Sophie Hallerton’s credentials to escape looming homelessness, or worse. When Lexi arrives in Norway, though, she finds that Tom Faraday’s house conceals secrets that make her lies seem small.

I really liked C.J. Cooke’s most recent novel, The Book of Witching, which combined family drama, mystery, and historical saga with a distinct voice. So I grabbed Cooke’s 2020 book expecting something similar. Indeed, she mixes liberally again from multiple genres with broad audience appeal. Somehow, though, the ingredients come together without much urgency, and I’m left feeling disappointed as I close the final cover.

Architect Tom Faraday needs a nanny to nurture and homeschool his daughters, because their mother committed suicide in a Norwegian fjord. Anyway, everyone believes Aurelia committed suicide. We dedicated readers know that, the more confidently the characters believe something in Act One, the more certainly they’ll see their beliefs shattered by Act Three. This is just one place where Cooke invites readers to see themselves as in on the joke.

Lexi secures the nanny position with her filched credentials and some improv skills, only to discover she’s pretty effective. But once ensconced in Tom’s rural compound, she finds the entire family up to their eyeballs in deceit and secrets. Tom’s build, in honor of his late wife’s earth-friendly principles, is badly overdrawn and short-handed. The housekeeper hovers like Frau Blucher. And Tom’s married business partners are fairly shady, too.

Supernatural elements intrude on Lexi’s rural life. Animal tracks appear inside the house, then vanish without leading anywhere. Tom’s older daughter, just six, draws pictures of the Sad Lady, a half-human spectre that lingers over her memories of Aurelia. The Sad Lady maybe escaped from Aurelia’s hand-translated compendium of Norwegian folklore. A mysterious diary appears in Lexi’s locked bedroom, chock-a-block with implications that Tom might’ve killed his wife.

C.J. Cooke

If this sounds familiar, you aren’t wrong. Cooke introduces her stylistic borrowings in an unusually forthright manner. Lexi reads “Nordic Noir” novels in her spare time, signposting the sepulchral midwinter setting, and Lexi describes her ward’s artwork as “Gothic,” the correct term for this novel’s many locked-room puzzles. This boldly announces Cooke’s two most prominent influences, Henning Mankell and Henry James, whose influence lingers throughout the story.

Unfortunately for contemporary English-language readers, Cooke also writes with those authors’ somber pace. Her story introduces even more narrative threads than I’ve mentioned, and more than the characters themselves know, because her shifting viewpoint means we have information the characters lack. We know how intricate their scaffold of lies has become, and sadly, we know that if that scaffold collapsed, most characters would be more relieved than traumatized.

Cooke unrolls her threads slowly and deliberatively. The narration sometimes includes time jumps of weeks, even months. Probably even longer, because Tom’s ambitious experimental earth-house would take considerably longer to build than something conventional and timber-framed; one suspects Cooke doesn’t realize the logistics that go into construction. Characters have mind-shattering revelations about each other, sometimes false, then sit on them for months.

Indeed, despite the unarguable presence of a carnivorous Norwegian monster inside the house, it’s possible to forget, because it disappears for weeks. Cooke’s real interest, and the novel’s real motivation when it has one, is the human drama. We watch the tensions and duplicity inside the Faraday house amplify, a tendency increased by geographic isolation. Indeed, we see every lie the character tell, except one: what really happened to Aurelia.

This novel would’ve arguably been improved by removing the folk horror subplot, focusing on the human characters. But that would require restructuring the storytelling. The characters linger at a low simmer for chapter after chapter, then someone does something to change the tenor, and for a moment, we reach a boil. Cook’s Nordic atmospherics, and glacial pace, put the best moments—and there are several good moments—too far apart.

Then, paradoxically, the denouement happens too quickly. After 300 pages of slow, ambient exposition, Cooke abruptly ends the narrative in a manner that leaves many threads unresolved. Despite Cooke’s pacing errors, I found myself invested in Lexi’s journey of discovery, only to find it ends hastily, in a manner scarcely prompted by prior events. Cooke’s narrative doesn’t conclude, it just ends.

I’ll probably read Cooke again. But after this one, I’ll approach her with more caution.