Human error

I had a rather unnerving experience last night, when I heard about the plane crash into the Potomac. In the afternoon, I had made the infamous Cameron Todd Willingham case the subject of my seminar on criminal punishment issues. This case featured the judicial murder by the state of Texas of an obviously innocent ,man, who was convicted for committing a non-existent crime, on the basis of no evidence beyond grotesque junk science presented by fake experts, and the testimony of a literally psychotic jailhouse snitch.

Willingham died at the hands of the state because of the extreme indifference of the legal system to the fact that Texas’s public defender system is a bad joke, and because what federal constitutional rights criminal defendants are supposed to have are, as William Stuntz argued, almost purely procedural. This means in practice that if all the right letters were crossed and dotted, the fact that your trial was a farce and you’re factually innocent doesn’t cut much ice with the interpreters of the Great Writ. (Antonin Scalia, who I sincerely hope is suffering the tortures of the damned in plus soul time or minus space time, went so far as to claim there was no constitutional right not to be executed for such a trivial reason as being actually innocent of the crime for which you were convicted, or, as in Willingham’s case, the imaginary crime that never happened).

So in the course of the discussion I tried to get the students to think about why the combined majesty of the courts of Texas and the Several States did not display any actual concern about the fact that they were collectively killing an innocent man. Without having planned to do so ahead of time, it occurred to me during the discussion to use the example of how much effort we put into making sure people don’t get killed by mistakes committed in the course of commercial airline travel. I pointed out to the students that there hadn’t been a fatal crash of a commercial airliner in the US in 15 years, or on a legacy carrier since 2001, i..e., probably before some of them were born.

Why do we expend such immense resources to make sure commercial air travel is almost unimaginably safe, and so few resources to ensure that a poor man who can’t afford a lawyer isn’t murdered by a superstitious legal mob in a small Texas town, with a big assist from The Supreme Court of the United States?

Any plausible answer to that question involves the kind critical thinking about the American legal, economic, and social systems that authoritarian reactionaries in general, and neo-fascists like Donald Trump and Co. in particular, absolutely despise, and are doing their best to try to stamp out in our colleges and universities.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism, June 22, 1995