Crime and Punishment

Saudi Arabia, the country that spawned three-fourths of the 9/11 hijackers, officially wants to encourage religious moderation and tolerance. Here's how that's working out in practice:

A Saudi high-school chemistry teacher accused of discussing religion with his students has been sentenced to 750 lashes and 40 months in prison for blasphemy, officials said Thursday. ... Al-Harbi was convicted of questioning and ridiculing Islam [by] discussing the Bible and defending Jews, judicial officials said Thursday.

Comments

[Phil]

Let freedom ring.

[tarran]

750 lashes!

That'll kill him! ... Poor guy. The best he can hope for is to be permanently injured.

[Martin Owens]

I used to work over there, helping to train the Saudi Navy ( don't ask). One of the favorite tactics of the lazy and devious students was to accuse the teacher of something un-Islamic: drinking, preaching Christianity, anything to get out of that next test. Over there, there is no such thing as a harmless, off the record discussion.

An acquaintance of mine, a teacher over there, was accused of "witchcraft" for trying to explain the chemical reactions that cure xylene paint, to a vicious little bastard with camel shit between the ears ( he got the idea from the Saudi government, who had been beheading dissidents on that same charge). Fortunately the instructor had taken precautions to stay on good terms with the Saudi supervisors, so in this instance it was the student who got a flogging. But we ought to file this away for future reference: when it's in their interests, our so-called allies can be limitlessly treacherous.

[Jeff the Poustman]

With "tarran", above, I wonder how the fellow could possibly survive 750 lashes.

If I have my facts straight, "flogging 'round the fleet" in the British Navy of the Napoleonic era meant 30 lashes per ship, then the prisoner was moved to another ship and so on.

750 lashes would mean 25 ships worth. I wonder if anyone ever survived-- even with the downtime between ships-- with that much physical damage.

[Jeff the Poustman]

My comment on "flogging 'round the fleet" and the measures taken by the Roman empire against various criminals (in their definition) makes me wonder about the whole issue of state 'success' (especially in times of war-- whatever war might be defined as) versus individual 'success'.

CS Lewis wrote that democratic societies tend to dislike the kind of behaviors that make democratic societies viable.

This idea, along with Toynbee's analyses, suggests to me that a culture rises to prosperity and power on the basis of one ethical system, and then those with power (especially those born into it) tend to reject that ethical system. They create an ethical system of their own, which tends to produce not a power-achieving state, but a power-maintaining state. In turn, the next generation tends to reject this second ethical system and create one that is essentially given to the pursuit of individual fulfillment at the expense of state 'success'. Usually it is a matter of very few generations more before the decline of that culture is such that neither state nor individual enjoy much, if any, success. See most of Europe today for a sobering example.

The one factor that tends to increase the duration of a culture's viability *seems* to be aggressive (military) expansion. Historically this has the tendency to play up the values that keep the state on the ascendant, and keep individual rights/privileges less so.

It is like the 'blue collar to blue collar in three generations' phenomenon.

It seems to me that individuals living in each era would have very different degrees of personal fulfillment, freedom, and liberty, but I don't see how any one era can endure for much more than a few generations before the upcoming generation rejects the dominant ethos in favor of one they prefer, which moves things on to the next stage.

[Jeff the Poustman]

I think of Rockefeller's maxim that when the man on the street gives you a tip about a given stock, it is time to get out of that stock.

It's like the advanced reading group, the normal group, and the remedial group in elementary school.

Right now, the yes-men of the culture are drunk on tolerance. The avante-garde (hat tip to Rogier) are talking about nannies. The Deliverance mountain men are still racist/homophobes (in the popular mind, at least. I've never met one, so I don't know for sure.)

Before long the portly middle-aged bourgeoisie will be talking about nannies. The mountain men will be preaching tolerance. (Tolerance of their pet vices, at least. To the cousins! Holy consanguinity, batman!)

What will the avante-garde be talking about then?

Sooner or later, I suspect, the smart, hip kids will start talking about self-sacrifice, 'proper Roman virtues' (see Gibbon or Rome: Total War (videogame)) and such ideas. And the state and it's success will start to be a much 'cooler' idea than it is right now.

To the cool kids, Teddy R was the darling of his day; Dubya, the goat. It's largely about context (but I still think Teddy was cooler-- and probably much smarter.)

[Padonak]

Right now, the yes-men of the culture are drunk on tolerance. The avante-garde (hat tip to Rogier) are talking about nannies. The Deliverance mountain men are still racist/homophobes (in the popular mind, at least. I've never met one, so I don't know for sure.)