What Dialogue Looks Like

I’ve been discussing what dialogue looks like, and I happened to think of something: When I was at school, a friend and I were having a discussion about capital punishment. We disagreed—she was for it and I was against it, but our argument didn’t lead to anger or bitterness. We were just talking. She gave me her reasons for her position and I gave her mine. We actually found that we actually had a lot more in common than I would have thought we did. (We ended up discussing exactly what makes people do what they do and whether nature or nurture has a greater impact on how people develop. We were able to find some common ground in the fact that we both thought that nature and nurture both share responsibility for why people behave the way that they do.)

Now, I hate to admit this, but I usually go into an argument seeing the issue as a win-lose situation. I must assert my views as superior to another person’s. I must use facts and logic and reason and if I can’t convince the other person, then I can at least make her/him look like a fool, which might convince anyone who happens to be listening. Yeah. For all my talk about dialoguing and discussion and understanding, when it comes to topics that I’m passionate about, I can be just as base and emotional as anyone else.

But, that didn’t happen in this situation, probably because I respect my friend. She doesn’t fit my stereotype of people who support the death penalty (I usually see them as rabid fundamentalists who snarl, “An eye for an eye!” and “We’re going to kill you, you dirty son of a bitch! But God loves you!”) and I know that when she makes up her mind about something, she thinks through it thoroughly first, so her arguments were reasonable. In this situation, I didn’t see her as an ignorant opponent that I had the duty to enlighten. She was just my friend and if she wanted to express her opinions, I knew that she would let me do the same.

After our discussion, however, my old habits of thinking came back to me and I wondered, “Doesn’t somebody have to win? I mean, sure, now I know where she’s coming from and she knows where I’m coming from, but the law has to be for or against the death penalty. The courts have to rule one way or the other. Doesn’t somebody still have to win while another person loses?”

The answer: Um, maybe. The thing is, as soon as I thought that, I recalled something I’d read while researching my religion seminar project. The point of the article was that through contradictions in views, we can actually come to a deeper understanding of what our own views are. We can also learn new things about ourselves and our views. The only way to learn about our own opinions and ideologies is to examine the opposites. You can’t see only one side of the argument and claim to know the whole argument.

So, I changed my thinking. Instead of seeing the issue in a win-lose manner, I asked myself, “What can I learn from this discussion?” And I realized that I had a lot to learn.           

The surprising thing is that all of my arguments about why I believe capital punishment is wrong stem from when I was a Christian. I didn’t see a way that any Christian could support the death penalty. Yes, the Old Testament said “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” but hadn’t Jesus overridden that rule when he said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who hate you”? The way I saw it, only God could choose who was to live and die, and we had no right to kill criminals, even if they had committed atrocities. (Even as a little kid, I held this belief. I remember being about seven years old and thinking about the fact that murder was against the law. But the fact that murder was punished by killing the murderer meant, to my seven-year-old mind, that the person who gave the criminal the lethal injection was also guilty of murder and would have to be killed too. So the person who killed him would have to be killed and eventually I concluded that the whole human race would die if this were the case.) I also believed that no one was outside of God’s grace. If someone had enough anger and hate in his or her heart that he or she had committed a capital offense, that was just because he or she didn’t know the saving love of Jesus. For this reason, murders should be given the chance to convert to Christianity and be saved, not merely fried in the electric chair. I loved stories of serial killers confessing their sins to prison chaplains and being baptized. God had forgiven them and they were going to heaven where all the pain in their hearts would be healed.

When I left Christianity, I took my ideas about the death penalty with me. I’d so internalized my idea that the death penalty was wrong that I hadn’t bothered to re-examine just why I thought it was wrong. Until my discussion with my friend. When I heard her reasons for being for the death penalty, all of my old Christian arguments leapt to the forefront of my mind. “Life is sacred!” I wanted to shout, but then I stopped myself and asked, “Why is life sacred? Because God says so? How do you even know that there’s a God?” Fortunately, I knew enough about sociology, economics, and psychology to make some arguments that actually made sense and didn’t depend on an omni-benevolent deity (the idea of which this friend and I also discuss in great depth and agree probably doesn’t exist)

What surprised me though is how long it’s been since I’ve examine my beliefs. I was also shocked that I had very little information at my disposal to back up my claims. I could argue against the death penalty from a Christian perspective, but I’m not a Christian anymore, so I needed something stronger. The arguments that I did have would only impress a Christian, and this friend wasn’t a Christian, so anything that I would have said about serial killers being born again wouldn’t have meant anything to her.

She also made a good point about capital punishment for serial killers. We didn’t delve too much into the death penalty for one-time murderers. We focused specifically on criminals who were sociopaths. The death penalty for someone who murders multiple people and eats them or chops up their body parts and stores them in a freezer seems a little more palatable than the death penalty for the guy who got angry and shot the man who was sleeping with his girlfriend. I had to admit that there does seem to be some grey area there.

When I usually think of the death penalty, I think of stories about innocent men (I’m sure such stories exist about women too) who spend years in jail, going through agonizing appeals, and are finally convicted to death row. Then, a few years later, some new DNA evidence is revealed that proves that he didn’t do it! The man is unceremoniously kicked out of jail with nothing—no money, no clothes, no apologizes. He has just lost five, ten, maybe even twenty years of his life, years that he could have spent with his wife and children and grandchildren, but he was falsely convicted of a capital offense and almost killed for something that he didn’t do. When I hear these stories, my gut reaction is usually, Better to let all of the real murders live to let just one of these innocent men not have to die unnecessarily!

And I think that I do have a point there. I also think—and I would need to look up statistics on this—that the majority of death row inmates are probably not sociopathic serial killers. However, let’s take the cases of those who are. Should they be killed?

It’s an interesting question and I never really thought about it. When I was a Christian, I would have said that Jesus could heal anything, but now that I don’t have Jesus to fall back on, what am I left with? Sociological theory, well, that speculates that sociopathy is a result of the general individualism in our society that has led to the break up of the family and other close bonds. Psychology? Well, there’s no cure for sociopathy. At least, not that we know of. Therapy, as far as I know, seems to be ineffective. So, what are we supposed to do with these people?

Obviously, I need to do more research, but the first thought that comes to mind is that, well, we could look for some sort of method to rehabilitate these people. To do that, we’d have to keep them alive. (Although my friend did suggest examining their brain chemistry once they were dead. Although, with the brain-imaging technology that we have now, we could examine how their brains worked while they were alive too.) I mean, if we came up with a method for rehabilitating these people, then healing them would certainly be a better option than killing them. (And, no, I’m not talking about rehabilitating them in a Clockwork Orange kind of way. For instance, supposing that serial killers’ pathologies were caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, sort of like clinical depression, and psychiatrists developed a drug that could restore a normal chemical balance to the brain, much like depression medication. Then, obviously, the more humane thing to do would be to give this pill to serial killers and not execute them, though life in prison probably wouldn’t be out of the question.)

However, as it stands, we don’t have such a pill and we don’t seem to be developing anything like it. So, in the meantime, what should we do with these people? Though they usually seem to suffer from horrible traumas in childhood, as far as I know, therapy doesn’t seem to help them. (This is how my friend and I began talking about nature versus nurture—the idea that people are biologically born to act a certain way versus the idea that the environment in which you are raised in affects how you act. We agreed that there is a certain mixture of both involved in why people behave the way that they do, but we couldn’t decide how much each contributed. Considering that psychologists wiser than us have been debating this issue for decades, I think it’s okay that we didn’t come to any definite conclusions.)

Anyway, whatever we do with the serial killers, my point is that, by talking with someone who disagreed with me, I realized that my own position was is pretty weak and I hadn’t examined my views on the death penalty for a long time. And I also became aware of some grey areas in which the death penalty actually might seem okay. And I also learned that people who support capital punishment are not always just ignorant fundamentalists who get love reminding everyone how much they deserve to suffer for their sins. People who support the death penalty can be rational, reasonable, intelligent people. And I don’t have to prove myself right or worry about taking my opposition down. People can disagree without making themselves right and the other party wrong. People can dialogue.

Overall, I think that it was pretty positive experience, and I definitely will try to keep it in the mind the next time I run into somebody who doesn’t think the same way that I do.