Clinton St. Quarterly, Vol. 9 No. 4 | Winter 1987 (Seattle) /// Issue 22 of 24 /// Master# 70 of 73

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had invented calculus, but unfortunately theology and metaphysics remained the preeminent systems of thought. Though elegant and pristinely logical, mathematics just didn’t seem to answer the big questions—does God exist, why is there evil, is death real, and exactly how many angels can danceonthe head of a pin? What was needed was a metaphysics which would reveal the lovely abstractions of mathematics to be the language of Truth. No doubt a lesser mind would have given up, but then lesser minds do not invent calculus. Leibniz persevered, and concocted a metaphysics which rests on one of philosophy’s most curious creations: the monad. The basic building blocks of Leibniz’s metaphysics, monads are similar to atoms, for from them derive all the manifestations of the physical world. But monads are not particles; in fact, they are not physical at all. They exist only ideally and have no extension or form. Instead, each monad consists of a consciousness which, depending on its particular physical manifestation, ranges from the dullness of inanimate objects to the acuity of a human mind. A monad, then, is a sort of atomistic soul. Monads are impervious. Prick the little buggers and they will not bleed. Indeed, the pin will not puncture at all, for this imperviousness is absolute. Each one must, like a perpetual motion machine, generate its internal activities on its own. There is a lot more one could say about monads—they are, especially to certain whimsical types, endlessly fascinating— but one characteristic is particularly important: monads are impervious. Prick the little buggers and they will not bleed. Indeed, the pin will not puncture at all, for this imperviousness is absolute. Each one must, like a perpetual motion machine, generate its internal activities on its own. Nothing outside a monad can have any influence whatsoever on its destiny, and any evidence to the contrary—such as a jury in Georgia sentencing a man to death—is purely illusory. If we could just see the world as it really is then the sound and fury would vanish and before us would stretch, like a million indestructible soap bubbles, a serene expanse of monads. All of which is bunk, but quite imaginative and very clever. Bloodless and abstract, monads bear a remarkable if not entirely surprising resemblance to geometrical points, which comes in quite handy for validating mathematics. Suddenly all those equations and theorems refer not merely to chalkboard figures but to Ultimate Reality. Monads can also come in handy for validating less august ideas, such as the notion that justice is not compromised by the fact that murderers of white people are at least four times more likely to be sentenced to death than murderers of black people. When the Court decided in favor of this idea, it also decided in favor of the metaphysics of monads. N ot that the Court put it in those words. Instead the Court talked of discretion, which it holds in very high esteem. “ Essential to the criminal justice process” is how the Court The Baldus study showed that killers of white people are at least four time more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of black people, and that blacks who murder whites are the most likely of all to be sentenced to death. described the discretion of every decision-maker, from legislator to prosecutor to judge, but to the discretion of the jury went the Court’s highest praise: . . . it is the jury’s function to make the difficult and uniquely human judgments that defy codification and that ‘buil[d] discretion, equity, and flexibility into a legal system.’ . . . . It is the jury that is a criminal defendant’s fundamental “ protection of life and liberty against race or'color prejudice.” Perhaps the Court is being ironic? After all, statistics clearly indicate that juries, especially those in Georgia where the defendant was originally tried and sentenced, do a very poor job of protecting defendants from racial prejudice. If such juries form the best “ protection against prejudice” for a Negro accused of killing a Caucasian, then truly a black person is hard pressed to get a fair trial in this country. Unfortunately the Court is not being ironic. Without flinching, it offered the following line of reasoning. Laws require implementation, and implementation requires discretion, primarily the discretion of the much-applauded jury. Therefore: Because discretion is essential to the criminal justice process, we would demand exceptionally clear proof before we would infer that the discretion has been abused. The Court went on to argue that the defendant in the case, Walter Mc- Cleskey, failed to provide such “ exceptionally clear proof.” What McCleskey did provide was a sophisticated statistical study (the Baldus study) showing that killers of white people are at least four time more likely to receive the death penalty than killers of black people, and that blacks who murder whites, which was Walter McCleskey’s situation, are the most likely of all to be sentenced to death. The Court did not argue the validity of the study itself, but claimed that its conclusions demonstrate only a general racial discrepancy which McCleskey failed to prove operated in his particular case. The Court did admit to a risk that racial prejudice had influenced Mc- Cleskey’s jury, but ruled the risk was not substantial enough to reverse the jury’s decision. And so McCleskey still faces execution. This ruling flies in the face of an old and unbroken tradition of jurisprudence. As Justice Brennan points out in his dissent: Defendants challenging their death sentences . . . never have had to prove that impermissible considerations have actually infected sentencing decisions. We have required instead that they establish that the system under which they were sentenced posed significant risk of such an occurrence. McCleskey’s claim does differ, however, in one respect from these earlier cases: it is the first to base a challenge not on speculation about how a system might operate, but on empirical documentation of how it ddes operate. Leaving Brennan’s argument to the side, assume instead that the Court’s reasoning is valid. The keystone of the Court’s argument is that discretion is essential to the criminal justice process— and indeed it is. Now the real question arises: what exactly is human discretion? In what ways do its inner workings function, what are the necessities and economies of its operation, how does it pass from oaths taken to judgments given? Before trusting something called discretion—and trusting it with human life—the Court has a duty to examine these questions, a duty that it has left derelict. If it has not addressed these questions explicitly, the Court has made assumptions, and those assumptions pose the monad as the model for human discretion. When the Court claims that McCleskey offered no proof that racial bias entered into his particular case, its word- ing g ives away its p h i lo so ph ica l assumptions: . . we hold that the Baldus study is clearly insufficient to support an inference that any of the decisionmakers in McCleskey’s case acted with discriminatory purpose. The Court seizes upon “ discriminatory purpose” in order to limit bigotry to the explicit intention to harm a person because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Gone, or at least out of sight, is the multidimensional reality of bigotry—the fact that bigotry is not always explicit nor even intentional, and that unconscious stereotypes can effect their own purposes which are beyond what the conscious mind intends or even knows. What the Court really shoves out of sight is a truth about the human mind. When it insists that prejudice occurs only where there is explicit discriminatory intention, the Court assumes that the human mind operates independently of subliminal motives and preconceptions, thus producing decisions which are wholly conscious and one-dimensional. In other words, when the Court compresses bigotry into “ discriminatory purpose” it also compresses the human mind into a monad—impervious and self- sufficient. One doesn’t need to be a metaphysicist to know that it just ain’t so. The mind is not a monad. We are open on every side to the influence of external forces; we think by means of language, we act on unconscious motives, we belong to a history. The authority of the Court’s ruling rests on one partiqular metaphysics, and perhaps because this metaphysics has been implicitly but ubiquitously interpolated into our world— Leibniz’s binary number system is the basis for the modern computer, not without its own cultural repercussions—the Court never deemed it necessary to step back and look at its fundamental assumptions. Of course there are a great many metaphysics besides the metaphysics of monads. The better of these do not arrogate human discretion to a state of impervious self-sufficiency, and thus they cope more effectively, and more honestly, with the mess of reality. To say the same thing in another way: If the Court looks at human subjectivity as a sort of magical soap bubble, indestructible and hermetically sealed, then I see subjectivity as a wave, dependent on the ocean of which it is a part. Perhaps that wave can gain a moment of transcendence, such as when it breaks upon a rocky shore and leaps up from the mass of water out of which it arose. But this is the rare exception, happening only once in the life of a wave and costing not less than everything. To transcend the forces which shape our mind—forces which include such societal and historical stereotypes as black life being worth less than Nothing outside a monad can have any influence whatsoever on its destiny, and any evidence to the contrary—such as a jury in Georgia sentencing a man to death— is purely illusory. white life—is ah exceedingly rare and difficult occurrence. Maybe, on some occasions, the jury box precipitates this occurrence and makes monads of its occupants; but are we willing to wager a life that it does? Are we willing to bet on monadological justice? Writer Mark Schoofs lives in San Francisco. An honor graduate in Philosophy from Yale, his work has focussed on how metaphysical assumptions influence cultural attitudes and values. Artist Stephen Leflar is a frequent contributor to CSQ. He lives in Portland. 16 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987

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