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Recall the dictum uttered by Ivan Karamazov in the novel, The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a moment of self-tormenting doubt about the moral chaos that results from the denial of God, Ivan Karamazov exclaims, "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted." Ivan's dictum points to the necessary check on human self-assertion. Speaking through his character Ivan, Dostoevsky recognized (well before Freud stated in The Future of an Illusion) that if there is no limit on human freedom, then indeed everything is permitted; any act can be committed, however tasteless and base, cruel or criminal. The inevitable result is chaos.
So let's start with this question: is our fascination with violence, particularly televised violence, natural to human beings or unnatural? Dostoevsky had his own answer. He believed that the fascination with violent behavior was natural to human beings. Dostoevsky, like Shakespeare before him, put violence at the center of his stories. His characters commit acts of murder, suicide, incest, and rape, which immerse them in struggles for the winning and losing of their souls.
What Dostoevsky dramatized in his novels was the human dialectic of violence: we are as fascinated by violence as we are repelled by it. Dostoevsky was as good a psychologist as he was a storyteller. He once accused his fellow Russian writer Turgenev of cowardice for refusing to witness the public execution of a murderer in Paris. Dostoevsky wrote, "No man has a right to turn away and ignore what is taking place on earth." One of his biographers writes:
[Dostoevsky] would have watched, open-eyed and pale-faced, the chopping off of a criminal's head as he did the tearing off of heads of sparrows as a boy so as to experience [as Dostoevsky himself put it] "during the very process of torture a sort of inexplicable pity and consciousness of one's own inhumanity," the sort of "cruel sensuality" to which "almost everyone on earth" was prone and which was "the only source of almost all the sins of mankind."1
In thinking about Dostoevsky's self-admission, we should ask ourselves if the televising of state-ordered executions would increase or decrease public support for the death penalty. As we contemplate this question, we must also note that in China today,...