by Bill Moyers
The Taliban does it. Al-Qaeda does it. The IR A in Ireland did it. Bin Laden says that chopping off heads is a justified form of punishment. What does it say that violent death becomes a policy option, that in the name of life, we take life?
I think that there are many things within the human soul or within the human character that we ignore. There’s a tendency to violence in all of us. There’s even, I believe, a prehistoric desire for human sacrifice. We see it in all ancient cultures. I refer to it in my book How the Irish Saved Civilization. Before Christianity, the Irish sacrificed children and prisoners of war. The Jews seemed to have been doing it in the time of Genesis. The near sacrifice of Isaac is an example of the Jews finally rejecting human sacrifice.
What does the death penalty tell you as you survey civilization over the ages?
Well, getting rid of it is a very new phenomenon. It wasn’t very long ago that all societies had the death penalty. Of course, a historian really wants a few hundred years to elapse before he makes a statement about the importance of anything. But I think the death penalty is among the touchstones right now of where different societies are going. The crueler societies—China, Saudi Arabia, the United States—support the death penalty. The more generous societies in Western Europe do not.
And yet that’s the continent that was ravaged by one war after another for so long.
They finally learned something—thanks especially to what happened in the World War I and World War II, in which Europeans behaved abominably. Maybe they learned that it was time not to do that sort of thing anymore. And that’s basically what at the end of the seventeenth century the original Anabaptists were doing. The people who became the Quakers, the Mennonites—people like that—were the first against capital punishment. They were the very first people to try to reform prisons so that they would not simply be places where other people were punished. They were to be put in penitentiaries, where they could repent.
Penitentiaries—penitence.
Yes!
You say repentance happened in the story of Dominique Green.
Oh, yes, very much. And a man who goes up and down death row seeking to forgive and be forgiven is not somebody we have to be afraid of.
And you really believe, as you’ve been quoted as saying, that Dominique Green turned that prison cell on death row into a zone of peace?
Well, you see in somebody’s body, in their face and their eyes, in the way they move—you see what they’re about. This was a young man who was deeply at peace with himself, who embraced you with his language since he couldn’t get through the glass partition when you visited him.
What struck you?
Instead of talking about himself—the poor conditions he had to live in, the other inmates, the past, the looming execution—he wanted desperately to talk about books and writing. He had become a great reader in the eleven years that he had been in prison. The book that he had read most recently and that he really cared deeply about was Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness, which is Archbishop Tutu’s book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. But what also came out was that even though they’re all in solitary confinement and you would think they can’t communicate with one another, they manage. Human beings are incredibly resourceful in situations like this, and Dominique was able to send that book up and down that death row after he had read it.
Tutu’s book—handed from cell to cell?
Yes, and most of the inmates on death row agreed that they had to ask forgiveness from the people they had hurt and to forgive those who had hurt them, insofar as they could. There was this tremendous—you’d have to call it a conversion. That’s certainly what it sounds like to me, all these guys on death row that nobody cares about, asking forgiveness on the basis of a book.
Did Dominique Green ever get to communicate that to the family of the victim in that crime?
The victim, a man named Andrew Lastrapes, was still in his thirties when he was killed. He had two small children—two sons—who became friends of Dominique in his last days. You don’t have an awful lot of things to give away on death row. Dominique gave Tutu’s book to one of the sons of Andrew Lastrapes. And the other son received a rosary that Dominique kept around his neck. And each bead on that rosary was a reminder of one of the people on death row who had been executed before Dominique and who had helped Dominique to become the person he became.
And you truly believe he was a changed man after eleven years there? He had been nineteen years old when he was arrested for the killing.
That cell in that prison became the means of his transformation. Yes, I believe it. I saw it.
You heard about Dominique Green from the community of Sant’Egidio in the Trastevere district of Rome, where you and your wife, Susan, live when you’re not in New York. That’s the community dedicated to bringing an end to capital punishment around the world, right?
Yes.
As I understand it, you and they were able to honor Dominique Green’s request that he be cremated and that the ashes be placed in that ancient church in Rome, Santa Maria in Trastevere, not far from your home there.
Yes. Well, he couldn’t be buried within the Basilica of Santa Maria itself, because of secular laws affecting interment within those churches. But he has been interred in a beautiful anteroom within the Piazza of Santa Maria. That’s where he is. He didn’t want to be buried in Texas.
We were in Rome in the spring, and walked from that piazza to the Colosseum. That’s when I learned that because of Italy’s opposition to the death penalty, the Colosseum is lit up when a death sentence is commuted somewhere in the world or when a country abolishes the death penalty. That’s quite something to think about, given that once upon a time the Colosseum was where the lions used to tear human beings to shreds. Now what used to be a cockpit of cruelty is also one of the world’s great tourist attractions.
Yes, well, it says something that, again, we don’t want to look at. The Colosseum is the single largest monument to human cruelty in the world, and now it’s on the new list of the seven wonders of the world.
Help me understand that psychology.
Why have there been so many movies about Romans sitting in the Colosseum turning thumbs up, thumbs down? We get a kick out of it. The real evil in the world, it seems to me, is cruelty. To me the word evil equals cruelty. It’s human cruelty that is evil. We all have to deal with that. We all have a tendency to cruelty that we’re not willing to acknowledge inside of us. It’s there.
You write in the beginning of your book on Christianity, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: “The history of the world, like the history of its hills, is written in blood.” Has there ever been any period when that wasn’t so?
It’s hard to find in Greco-Roman civilization. But you find it, for instance, in the communities set up by Francis of Assisi. You find it among the Quakers. Now, none of those people have been able to transform whole societies. But they did create a moment—what I would think of as a Shangri-la moment.
What do they share in common?
They were people able to recognize what human cruelty is about and renounce it. It doesn’t really matter whether they said explicitly, “I renounce human cruelty.” What was important is that they began to treat one another more kindly. Francis of Assisi said that the best thing you can do to any other person is to say to him or her, “May the Lord give you peace.” And that’s how we should go about our business: “May the Lord give you peace.” That already puts you in a completely different mind-set. And Francis said to do that with everybody. Leper, heretic, Muslim: “May the Lord give you peace.”
You’ve studied history enough to know that what works for the individual in a small realm of relationships isn’t a rule the nation-state can live by.
I don’t think real civilization ever occurs because of anything that a nation-state does. It occurs because of movements within the nation-state that are led by one individual or a series of individuals. Des
mond Tutu is an excellent example of that. And in fact, I’ll tell you something that I’ve never told anybody before. In each of the books that I’ve written, when I come upon a great historical figure that I’m trying to understand and deal with, I try to think of someone I know now who is like that person. And my model for St. Patrick is Desmond Tutu. I think he would be surprised to hear that, but Tutu in South Africa, and his wife, Leah, and their four children— they were all in danger of being assassinated for opposing apartheid. Those six people were constantly in danger of death by hatred. Nelson Mandela is always credited with so much, and I don’t mean to take anything away from him. But during his twenty-seven years in prison he wasn’t on the scene. It was Desmond Tutu who was on the scene. It was Tutu who would stand up to those horrible South African guards and say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our God is a God of resurrection. You’re not going to do us in.” This little guy, five feet four, standing up to the forces of cruelty and evil. Amazing.
So it’s the individual who acts?
And his wife and his children—and Stephen Biko and all the others. It wasn’t just one man. But Tutu embodied their courage.
Taking on this book about Dominique Green seems way off your beaten path. For years you’ve been working on your series on the hinges of history.
What I’m really interested in is what makes for civilization and what does not. How did we become the people we are? And why do we think the way we do, and feel the way we do, and perceive the way we do? Underneath this curiosity, I am looking for what’s good about us. What do we do that’s good? I started with How the Irish Saved Civilization—which is not the beginning of Western history by any means—for a reason. It was the simplest story that I had to tell. And it was about this guy named Patrick who had been a Roman citizen on the island of Britain who was kidnapped at the age of sixteen and taken to Ireland and made into a slave for six years before he escaped. Then in middle age he returned to Ireland—a rough, rough place, not a place anybody would willingly return to—and brought the gospels with him. He became the evangelist to the Irish. It was an act of great generosity to spend the last thirty years of his life there, among these very crazy people who practiced human sacrifice, who had no problem with slavery in its most awful form, who believed in really dark gods. In that great act of generosity he also realized that though he was never going to make them Romans or Athenians, he had to teach them to read and write. So he taught them to read and write from these simple lives of the saints who were the early Roman martyrs.
And it was all the terrible things that the Romans had done to the early Christians—they were eaten by lions, they had their eyes plucked out, they were slowly eviscerated; remember, St. Lawrence was burned on a griddle first on one side and then on the other side. The Irish loved this kind of stuff, thought it was just dandy. Loved these stories. And the only thing that made them sad was that Christianity came into Ireland without any martyrs. The Irish just kind of rolled over and accepted the new faith because they said it made more sense than what they had been doing. It was so much more. It was so superior to the old ways. But because Patrick taught them to read and write, they ended up setting themselves the task in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries of saving Western literature. The whole of the Western library was in danger of extinction at that time because the Germanic barbarians had invaded the Roman Empire, and within a century almost no one could read or write. Literacy itself was gone.
Civilization can be swept away.
If there are no books, there’s no Western civilization, that’s for sure. The Germanic barbarians thought that the only thing books were good for was kindling. They had no other use for it. So you have these very simple Irish people who had been great warriors and crazy kidnappers and all that sort of stuff, now sitting down and copying out Plato, which they couldn’t understand but thought was important. They had learned the alphabet, and dammit, they were going to do this difficult thing. And that’s one thing the Irish did like; they liked things that were difficult. So they copied out all of Latin and Greek literature. And they added to it in the margins. Now, they couldn’t understand Plato very well, and it was kind of hard for the scribe to copy page after page of Plato without understanding it very well. He started doodling in the margins. And that’s the beginning of the great decorated books like the Book of Kells. You have all these funny little medieval people peeping through in the margins. The copier would sometimes put in little comments or jokes or a little poem that had been part of the repertoire of the wandering bards, so that Irish becomes the first vernacular literature to be copied out and written down.
You start that book on the Irish with a chapter on the fall of Rome. What do you think about analogies between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fall of America?
I would say in some ways yes and in some ways no. History never repeats itself. That’s one thing you can say about it. It never happens again exactly the same way. There are tremendous differences. But we can look into the past and learn things. For instance, why did Rome fall? Because of things interior and exterior. The interior reasons included less and less just taxation; more and more it was the poor and the middle class that bore the burden of taxation. The wealthy and very wealthy pretended to pay but actually didn’t. We are in a very similar situation.
Then the big external thing was all of these Germanic barbarians who we think of as marauders, pillagers, and plunderers. But you know, they were on the wrong side of the river, and they knew it. They wanted farms and vineyards like the Romans had. They thought it looked great. They wanted to cross the river. What were they? They were immigrants—not at all unlike the situation today at the borders of our country and the borders of Europe. And the Romans couldn’t make that border guard strong enough and those walls high enough to keep out the barbarians. If people really want to get in, they’re going to find a way in.
I’m intrigued by your thoughts on the evolution of tolerance, especially among Christians, who so often seem to have so little of it for their own factions.
Well, as you know, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both Protestants and Catholics eliminated one another to their heart’s content. They liked nothing better than a bonfire and putting somebody in the middle of it. And that was happening on both sides. Somebody has said that at one point in papal Rome, there were more heads on the bridge that led out of the Vatican than there were melons in the market. But you could have said that about Geneva. You could have said that about London. Other places. Finally people began to ask, “Is this the only way? Does the religion of the monarch have to be the religion of all his subjects? Is that really necessary?”
And the answer was no. You begin to have enlightened monarchs who say no. There were setbacks, but finally you get the United States of America, the first country on earth to build tolerance into the very framework of government.
Well, unless you were an indigenous American, or a slave, an African brought over in the hold of a slave ship.
Or unless you were an Irish immigrant in the late nineteenth century. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, plenty of times where it doesn’t work. And yet it’s a new idea that the government would refuse to play the old game of “whose religion was true.” America fostered a generously agnostic view of religious truth.
Yes, you may believe as you like, and I may believe as I like, and we don’t impose our beliefs on each other. Could that change? Could we go backwards?
It may be changing somewhat in the face of militant Islam. I think we are going to have to find a way of dealing with Islam that is better than the way that we have constructed so far.
And they with us.
Absolutely, absolutely, but we already have gone through that process. It was called the Enlightenment. And the result of the Enlightenment was the American Constitution. That was the process by which we said, “Do we really have to keep killing one another?” Now, the Muslims have not gone through that, and the Sunni
s and the Shiites still think that they have to keep killing one another. And God knows that the Wahhabis and any number of other sects hate one another with far greater ferocity than they hate us. Religious history shows you over and over again that you hate most of all the people that are closest to you but just a little bit different. Protestants and Catholics throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example. If you were a Martian coming to earth, you would have said, “What are they arguing about? They seem to believe the same things, more or less. What’s the problem here? Why do millions of people have to die?” Jonathan Swift said it was really about how you set an egg on the table. Some people did it one way and some people did it another. And that was enough reason to kill. It more or less does come down to that. There are still plenty of people who feel that way. But we have essentially gotten beyond that. It would be a dreadful tragedy if we fell back into it.
Do you think that what’s going on now between the Shiites and the Sunnis in Iraq is comparable to what went on between the Catholics and the Protestants in the sixteenth century?
It’s so much a parallel, it’s amazing. If you’re not Muslim, you look at them and say: “What are they arguing about? What’s the big difference between them?” Well, I can tell you what some of the differences are. And you would begin to lose interest. Anyone would if they weren’t Muslim. And the same thing about the differences between Catholics and Protestants. I remember once giving a talk in a church. A guy stood up and said, “Do you believe we are saved by faith alone?” And I said, “Well, I believe we’re saved by faith. But I believe with Paul the Apostle that we’re saved by faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is love or charity.” He walked out. From his standpoint I had given the wrong answer, and he wanted me to know that I had nothing to say that he wanted to hear.