The “Lockerbie Bomber”

The circumstances surrounding the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi seem to have thrown into relief the way humanity is still struggling to reach a truly moral level. Let me explain what I mean. I think of our justice concepts as going through three levels (a bit related to Kohlberg’s “stages of moral development”).

First was vengeance; that is, the absence of justice. Someone does something to inconvenience or hurt me or my tribe, I/we get angry, so I/we go and thump them, with a degree of hardness depending on how angry we are. This still seems to be the dominant stage, both individually and collectively throughout most countries. It has the result that the person thumped then gets angry and thumps back and so on. It only works at all when the population density is so low that people can wander away for a while and forget about it, a situation that was becoming obsolete by about 1500 BCE.

Next was State punishment: the idea that cycles of retribution could, and must, be broken through the establishment by the State of a rational system of justice that overruled personal vengeance. One might place the definitive statement of this at 458 BCE with the performance of Aeschylus’ play Eumenides at the official Athenian tragedy festival.

Finally was the idea of non-violence, which received its most well known form in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) of Christianity, and later in the teaching of Mohandas Gandhi. The theologian Walter Wink has elucidated – to my mind, convincingly – that Jesus reached the position of non-violence set out in theses Gospels as a response to life under under occupation by the Roman Empire, a force that was impossible to defeat by violent means. Non-violence embodies compassion as as an ultimate good.

The steps to the second and third stages each involved going beyond a small-scale good to a greater good. The apparent loss and defeat at the scale of the individual or tribe, and then at the scale of the State, is, in its most recent forms, finally redeemed by the possibility of planetary justice based on the rights of all beings.

It was sadly to be expected that the vast majority of newspapers (if we count the number of copies in circulation) stayed, as always, at the pre-Aeschylan stage. The concept that upholding the integrity of  itself is more important than almost any other consideration is still immensely fragile, and we see it flouted time and again by world leaders. And time and again, from Cambodia to Zimbabwe, we see the vastness of the cruelty that breaks out when the dikes of law itself start crumbling and disintegrate.

Did Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, in fact uphold the law by granting release, or pervert the law by bowing to commercial and other pressures? It looks as thought the former was the case. But many strange arguments have muddied the waters. In Saturday’s Guardian Geoffrey Robertson argued that law was violated because what was at issue here was a crime against humanity, and, in the international laws regulating this, compassionate release was out of the question. But MacAskill only had power to administer Scottish law: international courts has not tried Megrahi nor was there an international warrant out for his arrest.  Robertson (first president of the UN war crimes court) seems to have been led, by his own involvement in international law, to confuse the greater global extent of international law with a greater level of justice. Only compassion itself (for the individual, for the community and for the planet) can have this higher status.

Such considerations do not, of course, make the decision any easier. Quite the contrary: we all blunder our way through as best we can, and we all mix baser motives with higher ones. What saddens me at times like this, however, is the extent to which the higher principles are not merely overridden, but in so many place are thrown out of the window at the outset.