158. Dreamworld

Insight into our legal system can be found in some of the most unexpected places.  Such as Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War, the introduction to which includes several pages devoted to Eric Voegelin, the Baton Rouge-based Nazi refugee who described himself as a "pre-Nicean Christian," according to a recent study. 

In his best-known work, Voegelin wrote that "[i]n the Gnostic dream world ... nonrecognition of reality is the first principle.  As a consequence, types of action that in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects that they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect."

Burleigh quotes that passage, and then about 50 pages later he quotes Tocqueville on the French Revolution:

Above the real society ... there was slowly built an imaginary society in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in accord with reason.  Gradually the imagination of the crowd deserted the former to concentrate on the latter.  One lost interest in what was, in order to think about what could be, and finally one lived mentally in that ideal city the writers had built.

And then, in V.S. Naipaul's great novel Magic Seeds, the main character writes a letter to his sister reflecting on his experience fighting a guerilla war in India:

That war was not yours or mine, and it had nothing to do with the village people we said we were fighting for.  We talked about their oppression, but we were exploiting them all the time.  Our ideas and words were more important than their lives and their ambitions for themselves. 

All of them might have been talking about America's criminal justice system since the 1960s.   William O. Douglas declared that the Constitution forbade the punishment of an indisputably-guilty sadistic rapist (see post 151 and post 47).  That was morally insane, but Douglas and a couple generations of law professors considered it moral because it was intended to serve a noble, if rather vague, ideal.  Douglas and the professors considered their ideas and words more important than the life of  Essie Mae Hodson.  Beating her to death in the very act of raping her was less to be condemned than the state court's adherence to a state statute.

(It is telling that Douglas's Supreme Court opinion doesn't even give the victim's last name.  For that matter, his opinion doesn't mention her first name, either, except in the passage from the prosecutor's closing argument it quotes only to declare it unlawful.  She was a nonentity in Douglas's dream world.)   

The essence of the non-textual exclusionary rules, and of the Rules of Evidence, is that juries should not be permitted to hear evidence relevant to their civic duty to enforce democratically-enacted laws - that, in fact, it is the judiciary's duty to prevent that from happening.  This leads to the release of dangerous sociopaths into the general population - sociopaths emboldened by the realization that being caught red-handed by the police does not necessarily mean legal punishment. 

The consciences of judges aren't disturbed by the suffering guaranteed to ensue from the sociopaths' release because the judges' refusals to enforce laws against criminal violence are intended to have an entirely different, and entirely beneficent, effect.  Our criminal justice system is concerned with the intended effect only, not the actual effect.   The Supreme Court has commanded the nation's criminal court judges to live in an ideal city floating above the real world, like Gulliver's floating island.