A reflection inspired by The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
It’s impossible to understand The Scarlet Letter without understanding its location. The story is of a woman named Hester Prynne, one of the members of newly settled Puritan community in 17th century Boston. She came to the New World without her husband and, presuming he was dead, had an affair with pastor Arthur Dimmesdale, giving birth to an illegitimate child. After the community found out about Hester and her child, they subjected her to public shame, put an embroidered “A”(the scarlet letter) for adultress on her bosom, and ostracized her from community. Her original husband, Roger, arrived in Boston a little after the event, and the rest of the book details the relationship between Hester and the two men.
It’s quite clear that among many things, The Scarlet Letter is blatant criticism of Puritan society. Humiliation and banishment for committing adultery on a man halfway across the world, is quite harsh from most standards. For most modern readers and historians, Puritan society is harsh, hypocritical, and unnecessarily authoritarian.
But, before we condescendingly mock and reprimand the barbaric, evil, and backward legal code of a precolonial America, I think we need to have a sober reflection on the relationship between law and society.
I’ve been reflecting on a question this week:
Why are things illegal?
Most people think law is immutable and necessary for securing the safety of the community, but, I’ve begun to realize, this is largely untrue. Law is a large part reflection of society, and because of that, it changes throughout time. If a society holds an activity to be immoral, even if the activity is not harming the safety of the community to any serious extent, the society will think of an excuse to make it illegal. In the Puritan world, the sin of committing adultery was seen to corrupt the very nature of society, therefore validating strict punishment. Making excuses to validate legality is a common theme among many legal battles in America, from the Salem Witch
So, back to my question:
Why are things illegal?
More importantly, are there any activities that we may be overestimating the danger of? Are we continuing to keep things illegal, not for their danger to society, but for our own personal and moral views? Most would agree that the Hester and other Puritans would have benefited if they reflected and truly analyzed the legitimate threat of many “illegal” activities of the time. Perhaps they would have realized that, contrary to popular opinion, someone worshipping a different god wouldn’t corrupt and threaten the safety of the community at large.
Maybe the same self-reflection could be applied to modern times on issues like drug use and prostitution. I’m not quite on those examples specifically, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t laws in our current society that, if removed, not only would we find it to have no corrupting effect on society, we would remove unfair punishment from those involved in said activities. I don’t have an answer to any of these questions I’ve raised, but I think that if we look at law through a cultural framework, it could lead to a safer and happier society.
The book for next week is Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl.