Decapitation Revisited (All Tumbrils Are Go)

Since its halcyon days during the French Revolutionary era, the “vogue” for decapitation has sharply waned, and our daily lives are impoverished once again by the ponderous march of what passes for progress. Just as the flashlight has displaced the fagot in the field of illumination, even so the rich pageantry of the Place de la Concorde (with its veritable sea of tricolor cockades rippled by some zephyrs and a thousand soaring voices united in the refrain of “Rod Out DuBarry”) has vanished forever.

Now we are left with the colorless cyanide of San Quentin and the bleak electronic apparatus at Sing Sing, whose name alone survives as a reminder of those simpler, happier times. In contrast, the far more limited circuitry of the brain of a serpent would require several particles to share the same circuit in a sort of party-line arrangement. What is more, the snake would then become nothing more than a live switchboard for interparticle communications, deprived of all capacity for the management of its own affairs. Surely this is not a course that will commend itself to the humane.

VOLTAIRE LAUDED

What has happened to our sense of history? It is the author’s belief that the blame must be placed in large part upon the nineteenth century. It has long been known, of course, that from a purely chronological standpoint the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed by a good hundred years. However, what is not so generally understood is that there were also differences in attitude between these two periods.

It is not for nothing that the 1700s are known as the Age of Reason. Nowhere was this more plainly revealed than in the cultivated view of decapitation, which was early recognized by the leaders of the Enlightenment as uniquely efficacious for separation of the head from the body. As Voltaire put it, “How else, we must ask, is it to be done?”

VICTORIA FOR THE VICTORIANS

However, the clarity of this vision was soon obscured by the dim-witted sentimentality that flawed the reign of Queen Victoria (which was, indeed, distinguished more by its length than by either of the other two dimensions). Yet the actual fault lies, perhaps, more with Rudyard Kipling than with Victoria herself. For when he wrote, “If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” he put the cat irretrievably among the pigeons. From that day to this the public has viewed decapitation with grave misgivings.

And so, even in the United Kingdom (where Tyburn stood for centuries as a monument to all that was splendid in dismemberment) the light is flickering and will soon gutter out. For Parliament will almost certainly enact the pending statute abolishing capital punishment — despite the fact that the hangman’s noose is virtually the last handcrafted instrument still in use for this purpose.*

THE CAMBRIDGE “SCHOOL”

Are we, then, confronted by nothing less than the death knell of the Death Knell itself? So it would seem. Still, in a few quiet enclaves of learning there have been those who have had the courage to speak out against these hasty reforms.

Perhaps the most cogent formulation of the conservative position was embodied in this enunciation by Cambridge’s late great J. B. S. Haldane:

It King Charles I’s or King Louis XVI’s [severed] head had been stuck within a minute or so on a pump which supplied oxygenated blood to it, it would almost certainly have come around, after half an hour or so, enough to open its eyes and move its lips, and would probably have recovered consciousness.

Although written in 1949, this

* The statute in question (which was still in legislative process when this paper was written and not yet approved by the Crown) has now become law. Why was the text of the paper not revised accordingly? There can be no honest answer to this question, good one though it be. Suffice it to say that it was not. bold conception is as fresh today as it was at the moment of its birth. Nonetheless, it would be less than realistic to suppose that this lone voice crying in the wilderness of modern thought will not, in the end, be overborne.

THE ERRORS OF J. B. S. HALDANE

For there is no longer any blinking the fact that the people are simply not prepared to place their reliance on blood pumps to anything like the extent that Professor Haldane (sheltered as he was from practical affairs) so idealistically postulated.

What is more, Haldane blundered in an extraordinarily ingenuous way in his reference to both Charles I and Louis XVI. For apart from the manner of their deaths, these dignitaries had almost nothing in common. Certainly the man in the street has sufficient difficulty in identifying with even one king. Is it not, then, the height of folly to “ring in” an additional monarch at this time?

It must also be admitted that Professor Haldane would have been far more convincing if he had at least roughed out what Charles and/or Louis might have said when their lips began to “move.” While space prevents our dwelling on this elementary question here, the firstyear student may wish (by filling in the following blanks) to complete two or three sample utterances:

Charles: Where .................?

Louis: I haven’t................

(Additional blank forms may be obtained from the registrar.)

In summary, then, Haldane’s otherwise impeccable analysis was marred in these three respects:

1. Excessive blood-pump reliance;

2. Fuzzy image kingwise;

3. No sayings; and

4. His vague prediction that the two (2) rulers would have recovered “after half an hour or so” is simply not in harmony with modern standards of splitsecond timing. It is difficult to visualize the employer of today’s citizen accepting decapitation as an excuse for job tardiness.

HEADS UP!

One point remains to be considered — the place of the head in the life of the mind. Throughout history these have gone hand in hand, and it has been noticed that even when the greatest care is exercised, removal of the one impairs the other.

It has been said that the head contains the brain, an instrument of impressive capabilities, yet whose extraordinary complexity is not generally understood. What is needed is a publicity campaign to bring the facts home not just to megalopolis but to the veriest hamlet in the land.

The number of discrete neural paths in the human brain has been estimated at the fantastic level of 10125. Since Einstein calculated that the total number of particles in the entire universe does not exceed 1079, what this means is that each particle can be “patched” into a separate neural circuit and there will still be enough free circuits remaining for all workaday thinking needs.

SORRY, WRONG NUMBER

While the suppression of the anopheles mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal was doubtless grounded in realpolitikal considerations, no argument has been advanced which would even remotely justify this ruthless exploitation of the scaly inhabitants of our planet.

After all, can we be so certain that we are not being watched?