Capital Punishment was Modernity just as its abolition was Post-Modernity

A new take on why 'abolition' and 'postmodernity' arrived together in the same taxi, back in 1965...

If Modernity was all about Grand Narratives, then there was no grander narrative than actually carrying out a capital punishment.

Modernity is best known now for its hubris over its total faith in its predictions about events in the near future.

But imposing capital punishment really is also about being totally certain, certainty about (often hidden) events in the near past.

Certain enough about your reading of them to kill a fellow being, with no chance to revive them, if you are subsequently proven wrong.

But Modernity simply couldn't conceive it might ever be wrong - not about the past and not about the future.

Postmodernity is really all about being less certain , about the past and the future.

Uncertain enough to never want to close all doors to doubt by executing people for crimes that we can't usually see on instant replay video and so remain always open to new evidence and motives.

In one of those ironies of history, the smallest Manhattan Project has turned out to have had the biggest impact ...

The historian is always being assailed by new generations of social scientists and new generations of wannabe social scientists (utopians) both who claim that we can safely predict the future from our study of the repeating patterns of the past.

But the poor naive historian only sees that the past repeats itself so imperfectly each new time around as to require everyone to be cautious in predicting the future, merely from the events of the distant past and the events of the recent present.

Case in point : who in 1940 (besides perhaps Adorno) would have predicted that our present age's moral cum cultural views would look more like the moral cum cultural values of the smallest Manhattan Project rather than those of the biggest Manhattan Project ?

But as we approach 2015, that fact seems increasingly obvious......