A murder can be a sudden, unexpected event, but sometimes you can sense it coming like a train hurtling down the tracks at night. There is something about the darkest human passions that strikes us at our very core, and nothing has such a strong emotional effect on social creatures such as ourselves as the arrival of death.
On one gray afternoon years ago, I was walking to the local convenience store when I heard a commotion from a house across the street. A man had burst out of a side door closely followed by a woman, and something about the scene immediately drew my attention. It was a working class, middle-aged black couple, the man fairly tall and and the woman stout, neither out of the ordinary in any way.
The man’s head was down and he was taking long, quick strides away from the woman, who was on his heels like a harrier. The man’s hands were spread out from his sides as though he was desperately imploring someone unseen; the woman’s hands were in front and up high, pointing, gesturing, taking an aggressive posture. In a voice that was half moan, half scream, the man shouted in a rising tone “why won’t you just LEAVE ME ALONE?” His voice was so anguished and tortured that I stopped in my tracks, staring at the couple. My first thought was to tell the woman she’d better listen to him and leave, but there’s something about a domestic dispute that gives one a strong feeling that getting involved at all is a very bad idea.
I stood watching for a moment, near a payphone on the corner of the street. I was prepared to call the police if it got any worse, but at that point I hadn’t seen any actual physical violence. Nevertheless, I felt very strongly that there was something desperately dangerous and dark about the scene I saw unfolding before me. The drama was so intense that it looked like an overacted play, but it was undeniably real, and I could feel the anguish welling up in the man through his tormented cries for relief.
Not all men have felt the black clouds of desperation and despair that blot out the light of reason, or the buzzing crescendo of insanity that overwhelms one’s senses like an angry swarm of hornets, but when a man has been stricken it is plain to see, although not easy to understand. It is something one feels, yet cannot readily explain, so I stood there watching with no real comprehension, but a deep sense of unease.
Soon, the scene appeared to calm, and the couple, perhaps sensing my attention, went back inside the house. I lingered for a minute, warily watching the house until I heard no more. I then continued on my way to the store, made my purchase, and headed back home, my eyes still on the house as I passed it again. For some time, the scene preoccupied my thoughts, but it soon passed out of mind and life went on as usual.
A few days later, while skimming a newspaper, I noticed a story about a murder. When I saw the address I stopped cold and read the story. There it was: same house, same date, same time of day. It was a short story; a simple notice of a small tragedy, such as happens every day in the city. A man strangled his wife, and then called the police to confess and turn himself in.
So I had witnessed the prelude to murder, and instinctively I had seen it coming, but I still couldn’t consciously believe it even as I watched it unfold. It struck me that violent crime can be an intimate act, often one in which the victim is very much a participant. As an outsider, I felt somewhat indecent and uncomfortable for having witnessed such a passionate exchange between two intimately-connected people who were strangers to me. For me, this posed a quandary: was my failure to intervene a moral lapse on my part? Had it been my duty to get involved?
In the abstract, of course, if I had known that the man would strangle his wife, I should have called the police. And in a sense I did know, or rather felt, that something very bad could happen. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have stopped to watch or positioned myself near the payphone. However, every bit of urban propriety and my sense of common decency had also told me that it was wrong to interfere in the intimate lives of strangers, especially in a case that was clearly not one-sided as a mugging or purse-snatching.
It is this lesson, this simple murder I saw coming, that makes me wonder whether, in our society, a private, intimate relationship between two people can exist in the framework of contemporary public morals and laws. If, as the feminists say, the person most dangerous to a woman is her intimate companion, and statistically speaking this is true, can an institution such as marriage survive laws that make interpartner violence a more serious crime than other, physically similar crimes? Can it survive a campaign to eradicate conflict between intimate partners?
Clearly, it was the ancient sense of the sanctity of such relationships that prevented me from getting involved, and possibly stopped me from preventing a murder. If it had been a conflict between two strange men or women I wouldn’t have felt any qualms about intervening or calling the police immediately, in fact, right around the same time I did break up a mugging. However, despite my reluctance to get involved, modern discourse and policy would never suggest that, at times, it is best just to stay out of it, because it has become our philosophy that the prevention of violence in relationships is a far more pressing concern than respect for or preservation of such relationships.
On the face of it, there is a strong moral case for taking preventative measures to head off interpartner violence, and for interfering whenever one has the sense that trouble is about to begin. If I had called the police right then, a woman might still be alive, and a man free. It is exactly those kinds of incidents that argue strongly for better domestic violence enforcement and more public vigilance.
But sometimes the face of things is not the entire picture. If we interfere in every domestic dispute that comes to our attention, regulating and sometimes destroying relationships, might there be some unintended consequences? Can we legislate an end to the passions that sometimes explode in the confines of an intimate relationship, or will they simply be set off in public, exposing others to the conflagration?
If we do gradually legislate an end to the sanctity of private relationships, there will eventually emerge a vagrant kind of passion, where people’s intimate lives are displayed in the open, as in a troop of baboons.
Perhaps marriage was originally conceived as a means to confine passions to private space, so as to preserve the integrity of the community by isolating the fires of passion. Our taboo against involving ourselves in the domestic disputes of others is a cultural relic of this peacekeeping practice, and we break it at our own peril. However, we have to recognize that the case for interference can be very strong, and many people, both men and women, have paid a heavy price for the survival of marriage, that oldest of all civilizing institutions. As always, we humans are ever weighing life and peace on the balance.
