Death Note and Divine Justice 2: Drawing the Lines

“Good evening; this is the nine o’clock news. Kira’s words, which I am to tell you now, are to become the law of this world. Kira will not forgive people whose existence is deemed a threat. Additionally, he will not tolerate people who live wastefully and do not use their abilities for the good of society.”

Death Note E32 ‘Selection’ (2007)

So last post, we left Light Yagami playing at being judge of all the earth, scribbling the names of convicted criminals and other assorted ne’er-do-wells in a notebook supernaturally powerful to thereby cause their deaths.¹ He understands that rotten people deserve to die – that justice is a real, objective standard to which human beings must be held – and he also thinks that he himself is able to discern which people count as rotten, namely exactly where that standard sits.

 

Look, some more amazing fanart of Light Yagami, this time by the excellent Zelkray at newgrounds.com.

But as his reign of terror under the public’s preferred moniker of Kira continues and increases, things start to get a little trickier. Once you’ve killed all the really bad guys – the ones that virtually everyone agrees the world would be better off without – how far do you go? How much wrong does someone have to do in order to qualify for execution? And, for that matter, what actually counts as wrong?

Late in the series, Light arranges – using his biggest fan, Teru Mikami, as an intermediary, in order to mask his own involvement in the matter – for the news reporter Kiyomi Takada to act as the voice of Kira to the world. Her first broadcast in this role, as I quoted above, announces that not only those who actively do harm to society, but also those to fail to make appropriate contributions to it, will be liable for the death sentence.

“Huh?” exclaims some guy watching the programme. “Does that mean that he’ll kill lazy people?”

“You’re kidding!” his colleague gapes.

Light happens to be walking by and overhears their reaction. His internal monologue chastises Mikami for encouraging Takada to make such an announcement: You’re overdoing it, Mikami. No, it’s too early.

But note the nature of his objection – not, that’s going too far, full stop, but rather, yes, that is the point we want to get to, but we need to ease the public into the idea more gradually. Light started by killing criminals, but he plans that he’ll eventually extend the same sentence to anyone who doesn’t conform to his idea of what it is to be a responsible citizen. Increment by increment, he’ll pull the line demarcating acceptable behaviour higher and higher until it sits where he thinks it really belongs; and so, increment by increment, he’ll render a greater proportion of the population liable for the death sentence.

He does it slowly, to avoid losing the not insubstantial wodge of popular support that Kira has managed to accrue. And the thing about doing things slowly, increment by increment, is that you often end up going further than you ever would in one big leap. This is demonstrated with a piercing irony by the earlier proportion of the storyline during which Light loses all his memories of being Kira. The whole thing is a highly elaborate ploy to convince his police colleagues of his innocence, and he has a plan in place to make sure his memories are ultimately restored, but for some weeks and months, he genuinely hasn’t got the faintest idea that he’s the one who’s been doing all the killing. On top of that, he has no sympathy for Kira. He considers him evil and is determined to bring him to justice. This is still Light, with his same personality, his same burning desire to see justice done – so why doesn’t he feel favourably towards the self-proclaimed judge of all the earth? Well, one reason, I’d postulate, is that he can’t remember the increment-by-increment process he went through from finding the Death Note to using it to murder anyone who didn’t fit with his idea of what a perfect world should look like. He looks at where Kira is now and it’s too big a leap from where he himself is now, for him to make it in one go.

But it’s more than that. Light thinks he knows what justice is, so if he thinks Kira is someone other than himself, of course he’s going to condemn him as just another mass murderer. He doesn’t trust anyone else to be judge of all the earth. This is still Light, with his same personality – his same burning desire to see justice done, yes, but also his same childish competitiveness, his same unmitigated arrogance, his same smug self-righteousness. While he has Kira’s power, he’ll exercise it; while he doesn’t (and has forgotten that he ever did), he consequently sees Kira as a threat to be neutralised. Whichever side of things it puts him on, at the end of the day, he wants to be the one drawing the lines.

 

Choose your weapon.

And aren’t we all like that to some extent? We look at other people and the various evils they commit, and condemn them – we ourselves would never do such things – because we can’t see or sympathise with the increment-by-increment processes that led them there. Moreover, we draw the lines as to what we consider just or unjust precisely where it suits us. To give a trivial example, how many conversations have you had where someone is complaining about some annoyance they’ve experienced because of someone else – that person still hasn’t replied to such-and-such a message, or was hogging such-and-such a piece of equipment earlier, or made such-and-such a request that seemed outside his or her remit – and you initially join in having a go at terrible people who do things like that, until you remember an occasion when you did something similar. Oops. You make an excuse for yourself: well, of course, it would be acceptable if he or she did it for this reason, or under these circumstances, or with this mitigating factor in place. And your conversation partner readily agrees: of course that would be acceptable. But in this particular instance, so-and-so was just being annoying.

And thus we draw the lines as to what’s acceptable where it suits us and the people we like. We draw them so that our behaviour sits on the side of what’s acceptable, and the behaviour of people who annoy us sits on the other side. It’s the same thing Light does when he’s dishing out death sentences with notebook and pen. And if the scale of the thing seems rather far removed from his reign of terror as Kira, just remember that all it takes is an unusual opportunity and an increment-by-increment process to make us capable of things that we’d squarely condemn if we were to suddenly forget how and why we’d done them. I’m not just speaking from fiction, either: name an atrocity you know of from world history, and consider the number of ordinary human beings like you and me who persuaded themselves (and mutually reassured their associates) that being complicit in or even helping to perpetrate it sat on the ‘acceptable’ side of the line.

In short, we can’t trust ourselves to draw the lines in the right places. Our view of what justice is is limited, because we don’t know everything; and skewed, because we want to pass off our own behaviour as acceptable, but are happy to condemn that of people who annoy us; and unreliable, because we often, increment by increment, change our behaviour, and consequently reassess what we’re prepared to call acceptable, to suit our changing circumstances. Because we’re imperfect human beings who sit subject to judgement, we’re always going to be biased on the matter of what justice looks like, because we want it to be favourable for us, and overlook our particular flaws. In order for someone to be able to be trusted to draw the lines in the right places, that person would have to know everything; and be perfect to the point of being beyond judgement himself; and never change.

Remind you of anyone?

Therefore hear the word of the LORD, you scoffers, who rule this people in Jerusalem. Because you have said, “We have made a covenant with death, and with Sheol we have an agreement, when the overwhelming whip passes through it will not come to us, for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter”; therefore thus says the Lord GOD, “Behold, I am the one who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: ‘Whoever believes will not be in haste.’ And I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plumb line; and hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter.”

 

Apparently this is what a house foundation looks like before it has the house on it. I’m prepared to believe it.

There are lots of bits of Bible I could have mentioned here, but of course I couldn’t resist this chunk of Isaiah 28,² because of the way God says in it that he will make justice the line. It’s not quite the same kind of line I’ve been talking about, though – this line is less a boundary, which is roughly how I’ve been using the term, and more the kind one uses to measure a straight line in order to make or build something according to the correct shape and proportions. The beginning of that building project in question is the sure foundation and cornerstone that God has laid – and I can tell at this point which kind of church you go to by whether the song you now have in your head is ‘Christ is made the sure foundation’³ or that Hillsong one with the chorus that goes ‘Christ alone, Cornerstone’.⁴ Either way, they’re both right about the identity of the foundation.⁵

If we draw the lines of justice where we think they should go, and not according to God’s true standards, in order to reassure ourselves that our own behaviour is acceptable, we’re taking shelter in falsehood, just as the leaders in Jerusalem did in Isaiah’s day. And God won’t stand for that; he’ll sweep such shelters away. But he has given us Christ as our sure foundation and he has made justice the line, so that as surely as we can’t trust ourselves to draw the lines in the right places, we can trust that Christ is the measure of all that’s just and righteous. So instead of having our idea of justice pulled this way and that by our changing circumstances, we can ground ourselves on that foundation, seek to know him ever better, and so to align our own ideas about justice ever more closely with his. If we’re grounded on our sure foundation, we’re guarded against increment-by-increment processes by which we would move into ever more unjust territory; if we’re grounded on our sure foundation, we’re no longer relying on our unreliable selves to draw the lines, but on him.

That’s kind of scary and uncomfortable; as Light demonstrated when he lost his memories, we’d naturally much rather be drawing the lines ourselves. But think back to whichever atrocity you called to mind earlier: that’s the kind of thing that happens when people do draw the lines themselves instead of seeking to understand where God in his all-knowing, unchanging righteousness has drawn them. Maybe it starts small, making excuses for oneself while having a go at some other annoying person – but all it takes is an increment-by-increment process to escalate from there to doing things of which we’d never have thought ourselves capable.

So let’s not make comfortable refuges for ourselves out of falsehood, drawing the lines to accommodate our own behaviour as acceptable; instead, let’s ground ourselves on the sure foundation, and seek to discern where the lines really are, which, by the Holy Spirit in us, we are now able to do. And as a sine qua non alongside that, let’s be altogether thrilled and awed and grateful that despite all the unjust things we do and try to pass off as acceptable, the righteousness of him who is the very measure of what is just and right has been freely gifted us by his death on our behalf.

Footnotes

¹ Box on the right for last week’s post. Netflix for Death Note itself rather than my ramblings about it: https://www.netflix.com/browse?jbv=70204970&jbp=1&jbr=1.

² Whole chapter for you: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+28&version=ESVUK.

³ Here’s a Songs of Praise recording from Aberdeen if you’re not sure how it goes or fancy a reminder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bC0tgG_blE.

⁴ And here’s Hillsong’s official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izrk-erhDdk. The contrast with the video in the last footnote is actually hilarious. I take no sides.

⁵ As is clear from 1 Peter 2, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter+2&version=ESVUK, though do look at the cornerstone motif more generally for a fun time.