Pardon Turing, but don’t stop there
The British government is supporting a backbench bill to pardon Alan Turing, one of Britain’s war heroes and one of the fathers of computer science.
Turing’s supposed “crime” was homosexuality; he was convicted in 1952 and opted for a sentence of chemical castration, with its extreme side-effects, over imprisonment. He died two years later of cyanide poisoning, at age 41, apparently by his own hand.
Taken on its own, the pardon is ethically dubious, even perverse, because it suggests that the anti-homosexuality law itself was valid and that only Turing’s exceptional contribution to history, or perhaps his suicide, makes him worthy of forgiveness.
It is nonetheless the right thing to do — if the pardon is a catalyst for broader state accountability. These symbolic gestures can cut both ways: they can create true shifts in our historical narratives and even in policy, or they can be tokens that actively prevent those meaningful shifts.
As with other state errors or crimes, such as wrongful convictions, redress for individuals should trigger policy discussions about how to prevent the injustice from happening again.
Canada has an example in Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology to the victims of residential schools. That was useful and important. But it was not the beginning and end of the long, difficult process of coming to terms with our history.
Bernard Valcourt, the aboriginal affairs minister, recently suggested the 2008 apology somehow covered the starvation experiments many Canadians recently learned about through the work of historian Ian Mosby, some of which did take place in residential schools. Those experiments were horrific. The prime minister should be making speeches about this, holding consultations, listening to victims and their family members. Instead, silence, because he apologized for residential schools once, five years ago.
Something similar could happen with the Turing pardon. From now on, anyone who calls for an examination of the history of state persecution of homosexuals, or redress for the effects, might be met with: “Well, we pardoned Turing. What more do you want?” So the key now is to use the momentum of the national sympathy for Turing to start to address some of those bigger questions.
Turing was an original thinker who lent his name to some of the most important concepts of the 20th cen- tury, such as the hypothetical Turing machine (which computes by manipulating symbols on tape) and the Turing test of artificial intelligence. He lived in an era in which a machine typically had a single function; what if, he theorized, a “universal” machine could do just about anything? His 1936 paper On Computable Numbers marks a historic shift.
“Before Turing, things were done to numbers. After Turing, numbers began doing things. By showing that a machine could be encoded as a number, and a number decoded as a machine, On Computable Numbers led to numbers (now called software) that were ‘computable’ in a way that was entirely new,” writes George Dyson in his book Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.
Turing understood the possibility that something like Google could exist, decades before it became real. It’s painful to imagine what Turing might have done for humanity if he’d lived another 40 or 50 years.
One of the arguments the British government used in support of the pardon was Turing’s contribution to his country. During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, helping to break the Enigma code.
But Turing’s genius is irrelevant to the moral question.
If Turing’s conviction was wrong, all convictions under that law were wrong.
Sometimes the best way to get people to care about injustice on a mass scale is to focus on the story of one person.