The question that interests me is not whether torture is sometimes morally acceptable, but whether it is something we can move beyond, as we have done with human sacrifice and slavery. I'm not saying that moving beyond some attitude or behavior means that such things are never thought or done, but that certain behaviors become so beyond the pale that the idea of anyone doing them is considered an abomination. Child molestations happen every day; but they are an abomination. Normal people are disgusted by the very idea of them, and nobody feels ambivalently about them enough to even attempt their moral justification.
Where we feel ambivalently about a moral issue is where we are most vulnerable to regression. I think it's safe to say that our attitudes toward human sacrifice, cannibalism, child molestation, and slavery are stable because normal people don't feel ambivalently about them. They are abominations, and while nothing is impossible, there is little risk of our regressing to accept them as normative. But our ideas about torture are not so stable in this sense. We don't like the idea of it, but many mainstream Americans still find themselves trying to justify it, or find it hard to condemn it as they would other behaviors considered unambivalently as abominations. Ross Douthat in an honest post articulates, not torture's justification, but the ambivalence he and many Americans feel in passages like this one:
The same difficulty obtains where certain forms of torture are concerned. If I find it hard to condemn Harry Truman for incinerating tens of thousands of Japanese civilians, even though I think his decision probably violated the moral framework that should govern the conduct of war, I certainly find it hard to condemn the waterboarding of, say, a Khalid Sheikh Muhammed in the aftermath of an event like 9/11, and with more such attacks presumably in the planning stages. I disagree with Charles Krauthammer, who has called torture in such extreme circumstances a "moral duty"; rather, I would describe it as a kind of immorality that we cannot expect those charged with the public's safety to always and everywhere refrain from. . . .
Yet of course the waterboarding of al Qaeda's high command, despite the controversy it's generated, is not in fact the biggest moral problem posed by the Bush Administration's approach to torture and interrogation. The biggest problem is the sheer scope of the physical abuse that was endorsed from on high - the way it was routinized, extended to an ever-larger pool of detainees, and delegated ever-further down the chain of command. Here I'm more comfortable saying straightforwardly that this should never have been allowed - that it should be considered impermissible as well as immoral, and that it should involve disgrace for those responsible, the Cheneys and Rumsfelds as well as the people who actually implemented the techniques that the Vice President's office promoted and the Secretary of Defense signed off on.
But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.
Wow. There's enough ambivalence here to sink a ship. I applaud Douthat's attempt to grapple honestly with the problem, but what's he really saying?
Conservatives argue that there is no moving beyond, that evil is not something humans move beyond--that war, crime, violence, and predatory behavior in general are not things we will ever move beyond. The question for me here is not whether or not evil is ever completely eradicated in the human heart or will, but how is it that social attitudes toward certain behaviors evolve in such a way that what was once acceptable by large elements within a society becomes unacceptable. Until fairly recently it was acceptable within American society to think of some humans as chattel. This was acceptable as a mainstream idea in the mid 19th century and beyond. What had to happen so that the idea of slavery has become so repugnant for normal Americans? What were the dynamics within the collective soul life of Americans that enabled such a change?
Am I saying that racism has been eradicated? No. Is it possible that we can regress? Yes, of course we can. But to accept the possibility of regression is also to accept the possibility of progression. And consolidating the progress we have made--sustaining it--and moving on rather than moving backward is at the heart of my concern. What are the forces, the human impulses, that work against sustaining the progress we've made to move beyond the barbaric? I am not arguing for some simplistic idea of "progress" which in the popular imagination is linked to technological advances. The more important question regarding technology is whether it is used to serve barbaric purposes or sustainable civilizational purposes. I realize that 'civilization' is a loaded word here, but I use it in the ordinary sense as the opposite of barbarism. We have some work to define what 'civilization' means in a positive sense--or perhaps to come up with a better word--but this post is more about sustaining resistance to the forces that pull us regressively toward barbarism.
But before pursuing that theme, I want say a thing or two about the dangers of sanctimony. Anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I loathe sanctimony, even though sometimes I am guilty of it. But let me ask you this: Was unequivocal condemnation of slavery in 1855 more sanctimonious then than it is now? Clearly those who condemned slavery were right and those who defended it were wrong. Southerners who defended slavery resented northerners who told them they were wrong, and they did what everybody who is confronted by their being wrong tends to do: to deflect the accusation back on the accuser by pointing out some hypocrisy of his. But the question is not whether northerners then were hypocrites but whether human slavery was then and is always an abomination. It is, and today there is no argument about it. Sanctimony is annoying, but it's no excuse to dismiss the argument the sanctimonious are making.
So if slavery was wrong, even though most southerners annoyed by the sanctimony of northerners defended it, I would argue that we are in a similar situation now regarding torture. It, like slavery, is an abomination. It always was and always will be. The only thing that changes is the social attitude toward it. People like Cheney defend the use of it. Douthat sees both sides, and articulates the ambivalence many decent, thoughtful people feel about it today reminiscent of the way that decent, thoughtful southerners and northerners articulated their ambivalence about slavery. Douthat recognizes the moral principle, but that's his head talking. His will is in a different place.
But here, too, I have uncertainty, mixed together with guilt, about how strongly to condemn those involved - because in a sense I know that what they were doing was what I wanted to them to do.
He acknowledges the moral principle, but we have to ask the question: Why is torture something he willed Americans to inflict on these terrorists? Is it because he thought it was an effective way to get information? Or was it because he is personally so terrified by the threat posed by Islamic terrorists that he believes flouting the moral principle is justified in self-defense? Or is it because he just wants to squash people like Khalid Sheikh Muhammed like a bug?
I get it and I can relate, but isn't that precisely why we proscribe torture as immoral because to remove that proscription gives license to act out our own darkest impulses? What is disturbing about the passage quoted above is not that Douthat wills violence on someone like Khalid Sheikh Muhammed--that is understandable--but that he thinks because he has this violent intention it prevents him from condemning people who act on it. That's the purpose of having a moral principles and the virtue of restraining our action in the light of them: the problem is not that we have evil impulses--that's endemic to the human condition, and none of us are exempt. The problem lies in our acting on them. We use our moral principles as rocks to grasp hold of when the flood would drag us into the deepest pools of collective evil. Douthat seems to be a child of the sixties in this respect: if it feels good, do it; it must be ok. If I hate Muslim terrorists or the Japanese or Germans intensely enough, it's ok to obliterate them--women, children, the elderly. And we suppress our guilt by blaming them in one way or another or by losing ourself in the crowd--if everyone else thinks it's ok, it must be ok.
For me there is no ambivalence about the moral principle regarding torture. It is an abomination; it is always wrong and should always be proscribed by law. And every soldier and agent of American policy should be trained to accept that as normative. Will there be situations that are morally ambiguous and require some flexibility? Yes. But that's true for everything.
No norm is absolute, but the nature of a society's norms distinguishes it as civilized or barbaric. We don't define the norm by the exceptional situations in which it might be breached. The purpose of a norm is to define certain behaviors as repulsive, to acculturate people to develop deeply ingrained interior restraints that make it difficult to perform such behaviors even if it is in their will to do them. And, yes, life is not neat; there are extreme circumstance where normatively abominable behavior is necessary--but even so, it is not done with ease or pleasure, but with a full sense of its horror.
So what is disturbing to me, as it was for Douthat, about the torture policy over the last eight years is not to learn that our soldiers and agents do it--abominable things happen in war--but that the norms as defined by the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual were dismissed as no longer normative by our political leaders--and that in their dismissal of them they in effect legitimated barbarism. What was most disturbing to me about the pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib was the fun that these soldiers seemed to be having, and Limbaugh's justification of it as like fraternity hazing. These soldiers were like children behaving in an environment in which they knew their behavior was legitimated by their superiors. And for what reason? Because the barbarism of Islamic terrorism must be met in kind? Or is it really because, like Douthat, they were doing what so many Americans wanted them to do--to humiliate these Muslim phantasms, to stamp them out like bugs, to enact the dark fantasy in all our hearts to destroy the enemy before it destroys us.
And so this is my problem with many conservative intellectuals who tend toward the authoritarian: it is not what they think, but what they will. Many of the folks at NRO and guys like Charles Krauthammer are among the most egregious examples of this kind of conservative intellectual, and do not to think of Douthat in that group. But after reading a post like this he seems more vulnerable to fall into it than I thought possible for him. Regardless of their sophisticated understanding of the moral principles involved, for them it comes down to a deep need for order and security, which trumps all other factors. Every threat is maximized so that our collective survival is at stake, and so maximum force is justified without any debate or attempt at prudent assessment of the seriousness of the threat. They dared to attack us? Well we'll wipe them from the face of the earth. This attitude toward enemy is in us all, but with security-minded conservatives it's considered a virtue to act on it. But to act on such an impulse is not virtuous or realistic; it is barbaric.
I am not a pacifist. I believe that there are extreme situations when moral norms in good conscience can and should be suspended. But such acts must then be justified to the larger community as warranted by the exceptionality of the circumstances. Just saying it was an act of conscience does not give it moral legitimacy. No serious breach of a moral norm transcends accountability to the judgment of the larger community, no matter how justified the transgression might be in the mind of the transgressor.
And because of their suspension of the moral norms with regard to torture Bush, Cheney, and others should be put on trial--or subjected to some other formal proceeding--in which their decisions are judged by the larger community. I think Truman should also have been forced to formally account for his decisions. These officials should be given their opportunity to justify themselves, and we should all listen with an open mind. Maybe most Americans would give them a pass. Maybe I would. But at the very least they should be challenged by authorities more legitimate than Chris Wallace and threatened with sanctions more serious than a negative op ed if they be judged guilty. If they are not held accountable, then truly we are legitimating a regression that will only lead to more egregious trangressions in the future.
If we were a politically mature society we would do this as a matter of normal procedure without a second thought, but clearly we are not. Someday I believe we will progress to a point where we will be.
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Monday Update: Greenwald quotes Orwell this morning:
All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them
The first time I even heard of the firebombing of Dresden was when I read Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five account in my twenties. And because of the nature of the book I assumed it was fictional exaggeration, and it wasn't until some years later that I learned what really did happen there. Douthat thinks that Truman had no other choice but to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. Maybe he's right, but if such a decision is so automatic to kill so many thousands of noncombatants, then we have to accept that we are tribalistic moral primitives. It is precisely this kind of tribalistic thinking that is the barbarism we have to move beyond.