Torture Isn’t Complicated
Jon Stewart, the comedic political commentator and host of The Daily Show, has an unfortunate habit of thinking he’s being hospitable to a legitimate opposing viewpoint when really he’s just inclining an ear to moral bullshit. Case in point: his interview with Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain, in which he indicated that the film’s scenes of torture, which he described as our government doing “difficult” things, challenged his viewpoint. Ned Resnickoff offers the right response, explaining how Stewart and others buy into the pro-torture narrative of good people doing ethically difficult things for good reasons. Writes Ned:
Of course, there’s nothing courageous about concealing one’s support for torture. Nor is there anything particularly brave about saying the state should be able to do unspeakable things in order to keep you safe. Excusing and even fetishizing those unspeakable things is an act of cowardice—and there’s nothing particularly complicated about that.
It’s a testament to our country’s moral adolescence that the ethics of torture gets unnecessarily convoluted by endless debates about degrees of pain, fantasy scenarios cooked up by moral relativists, and the high liturgical celebration of killing bad guys. Torture has an objective and morally-clear meaning: the infliction of physical or mental pain for the purpose of breaking the will. It isn’t complicated and it shouldn’t be difficult to identify or to condemn.
Comments are closed.
What about drones? They should be condemned as well as they kill innocent people overseas. They torture as well to some degree by the fear they instill in people that are effected by drone strikes.
I’ve seen the occasional indication that Stewart, much as he likes to critique the politics of militarism in the abstract, has to some extent bought into the heroic military mythos, which is the sacred cow of US politics. I’m thinking of his interview with Sgt. Leroy Petry, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor after losing his hand to a grenade. At one point as Petry is describing the scenario, Stewart says, “You were [x] feet away from these–” He appears to be about to say “people” and stops himself, following the ironclad rule that humanizing the enemy would detract from the soldier’s heroism.
I suppose the neat categorization of people into heroes and villains is the one type of clarity this mythos can accept, since this dehumanizing ontological distinction makes it easier to claim that clear evils such as torture are, at worst, morally ambiguous.
“Jon Stewart, the comedic political commentator and host of The Daily Show, has an unfortunate habit of thinking he’s being hospitable to a legitimate opposing viewpoint when really he’s just inclining an ear to moral bullshit.”
My knowledge of JS is almost nil – largely because videos of his shows don’t broadcast in the UK.
That said, it is often the case that there is no way of distinguishing between “a legitimate opposing viewpoint”, and that other thing. Whether something is “a legitimate…viewpoint” is dependent on many variables. I think the outlook of Jack Chick is objectionable for many different reasons – that is not a reason not to listen to the man express his POV, from his POV.
Intolerance, even of views one might think indefensible & repugnant, worries me. It is a challenge, often a very comfortable one, to listen to views one finds repugnant – but the very discomfort can be a means of growth in compassion, humility, insight, and wisdom. Few views (if any), ISTM, are so utterly devoid of all value that they cannot teach one something. Time on the Net suggests that Christians are divided even within Churches – a contributor to these divisions is rejection of the views of others. People use labels like “modernism” (which often appears to mean Modernism – it’s often hard to tell); “liberalism”, “conservatism”, “progressivism”, & so on; but what do these mean: but many of them, being relative qualities, not absolute, vary in meaning depending on what is being talked about.
For group or person X to say to group or person Y, “I’m not listening to your rubbish” is self-defeating: for Z may treat the convictions X with equal abruptness. In a pluralistic society – in any society – this is unwise, as well as impatient.
“Left Behind” (say) has been severely, & rightly, criticised – there is a lot wrong with it, in many ways. But, however “tripish” it may seem, it needs to be understood, for several reasons:
1) It is based on a reading of Biblical texts; and there are reasons for the choice, & the exegesis, of those texts. Reasons outmoded by the standards expected of sound exegesis today, but reasons nonetheless.
2) It exemplifies a certain approach to the Bible which has had & has still not only intellectual influence, but social effects: whether it is held, makes a difference to society. anti-government paranoia would be less powerful, if the malign, even Satanic, character both of the POTUS & of the executive could not be regarded as prophesied in the Bible. Here in the UK, we too have anti-government sentiment: but we are a very secular culture, so the eschatological Satanising of politicians is far weaker; the fewpeople who think like that are dismissed as cranks. The US is criticised as arrogant & hypocritical, not as “Babylon the Great, the mother of the harlots and abominations of the earth”.
3) The Dispensational Premillennialist Fundamentalist Evangelical Protestantism that informs the “Left Behind” series is the faith of a lot of people. It is a formidable pastoral problem & and inviting reading of (parts of) the Bible. Partly because accepting it, looks like “taking God at His word”: which is an admirable thing to do. And it looks plausible, if one knows no better. Many Christians do not. The DPFEP in those books is, as a system & in many of its details, unfounded. That does not justify not hearing those who express these views.
STM Jon Stewart is doing as he should. Apologies for length.
a very comfortable = a very uncomfortable
“Torture has an objective and morally-clear meaning: the infliction of physical or mental pain for the purpose of breaking the will.”
## Sounds like school to me. “Breaking the will” of the young used to be regarded as a parental duty, founded on by such verses as Proverbs 13.24 & 19.18 – this POV is still being preached:
“I’ll not deal with each of these verses this morning, except to remark that the mother or the father who does not recognize that coercion is a necessary part of parenting is simply naive. You heard me; coercion.”
http://www.calvaryroadbaptist.org/sermons/00-05/sermon__all_you_need_is_love.htm
“It isn’t complicated and it shouldn’t be difficult to identify or to condemn.”
## Given the “variations” in Catholic theology & doctrine, it seems wise to be cautious in how & why one condemns torture: we’re very vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, since Catholics used it for centuries, often in forms that make water-boarding look mild. Which raises the further question – does anyone, anywhere, have an answer ? –
if the various Inquisitions (say) could use torture without blame from Church authority for doing so, why can’t the US ? Seriously. It’s hard to suppress the notion that now the Church has had her fun doing nasty stuff she (at last) disowns, she doesn’t want anyone else to have their fun doing it. May the Church in (what is now) the past torture ? Sure. But now, it’s completely wrong, for everyone. This is not a convincing position. Doctrine should not be laid aside like last year’s summer fashions.
If the Church can change its doctrine on the allowability of the employment of torture, how is that consistent with Catholic attacks on “relativism” ? There is thinking on these questions that needs doing, so where is it being done ? Where can it be found ?
There must be a genuine case for using torture, otherwise Saints & Popes would not have defended the practice. STM there is far too much emotion, far too little thinking, on this issue. The imagination is given too much freedom – the issue should be decided by reason. If the state cannot use torture to defend itself from treason & attack & terrorism, it is denying itself a valuable means of self-defence. It’s a bit late to have a fit of morality anyway, because the state often behaves in immoral ways: how is torture going to make the state evil, if its support & arming of tyrannies does not ? The definition of torture is very uncertain: is birching juveniles torture ? It was legal in the UK until 1948. When people are soft, any severity, however justified, can be miscalled torture: the birch, the cane, the ducking-stool, the branding-iron, the tawse, & so on. These were not pleasant, but neither were they barbarities like scaphism (surely one of the most horrible of deaths), or (among Christians in England), hanging, drawing, & quartering.
I think we in the West are soft, and sentimental, and without principle – not compassionate. There is far too much kindness (to the “wrong” people), and not nearly enough (to the “right” people. How otherwise can a country agonise over the “rendition” or the water-boarding of terrorists, while killing millions of its unborn ? If that is not a sign of a deeply sick society – what is ? If Cardinal Dulles could defend slavery – others can defend torture.
I’ll agree (probably for different reasons) with Kerberos that “…we in the West are soft, and sentimental, and without principle – not compassionate.” I also agree that the Church leaves herself open to charges of hypocrisy on the subject of torture. Where I strenuously part company is this sentence, “There must be a genuine case for using torture, otherwise Saints & Popes would not have defended the practice.” Saints and popes have defended other things which are indefensible (such as slavery and anti-semitism). It is indeed relativism to say that certain things were okay in the past, and now they are sins. It would be refreshing to hear from the Church that these things were always wrong, but because of our hardness of heart we were unable to see them as wrong.
There is a certain sense in which relativism is true though, no?
The Church has always admitted slavery is the result of the Fall, and thus is not ideal.
However, I am not sure that, even today, the Church has condemned all slaveholders in the past as objective sinners or anything like that.
The position does seem to be more like “there could still be good people operating in a bad system,” in such a way that the system is bad or a tragedy, but not necessarily a personal sin to participate in some way in a world in which it does exist (especially since, when you start getting to strict definitions, it becomes hard to define “slavery” as different in nature rather than merely degree from systems we have today) and maybe even was the only conceivable system that even COULD exist given economic development; let’s remember that “ought implies can.” And What constitutes “can” is debatable.
“First Things” in 2010 on a post by MM, here, on torture:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/02/12/catholic-advocacy-of-torture-a-teaching-moment-for-the-catholic-bishops/
I always wonder at Catholics who try to relativize and complexify the moral nature of torture, since on this question the teaching of our bishops is unequivocal. From their letter Faithful Citizenship:
The use of torture must be rejected as fundamentally incompatible with the dignity of the human person and ultimately counterproductive in the effort to combat terrorism (No. 88).
Umm. I’m not in favor of US practice, but one pastoral letter from one bishops’ conference in the past few decades is hardly the be-all and end-all of magisterium. The “complexifying” that Kerberos brings up are all legitimate questions, most especially because of the (to say the least) “mixed message” sent by the full sweep of church authority over the long view of history.
It is not inconceivable that a “State self-defense” argument could be made. If our soldiers are allowed to shoot at armies that try to cross our borders to kill us, and if we’re allowed to taze an aggressor attacking us personally in order to break his will from continuing to attack, it seems at the very least a somewhat more complicated question as to why physical force or pain is out of the question when someone is harming us through an act of aggression that happens to take the form of remaining silent. If we were all trapped in a tunnel running out of air, and a big strong fat guy refused to move out of the mouth of the tunnel, it would seem to be self defense to burn him with a heated iron to “break his will” and get him to move, even though the harm he was inflicting was only “passive”…