Mother Jones has a fantastic article about the effects that torture — excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques” — can have on the torturers. (h/t Eve) This, I think, is the best argument to make against torture. It’s horrifying and dehumanizing to the victims, but we regularly accept the necessity of other dehumanizing acts, especially when on a war footing.
The more important point, and the one that far too few emphasize, is that torture destroys the soul of the torturer. It’s dehumanizing to be tortured, but it is, at least, something that someone else is doing to you. To be the torturer is to dehumanize yourself — or, perhaps, to rip off that veil of second nature that hid something you had never seen before. A state that permits — indeed, encourages — its citizens and soldiers to destroy themselves morally in its service as no business compelling anyone’s loyalty.
Ben Allbright doesn’t want to accept that what he did was torture, because unless you’ve deadened yourself to the term (and disturbingly many have) you have to accept that it’s wrong.
Ben loves to debate, perhaps because he usually wins, but now he was endlessly, fruitlessly arguing with himself. “Every human being instinctively knows right from wrong. There is never a justification for torture.” But then again, “Is softening people up wrong on some levels? I don’t know. It wasn’t beneficial to them, but it was presented as necessary.” He had seen a side of himself he didn’t know existed, and now he had to live with that. “In combat you question your mortality,” he told me. “In these prisons you question your morality.”
Ben isn’t the exception. People do these things. People enjoy doing these things. There is a seed of darkness at the heart of man. It isn’t overwhelming — we feel guilty, until we train ourselves not to — but it’s there, and the whole purpose of society and tradition and culture and (if we must) the state is to teach us: first, not to let it out and then, to eradicate it if we can.
For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished: — it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator — but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator. …to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering — a real celebration… (Nietzsche, 1887)
There are any number of reasons why John Yoo, and the rest of the Bush Justice Department that tried to find legal justifications for torture, are wicked men, but here is the best: they decided, on utilitarian grounds, that torture was necessary, then demanded that someone else pay the price. There is certainly something noble in throwing yourself on a grenade to save the rest of your platoon. There may, I think, be something noble in doing the same with your soul — if there really is a ticking time bomb, if it really will save New York, then perhaps it’s noble to damn yourself to save others.
It is never noble to throw someone else on a grenade.
What about the government that orders the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Or the firebombing of Dresden? These were dehumanizing acts of war that saw thousands of women and children killed or horribly maimed. Certainly some of the men responsible later felt that their participation was immoral, or that the order was immoral, yet we don’t call FDR and Truman wicked men. They were great men who decided, on utilitarian grounds, that such evil was necessary, and they demanded that someone else pay the price.
Presidents have always thrown young Americans on grenades when they believed the office demanded it. Maybe Bush was wrong, but that does not make him wicked. Do you imagine that no one could disagree with you on this issue in good faith? Or is everyone who doesn’t draw the line in the same place as you and Mother Jones a wicked, immoral warmonger?
There’s an important and fundamental distinction between killing someone — or, in this case, asking someone to risk being killed — and asking/encouraging someone to destroy himself in a metaphysical, rather than physical, sense.
Total war is horrifying and degrading to our sense of humanity. The mechanization of death makes it far easier to separate ourselves from the human cost of what we’re doing. That doesn’t mean that war is immoral, or that presidents who go to war are wicked; political leadership requires a person to do morally repugnant things, because political virtue is not the same as virtue for the private citizen. A president who sends men to their deaths, or who kills the civilians of an enemy nation (no matter how justified on politically utilitarian grounds) should feel guilty and ashamed, even if he knows it was necessary. Sending a man into battle should never be easy, and that’s only a risk to his body, not his soul.
The question of Bush’s wickedness is really a question of (if you’ll pardon the allusion) what the President knew and when he knew it. Asking men to destroy themselves — telling them that this will, in a fundamental way, break them, and asking that they do it anyway — for the greater good is one thing; treating it as an irrelevance is something entirely different, and evidence either of ignorance or a callous disregard for human virtue.
Yes, of course someone can, in good faith, disagree with me on torture. I will readily admit that many people do, and that I can conceive of (entirely hypothetical) circumstances under which torture would be justified. It isn’t a question of what we’re doing to other people (although that is important and should weigh on the minds of the decision-makers) but what we’re doing to ourselves.
The wickedness isn’t in the war (though stupidity may be); it’s in the thoughtless sacrifice of something more important than life.
How do have any idea whether Bush thoughtlessly or thoughtfully sacrificed the people who did the torturing? A legal memo that tries to make sure that the difficult decision that he made is still technically possible (i.e. allowed to proceed under the laws under the united states) is a totally different thing from a heart-to-heart conversation or even from a philosophical treatise. Wouldn’t a good-souled politician–one who did privately struggle with the consequences of his actions–still use rhetoric that presented his decision as both necessary and legal?
On the broader point, though–that political virtue is different from personal virtue (which I would call true virtue)–you are correct. Politics tends to corrupt the soul of anyone but the strongest kind of man.