Torture and Civilization | Mother Jones
The whole point of civilization is as much moral advancement as it is physical and technological advancement. But that moral progress comes slowly and very, very tenuously. In the United States alone, it took centuries to decide that slavery was evil, that children shouldn't be allowed to work 12-hour days on power looms, and that police shouldn't be allowed to beat confessions out of suspects.The whole piece is worth a read, I suppose. But this is the central thrust of his argument, and it really encapsulates how I feel about it.
On other things there's no consensus yet. Like it or not, we still make war, and so does the rest of the world. But at least until recently, there was a consensus that torture is wrong. Full stop. It was the practice of tyrants and barbarians. But like all moral progress, the consensus on torture is tenuous, and the only way to hold on to it — the only way to expand it — is by insisting absolutely and without exception that we not allow ourselves to backslide. Human nature being what it is — savage, vengeful, and tribal — the temptations are just too great. Small exceptions will inevitably grow into big ones, big ones into routine ones, and the progress of centuries is undone in an eyeblink.
5 comments:
Boy that needed editing... meaning didn't change, but here is the cleaner copy:
The problem with comparing torture to slavery is that slavery is a thing. You practice it, or you don't, there is not much of a continuum. Can you find an intermediate state, like indentured servitude? Yeah, I'll grant that there is a digital gradient, but not a continuum.
Torture is a smooth continuum. Unless you believe that you aren't allowed to ask an accused person questions, then you, like everyone else on Earth, are drawing a line past which you personally believe it is wrong to go. I would venture to guess that in your own personal gray area there are conditional components to where you would draw that line.
So the comparison is weak.
That is a problem with torture for sure. I remember when some kid was about to be cained in southeast asia and that was the whole deal, is all corporal punishment torture.
But that is not the discussion right now. The discussion right now is whether torture is wrong. Is it ever okay to torture? No matter what answer you give, you can then get around it through application of the rule, but that isn't what the nation is talking about right now.
The stuff we did over the last eight years strongly suggests to me that it matters when a society decides that torture is sometimes okay.
Strike eight and insert how ever many years necessary to go back to Clinton's rendition period.
Matt,
Yes, there is a continuum of mild interrogation to torture, and yes slavery is a little more binary. However, the other moral advancements cited in this piece share the gradated nature of interrogation, some such as war involving many more complexities. For that matter, you can say that Jim Crow and racism might be a better example than slavery of a clear moral wrong with many shades of severity which has been rejected by our society. It's a better parallel to the point, but doesn't change the essence of the analogy.
Torture also has some more moral clarity provided from the international agreements to which the US is signatory, in which torture is pretty clearly defined. So that line has been drawn, and there are things which are clearly on one side of the line and things on the other.
So the point is valid that there is a "wrongness" to torture, as there was to slavery and child labor (etc) that has grown from the moral advancement of our society, and that the retention and progress of this advancement is fragile. Defining down and re-instituting what was previously illicit is a troubling regression.
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