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May 18, 2004
Torture and Moral Agency: the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
For the powers-that-be, scapegoating individuals serves as a smokescreen to deflect attention from unjust power structures. When the individuals targeted are far down in the social hierarchy, this serves the added benefit of deflecting attention from the people at the top, the ones who give the orders and who create the structures of injustice and oppression that we live under. In the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, we see this pattern playing out, with the rhetoric about a “few bad apples” and the focus on a handful of Army reservists.
Progressives are right to focus instead on institutional change and on accountability for those at the top. They are right to oppose these efforts to cover up the systematic nature of torture in American gulags around the world. Unfortunately, in doing so, many are on the verge of degenerating into a denial of individual moral agency.
Human beings are capable of choice and morally accountable for their actions. Circumstances can alter culpability-- people in certain kinds of institutions and situations are more likely to commit morally reprehensible actions. But to deny their ability of choice and their role as moral subjects and not just objects is to deny their humanity. Individual moral agency is at the core of one’s right to an equal standing before one’s community. That is not a right that can or should be sacrificed at the altar of institutional responsibility.
One striking example comes from Code Pink, a marvelous group with a history of creative actions, which describes itself as “women for peace.” Yet, while rightly pointing to the responsibility of higher-ups, Code Pink argues that we shouldn’t “let 21-year-old girls be the only people held responsible.”
We don’t need to juvenilize Lynndie England as a “girl,” invoking both age and gender as a way to diminish her agency, in order to hold Rumsfeld and Bush accountable. If Codepink are “women” for peace then Lynndie England is a “woman” torturer. It’s disdainful to describe a 21 year old adult as a girl; she is a woman of equal standing and equal right to moral agency, and therefore culpability, as Code Pink “women” -- and the rest of us. We would all loudly protest if she was denied any basic right or privilege because of her youth, all the while being addressed as a “girl.” The irony is especially profound because many Code Pink women are themselves living embodiments of individual moral agency in restrictive political conditions.
A few years ago, I encountered this drive towards individual absolution in a peculiar setting. I had been in on vacation in Istanbul, about a hundred miles from my childhood hometown when a massive earthquake leveled it. I cancelled my return and rushed back to help with the rescue efforts, spending two weeks in the open-air mass grave my hometown had become. It was hard stuff: we dug, buried, consoled survivors, dug, listened for sounds of life under tons of twisted steel and concrete, and dug more. Although the ordeal was not easy, I felt relatively okay upon my return -- except the stench of death and destruction just wouldn’t leave me. Literally. I was having olfactory hallucinations. If I saw a picture of a dead body on TV, or even thought about death, I smelled it. My doctor recommended I see a post-trauma specialist.
The therapist was a kind, patient woman who made me tell the whole story many times. She then told me that it was not my fault.
Excuse me? Of course it wasn’t my fault. I had never said or thought that it was.
Actually, I thought I had done relatively well given the conditions. I had helped direct a rescue team, composed of a genuinely brave American men and women from Fairfax, Virginia, to a region which had been skipped over because it was a very poor neighborhood next to a burning refinery that authorities and other rescue teams feared might explode. We joked that it made our work easier since we could use the light from its fire to work through night without needing generators -- and worked on, practically non-stop, through very strong aftershocks. Witnessing the heroism, and the aching, impossible solidarity common to scenes of disaster, I didn’t think of myself as a hero but I still felt pretty okay about my role. Certainly not at fault.
But my therapist wouldn’t let up. She kept repeating herself:
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know it’s not my fault.”
“No, really, it’s not your fault.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean it.”
“I mean it too: I’m well aware it’s not my fault.”
“Really, you should accept it’s not your fault because it is not.”
After many rounds of this puzzling behavior, thinking this was some quirky school of psychotherapy that I had never heard about, I started inquiring about her and her work.
She worked mostly with Vietnam veterans.
She told me that, thirty years after the war, some of her patients were having nightmares, crying fits and many were crushed with guilt.
They came to her with souls in the kind of deep wrenching pain that would not go away.
She kept telling them it wasn’t their fault.
From there on, the subject changed.
I pointed out that people who are truly not at fault often know that and do not need to hear it 30 years later. If a man is having crying fits and nightmares three decades after a war, there is a possibility that something really was his fault and that the last thing he needs to hear is “it’s not your fault.” Maybe he needs to say he was indeed at fault, that he was guilty. Is there a way to redemption without acknowledgement of guilt?
Who was she, I argued, to so persistently deny these men’s claim to their own moral agency? Perhaps, I said, she told them what they appeared to want to hear without listening for what their souls, in the nightmares and the crying fits, were desperately trying to say.
Part of the problem is the schizophrenic attitude progressives have towards the U.S. military and the largely poor, mostly red-state population that its foot-soldiers are drawn from. A typical example comes from Bob Herbert, a persistent critic of the administration, the war, and corporate brutality. In a single op-ed, Herbert both says that the price for the administration’s policies is being paid by “brave and patriotic men and women who deserve so much more from the country they are willing to defend with their lives” and just a few paragraphs later, that “we've destroyed countless homes and legitimate businesses and killed or maimed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including many women and children. That was a lousy strategy for winning hearts and minds in Vietnam and it's a lousy strategy now.”
But just as millions of Vietnamese did not die of sudden heart attacks, but were killed, just as villages did not burn from forgotten candles at bedtime, but were set alight with Zippo lighters, and just as Agent Orange did not rain from the clouds, but was dropped from planes, those thousands of Iraqis were killed by our policies, and by the people implementing our policies.
The peace movement has been adamant that it supports and respects the men and women in uniform. But what is real support and real respect? Denying moral agency and refusing to push for full individual accountability is not respect; in fact, it’s rather blatant disrespect, especially given the fact that our concern for “our brave men and women in harm’s way” has been a central slogan of the anti-war movement. Concern without accountability is inherently contemptuous -- even children are generally held accountable, subject to the limits of their understanding. Furthermore, how can any real accounting of the harm done by war exclude the damage done to the soul of someone who tortures people at his complete mercy or fires at inhabited buildings from a helicopter gunship?
I understand all the reasons and the levels of victimization that result in unsuspecting, poor urban and rural youth signing up for the military or the reserves. I have indeed worked in the kind of hellish schools where the recruiting office does seem like a neat little slice of cleanliness and purpose amidst hopelessness. I understand the “poverty draft,” the lack of opportunities for the structurally poor underclass, and all the things that are wrong with the racial and economic realities in this country, which, not incidentally, we are obliged to change.
But we still have to respect the humanity of those soldiers. Anything less is indeed the true “soft bigotry of low expectations.” These men and women are not predator drones with arms and legs. We can’t get away with just talking about institutions, orders, poverty draft and the commanders-in-chief.
Perhaps we shy away from this deeper recognition of individual moral agency because it has such far reaching consequences. When we deny another’s moral agency, we help to create the conditions for denying our own. If we start talking about individual responsibility when it comes to soldiers, how long is it before we discover our own individual responsibility when it comes to war, colonialism, disproportionate consumption, racism, ecological damage, global poverty and hunger, millions of dead children who lacked simple drugs…
The simple fact is almost all of us, even those who try to consume little and recycle everything, benefit from living in such a wealthy country. As George Orwell wrote, “certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind.” The fact that one can dial 9-1-1 during a heart attack gives us 10 to 20 years advantage over the life expectancy of most of the rest of world. Even if you swear not to use it, you have the option -- and I believe that, being human, you will be weaker in your resolve when your breath almost leaves you.
This is simply repeating a truth that I think most of us know at some level: we all exercise privileges that depend, at least partially, on ill-gained wealth in an unjust world.
When viewed through this lens, it’s difficult not to start questioning the connection between our privileges and the occupation of a country at the center of world’s primary oil producing region along with the maintenance of an imperial military that clearly exceeds any reasonable requirements of self-defense. Let me be clear, I am not defending or proposing that we ignore institutions and structures, quite the opposite. Of course we must primarily concentrate on changing and abolishing unjust institutions; however, in the mean time, let us not lose a basic respect for the people in them by withholding a demand for accountability.
Individual moral agency is a precious component of being human; it is also something that people try desperately to avoid coming to terms with. It turned out that my therapist was married to a Vietnam vet -- she wasn’t just trying to protect her patients, she was protecting herself from the reality of that war. She basically asked me to stop coming. A month later I got a check in the mail refunding my co-payment for those last contentious sessions. There was no note.
Posted by zeynep at May 18, 2004 12:06 PM
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Comments
Bravo! I was quite taken with your essay and so I linked to your website. There is something so captivating in your writing style. Firm yet soft. Realist yet so optimistic.
I can't quite describe it........
I don't generally post comments on articles but could resist.
I look forward to reading more.
James
Posted by: James Poulson at May 18, 2004 05:37 PM
Wow, deep, important, and not like anything else I've seen on this issue. Also, I totally agree with Poulson about your writing style, which is so fluid and transparent that I'm not aware of it as I read, just transported by your thoughts into the associated resonances in my own life.
The final part about the therapist and Vietnam gives me goose bumps.
Posted by: Harpo at May 19, 2004 06:08 AM
Interesting essay. It's interesting to see the ramifications of our new moral universe: Bart Simpson forever saying, "I didn't do it!"
Paradoxically it's an extreme individualist culture that tends to try and absolve the individual of all blame. It's always someone else's fault. Me? No. It's society's fault. My parents too.
The conclusions of the Nurnburg era are that to say "I was only obeying orders" is not enough. But that doesn't absolve Rumsfeld et al. either.
Posted by: William at May 19, 2004 07:43 AM
There were many good points there, but the main one I suppose was the observation that justice requires intellectual and moral consistency, which in turn requires individual honesty and responsibility.
I liked the Code Pink thing. I have come across similar examples before of this kind of feminist double-standard: you mustn't refer to women as 'girls' because it is belittling, but then feminists do it themselves in order to deflect blame away from women. The Observer columnist Barbara Ellen was answering complaints about misandry in popular culture, and accused men of being wimps if they couldn't put up with "a bit of gentle ribbing from the girls". The language is obviously chosen to diminish female culpability (ironically, by diminishing females). This also illustrates another good feminist double-standard. We want all gender expectations to be removed, but only from us, not from you. Code Pink did not bother to defend England's fiance, Mr. Graner, or any of the other low-ranking redneck reservists. Why not? Because they were the wrong sex.
One of the reasons I dislike feminist perspectives so much is not just because they tend to be anti-male, but more importantly because they tend to have a distorting effect on our moral judgement. Code Pink is basically excusing Lynndie England from being a torturer on the grounds that she is a woman. Feminists are likely to celebrate Condo Rice as a role model rather than criticise her. It is almost a kind of perverse fascism to define her by her biology - as a black woman - rather than by her actions. It is again tantamount to - as Toufe said - denying her moral agency on the grounds of her biology. This also implies that she cannot be given credit for successes either, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone. Condo Rice and Lynndie England can be given credit but not blame. This whole way of thinking is terribly misleading, and needless to say is unlikely to make the world a better place.
I am frequently saddened by feminism because I expect more from it. Its job is not simply to get women off the hook, its job is to promote equality. Unfortunately, the PR war often becomes an end in itself, and feminists end up excusing torturers.
Based upon the England affair, we can ask what is the feminist view of torture? Is torture acceptable or unacceptable? It seems to be acceptable (or at least excusable) when women do it, but unacceptable when men do it.
This approach is simply no basis for a theory of justice. In order for justice to exist, each person must have equal moral culpability.
Justice is not just about grabbing whatever you can for yourself, it is about making sure that everyone gets their fair share. This sometimes means foregoing an opportunity for self-aggrandisement. That's the tricky bit.
Posted by: Colin at May 19, 2004 07:47 AM
The essay on torture is fabulous and not a minute too soon. It has never made sense to me that we would have to have an either/or culpability. Personally, I think Rumsfeld should lose his job and the ethnocentricism of this nation's leaders should be addressed, both at the polls and elsewhere. No question about that in my mind. I also know there are soldiers who refused to take part in the torture, one of whom is being tried as we speak. That is a man who shows us a choice could be made. I would imagine he struggled with his decision, because the repurcussions could be uncomfortable.
Ours is a nation that does not tolerate discomfort. We seem to believe that we have some kind of right to never feel anxious, to never be uncomfortable, and maybe to "let ourselves off the hook" too easily. Well, I have been a therapist for 25 years and anxiety and discomfort are natural parts of life anywhere.
There is a trauma recovery method called EMDR, which helps people deal with their real feelings and thoughts. It is quite respectful, when done well, of what the person is experiencing on a deep level. Part of our instruction in this method is not to talk people out of their self-blame, which is insulting and doesnt work anyway. We have a story we can tell them, which is that the knights of the round table sometimes were guilty of "friendly fire," as we now call it. There weren't therapists around back in the day, so they went to their priests, who usually set up an atonement process for them, such as guarding a portion of dangerous highway. This way, while they could not bring back the people they had killed, they were able to prevent a few the deaths of innocents on the roads. The movie "Flatliners" (I think I got the name right) which was filmed in the early 90's, is about atonement and depicts a group of medical students who, despite their best efforts, have to come to terms with the immorality in their pasts. It fits with this fabulous essay about the prisoner abuse and is much more honorable.
Posted by: Christine at May 19, 2004 11:37 AM
Interesting stuff, especially, from my POV, the linguistic side (my MA dissertation was on English and Turkish terms for girls and women).
Posted by: Robin at May 19, 2004 07:45 PM
Beautiful essay. It seems obvious to me that those who commit atrocities and those who order them are both culpable, but evidently it is not. Thanks for putting it so plainly and clearly. I will bring your article to the attention of the "we oppose the war but we support our troops" apologists on the left I somehow still encounter, even now.
Posted by: J. A. Lee at May 21, 2004 10:35 AM
The last four paragraphs of this beautiful essay articulate a feeling I have had for quite some time better than I could ever have done myself. The crux of the moral dilemma is
"This is simply repeating a truth that I think most of us know at some level: we all exercise privileges that depend, at least partially, on ill-gained wealth in an unjust world."
Posted by: Miguel at May 26, 2004 02:58 AM
What is said here is very moving - especially the one-sentence crux of the whole essay, where it is stated that "If we start talking about individual responsibility when it comes to soldiers, how long is it before we discover our own individual responsibility when it comes to war, colonialism, disproportionate consumption, racism, ecological damage, global poverty and hunger, millions of dead children who lacked simple drugs…"
But there's one thing about that statement that I cannot understand, at least in terms of how effective it is to consider that in terms of motivating people to oppose these unjust institutions. I don't think it's all that effective to think in these terms, because when I read something like that, this is usually the thought process that goes through my mind:
"If I am personally responsible for war, colonialism, disproportionate consumption, racism, ecological damage, global poverty and hunger, millions of dead children who lacked simple drugs…then that would make me an irredeemably evil person. And if I'm irredeemably evil, then the only way to be a good person again, to contribute to the global struggle against these injust institutions would be to die."
Thusly, suicidal thoughts.
I'm in no danger of committing suicide right now, but whenever I read something like that, suicide is usually the idea that comes to mind, because, well, being responsible for all those overwhelming sufferings listed above is a lot more than I can take. Even when I get out of the suicide mode, I'm still mentally paralyzed, because I'm so fixated on how I'm contributing to all those horrible things, that I can't concentrate on other stuff, like actually doing something about it.
Thusly, I'm gonna need clarification as to how this is actually an effective method of protesting the war in Iraq and other injustices committed by the US. Overwhelming people with guilt trips is only gonna create more depressed people, not people who are actually gonna stand up and fight for what's right. It's certainly gotten me depressed, and I'm gonna need some positive encouragement if I'm to stop weeping and start fighting.
Posted by: Phil at July 30, 2004 07:03 PM
Hi;
I took note of your adjective "red-state" population. Did you mean redneck? If so the more accurate description would be "typical rural areas". I live in one of these areas. Here are some gems of downhome wisdom I have collected:
"we took the land from the indians so we can do the same thing over there and take all the oil we want. (unclear as to where that is, at the time I believe it was Afganistan but she's flexible)( also a mother of a soldier, military police)
"if we kill a million of them the other two million will be better off." (this specifically referred to Afganistan but will serve wherever.)
And this one makes me cringe...............
"those people don't value life like we do." (this one re: Iraq.but can be adapted to just about anyone who isn't us)also this remark is so old it has hair, i've heard this one at least 40 years ago
Considering the daily raido hatemongers, (i have read that there is an audience of 6 million for one of these bastards)and the examples of ignorance sited above, is it any wonder that there is no individual soul searching and that torture can be seen as "just blowing off steam" or "fooling around". Remember we have a born again christian leader who discusses the fine legal points of torture.
Posted by: hallie at August 1, 2004 11:28 AM