Never Again

The horse has already left the barn, Pandora’s Box is already open, or the genie is already out of the bottle. Whichever cliché you prefer, each describes our new relationship to state-sponsored torture. Once beyond the pale, torture has crossed over as effortlessly as Taylor Swift making the switch from teenage country crooner to grown-up pop superstar. We now have a sitting Supreme Court justice, one Antonin Scalia, who, when asked about torture as a tool for interrogation, publicly opines that “We have never held that that’s contrary to the Constitution.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/12/22/7_worst_right_wing_moments_of_the_week_%E2%80%94%C2%A0rick_santorum_wants_you_to_know_hes_not_a_virgin_partner/)

For Scalia, torture is only ruled out by the Constitution as a “cruel and unusual punishment” for those already convicted of a crime. How convenient, then, the post-9/11 rolling back of habeas corpus rights, which intend the enabling of indefinite incarceration without trial for any individual the state identifies as an “enemy combatant.” Scalia’s reading of the Constitution legitimizes torture for the full duration of any such individual’s indefinite incarceration, i.e. the only way to stop the torture is to be convicted of acts of terrorism, except that as an “enemy combatant” one doesn’t have a right to stand trial for those very acts of alleged terror. Scalia’s brand of justice sounds rather like the old witch trials in which the suspected witch was subjected to dunking and could either a) admit to being a witch or b) prove that she wasn’t a witch by drowning. The only difference now is that with water boarding you get to drown again and again; as an “enemy combatant” one doesn’t really quite exist so one can’t actually die.

Even more troubling than this are the results of a recent ABC News- Washington Post poll conducted in the aftermath of the US Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture. 59% of poll respondents think the CIA’s treatment (i.e. torture) of suspected terrorists was justified. William James once described religion as “a forced option,” reasoning that “We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in this way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.” Torture, I would argue, is a forced choice in much the same way, such that the 9% of poll respondents who hazarded “no opinion” as to CIA torture have, in their indecision (or, worse still, apathy) definitively decided in favor of torture in the same way that agnostics have, per James, decided against religion. This, if my math is correct, brings the percentage of Americans approving state-sponsored torture up to 68%. Which, given the wiggle room of polling margin for error, allows us to comfortably conclude that 7 out of 10 Americans are on board with water boarding. For context, note that this 68% is ten percentage points higher than the 58% of Americans who watched last February’s Super Bowl.

I was eating lunch with a colleague at work the other day when Senator Dianne Feinstein appeared on the café TV screen explaining why the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report had been made public, an explanation that can be boiled down to the two most important words of her speech: “Never again.” But when Feinstein delivered these words my colleague didn’t hesitate in her reply, “Oh, like that’s ever going to happen.” For my colleague, torture was already in the same category as death and taxes, leaving me wondering how we got from the unthinkable to the inevitable in the seeming blink of an eye.

The answer, I would suggest, stems primarily from our deep-seated need to think of ourselves as fundamentally good people, a need that frequently manifests in the individual psyche, but which in this case also plays out in the realm of our collective identity. For many, if not most Americans, one of the keystone reasons we believe ourselves to be good is that we are, indeed, Americans. Whatever our personal foibles, simply by virtue of living and working in the United States we contribute to and participate in what is perhaps best summarized in the opening credits for the old Superman TV show: “Truth, justice, and the American way.” So even if I’m just an average Joe (or Jane), I am a part of something larger than myself, and that something isn’t just good, it is, essentially, the Good in the Platonic sense of the term; just as Plato’s form of the Good “allows one to realize all the other forms,” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good) the American Way allows one to realize truth, justice, and all of the other goods accruing to citizens of a land made, per Woody Guthrie, “for you and me.” Which Good isn’t all bad, at least when we kinda live up to the communitarian ethos embedded in Guthrie’s secular hymn. But what happens when the Good, like Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction, announces its intent to “get medieval on yo’ ass”?

The “yo’” in question here, of course, is Islam, but it could just as easily be communism, China, or Mars, because all that really matters to the collective identity is that the Good is going to get medieval on somebody’s ass. The Good, you see, can’t get medieval on anybody’s ass. The Good can’t, to quote Marcellus Wallace again, “call a couple of hard, pipe-hittin’ (blokes) to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.” Or at least the Good couldn’t. Past tense. But, per the 68 percent, now it would seem that the Good can. Get medieval. It’s not the American Way until suddenly it is.

Which brings us back to our need to need to think of ourselves as fundamentally good people, and the solution of subsuming ourselves in a greater (American) Good. The need doesn’t change, even as circumstances do, and even if those circumstances involve the Good perpetrating bald-faced evil. So when the Good gets medieval/evil, those of us who derive much of our sense of ourselves as basically good and decent people from the fact that we are Americans are subject to one of psychology’s most potent phenomena, cognitive dissonance, that “feeling of discomfort caused by performing an action that is discrepant from one’s self-concept.” (http://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/hip/us/hip_us_pearsonhighered/samplechapter/0205796621.pdf) Or, in this case, the feeling of discomfort when the Good perpetrates evil in your name.

Dissonance theory maintains that there are two primary ways to respond to cognitive dissonance. The first involves “changing our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition.” (ibid) Senator Feinstein’s “Never again” is a perfect example of this approach. “Never again,” however, is extremely difficult and fraught with risk. Terrorism, as perpetrated on 9/11, is terrifying, indeed. Facing it down without resorting to ultra-violence of our own requires a courage that is excruciatingly difficult to muster. And it may fail. The attacks may come again.

Given the outsized difficulty and risk of “Never again,” it should come as no surprise that the 68% have managed their cognitive dissonance with the alternate approach of “attempting to justify our behavior through changing one of the dissonant cognitions,” or “by adding new cognitions.” (ibid) Put another way, “once we are committed to our views and beliefs, most of us distort new information in a way that confirms them.” (ibid) Making things even less surprising is the fact that the “closer people are to committing acts of cruelty, the greater their need to reduce the dissonance between ‘I am a good, kind person’ and ‘I am causing another human being to suffer.’ The easiest route is to blame the victim.” (ibid)

From here, it is all too easy to connect the dots:

1) America is Good (and by extension, so am I)

2) America engaged in the evil act of torture (and by extension, I am implicated, triggering cognitive dissonance)

3) Ipso facto, the torture of suspected terrorists was, far from evil, morally justified (and by extension, I am exonerated and cognitive dissonance is defused, despite the fact that torture was unequivocally evil right up until 9/11/2001)

No one, of course, is talking about any of this because no one is actually thinking about it: “the process of reducing dissonance is largely unconscious. Indeed, dissonance reduction works better that way.” (ibid) Perhaps this is yet another reason that Feinstein’s “Never again” fell so flat in the café at work last week and with 7 out of 10 Americans. You can’t get to “Never again” without stopping, facing your fear, and, crucially, thinking. And it is thinking that is sorely lacking in our unconscious resolution of cognitive dissonance, because even if torture weren’t unequivocally evil (which it is), one doesn’t have to think long and hard before realizing that the very best reason to abstain from torture is so that we, and especially those young men and women we send to the four corners of the earth to prosecute the war on terror, don’t become victims of torture ourselves. To our list of clichés we should add what goes around comes around. Pandora’s Box, indeed.

If we were to Monday morning quarterback the unforgivable decision to engage in state-sponsored torture we could modify another cliché and say that some rules are meant to never be broken. Taboos are taboos for a reason, and that reason, it turns out, is cognitive dissonance. Human weakness being what it is, it is all too likely that we will, as we have with torture, distort the truth in service of our sacred self-image. Kant’s categorical imperative might be helpful here: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” As impractical as the categorical imperative often is (we should indeed, contra Kant, lie in order to prevent a murder), we just need to know when to use it. And, it turns out, the categorical imperative is essential to the preservation of necessary taboos. As an intellectual/emotional exercise, ask yourself if you would rather live in a world where Scalia’s “We have never held that that’s contrary to the Constitution” or Feinstein’s “Never again” should become a universal law?

But the horse (torture) has already left the barn, and the truth (torture is evil) has already been distorted. In describing the future (“Never again”), Feinstein is talking to the past. But, if dissonance theory is correct and the only alternative to distorting the truth is to change our behavior to bring it in line with the dissonant cognition, then Feinstein and the rest of us 32% need to keep preaching to the empty choir stalls until they are fit to bust once more. And the only way we get there is if the truth matters a hell of a lot more to the 32% than the personal comfort that comes from feeling good about yourself does to the 68%. Knowing just how deeply I myself am committed to my own personal comfort and to my own self-image, I’d say that the odds, as they are if we choose to fight terror non-violently, are against us. We may fail. Torture may well continue. All we can do is fight to keep the barn door open, all along asking what is the meaning, the truth, of the empty barn?