This piece by Jonah Goldberg pretty much sums up my position on torture: On Torture ...I’d like to return, briefly, to a point I’ve made a few times over the years. To listen to opponents of torture, torture is always and everywhere evil and unjustifiable. I believe this view is sincerely held by many who hold it. To be honest, I would like to hold that view. I have no problem with moral dogma. I wish we had more of it in this country. But I’m just not persuaded. And I have a weird partial explanation of why I’m not persuaded. Whenever I see a movie depicting, say, slavery, my view of the evils of slavery is either reinforced or unchanged. Slavery is always wrong. Even if I see some slave in a movie set in, say, Ancient Rome serving his master happily and loyally, that doesn’t change my view one bit. Similarly, I very much doubt there’s a filmmaker in the world so gifted he could artistically depict pedophilia without making me want to vomit and, when recovered, want to kill the pedophile on screen and all the people who made the movie. And so it goes with many moral horrors. But it’s not true with torture. There’s a lot of mockery about the TV series 24, and that’s fine. But the truth is heroes in film and TV torture people all the time, from mild beatings to really horrific stuff, and they remain heroes. You can complain that 24 isn’t remotely realistic -- which is true. Forget whether his torture techniques are effective, it’s simply unbelievable that Jack Bauer could get through traffic in L.A., New York, or London as quickly as he does. But what drama does is create a hypothetical situation, a circumstance we can imagine being in. And while we can suspend our disbelief about the laws of physics or the rules of traffic congestion, it is very difficult for us to suspend our moral sense, at least entirely. Quick: In Patriot Games, when Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan shot an IRA stooge in the kneecap to find out more about the ambush, who out there left the theater hoping for a sequel where Ryan was put on trial for his heinous deeds? Anyone? Yes, I understand “it’s just a movie.” I’ve gotten that response before. But the very same crowd tells me that Zero Dark Thirty was an evil piece of propaganda for suggesting that waterboarding works. No one disputes that film and TV not only reflect but also influence the culture, they just tend to be selective about what they complain about. But again, why is it that it’s so easy to imagine situations where torturing someone is defensible but so hard to do so for other taboo deeds? I truly don’t think the answer is simple, nor am I saying anything in the popular culture justifies a public policy on torture or anything else. I’m really just asking the question because I think it offers an interesting insight into how social norms, law, and popular culture interact. My own partial explanation is that torture is ultimately a subset of violence. And violence, as I’ve written at some length here, is imbued with less moral significance than people sometimes assume. Violence is a tool. Violence used to enslave is evil. Violence used to free slaves, not so much. Violence used to rape? Evil. Violence used to subdue rapist? Fine by me. This is the problem with doctrines of non-violence. They end up being exercises in moral equivalence. As Bill Buckley famously said, if you have one man who pushes old ladies in front of oncoming buses and another man who pushes old ladies out of the way of oncoming buses, it simply will not do to describe them both as the sorts of men who “push old ladies around.” I think it would be very, very hard to create a heroic character in film or TV who enjoyed torturing people simply for pleasure or money (though I’m sure some asshat is working on that as we speak). But it’s easy to create a likeable character who beats a bad guy to find the bomb at an orphanage or rescue a kid from suffocating in some pit. In other words, when it comes to violence, the why still matters more than the what for most people. I am entirely open to arguments that this shouldn’t be the case. But I think, simply put, it is the case for most people. And until persuaded otherwise, I’m with most people.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 22:29:25 +0000