The political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain has died. Many people were fans of her work; I was not.
In her early scholarship, Elshtain established herself as a distinctive voice: feminist, Laschian, Arendtian. By the mid to late 1990s, however, she had descended into cliche. As she dipped deeper into the well of communitarian anxiety, she would come up with stuff like “the center simply will not hold.” When she worried about the loss of historical memory, she would say “we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past.'”
Every sentence felt like a windup to an inevitable, unsurprising conclusion. Any author or topic she mentioned, you knew the exact quote she was going to pull.
But it was her posture as a realist that irritated me most. Elshtain styled herself a sober, unflinching witness to the horrors of our world. This write-up at The Atlantic partakes of the same frame.
As befits a political theorist, Elshtain’s ideas eclipsed her accolades. “She wanted to be absolutely realistic about structures of power and political power that operate in our world that we should not be naïve about,” said William Schweiker, a University of Chicago professor and colleague of Elshtain’s. “In the terms of political philosophy, she was called a political realist.”
But, importantly, she was a political realist of a very specific sort: Christian. An admirer of Augustine, her sense of the fallen world was an early and foundational belief, she wrote in Augustine and the Limits of Politics in 1995. “Having had polio and given birth to my first child at age nineteen, bodies loomed rather large in my scheme of things. … I was too much a democrat and too aware of the human propensity to sin to believe that humans could create a perfect world of any sort on this fragile globe.”
This led her to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a robust theoretical argument about just war.
Yet what was most striking about Elshtain’s realism was how removed from reality it actually was. Channeling decades of communitarian complaint about the triumph of the rights revolutions of the 1960s, the rise of individualism and the like, she took aim in 1995 at the “new attitude toward rights that has taken hold in the United States during the past several decades.” This at a time when Democrats and Republicans had begun to strip suspected criminals of many procedural protections, when a presidential candidate’s membership in the ACLU was equated with membership in the Communist Party, when there were fewer counties in the United States with abortion providers than they were in the 1970s—developments, as we have seen, that have mostly gotten worse in the succeeding years.
When it came to matters of war and peace, especially after 9/11, Elshtain was even more removed from reality. No more so than when she claimed to be confronting it. I wrote about Elshtain’s views on torture in the London Review of Books in 2005. Some of the specifics may be out of date, but the overall argument, I think, remains sound. (The essay, sadly, is behind a firewall, but you can read the first half of it here and the second half, where I discuss Elshtain, here.)
If Torture, Sanford Levinson’s edited collection of essays, is any indication of contemporary sensibilities, neocons in the Bush White House are not the only ones in thrall to romantic notions of danger and catastrophe. Academics are too. Every scholarly discussion of torture, and the essays collected in Torture are no exception, begins with the ticking-time-bomb scenario. The story goes something like this: a bomb is set to go off in a densely populated area in the immediate future; the government doesn’t know exactly where or when, but it knows that many people will be killed; it has in captivity the person who planted the bomb, or someone who knows where it is planted; torture will yield the needed information; indeed, it is the only way to get the information in time to avert the catastrophe. What to do?
It’s an interesting question. But given that it is so often posed in the name of realism, we might consider a few facts before we rush to answer it. First, as far as we know, no one at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or any of the other prisons in America’s international archipelago has been tortured in order to defuse a ticking time bomb. Second, at the height of the war in Iraq, anywhere between 60 and 90 percent of American-held prisoners there either were in jail by mistake or posed no threat at all to society. Third, many U.S. intelligence officials opted out of torture sessions precisely because they believed torture did not produce accurate information.
These are the facts, and yet they seldom, if ever, make an appearance in these academic exercises in moral realism. The essays in Torture pose one other difficulty for those interested in reality: none of the writers who endorse the use of torture by the United States ever discusses the specific kinds of torture actually used by the United States. The closest we get is an essay by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in which she writes:
Is a shouted insult a form of torture? A slap in the face? Sleep deprivation? A beating to within an inch of one’s life? Electric prods on the male genitals, inside a woman’s vagina, or in a person’s anus? Pulling out fingernails? Cutting off an ear or a breast? All of us, surely, would place every violation on this list beginning with the beating and ending with severing a body part as forms of torture and thus forbidden. No argument there. But let’s turn to sleep deprivation and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category as bodily amputations and sexual assaults? There are even those who would add the shouted insult to the category of torture. But, surely, this makes mincemeat of the category.
Distinguishing the awful from the acceptable, Elshtain never mentions the details of Abu Ghraib or the Taguba Report, making her list of do’s and don’ts as unreal as the ticking time bomb itself. Even her list of taboos is stylized, omitting actually committed crimes for the sake of repudiating hypothetical ones. Elshtain rejects stuffing electric cattle prods up someone’s ass. What about a banana [pdf]? She rejects cutting off ears and breasts. What about “breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees”? She condemns sexual assault. What about forcing men to masturbate or wear women’s underwear on their heads? She endorses “solitary confinement and sensory deprivation.” What about the “bitch in the box,” where prisoners are stuffed in a car trunk and driven around Baghdad in 120° heat? She supports “psychological pressure,” quoting from an article that “the threat of coercion usually weakens or destroys resistance more effectively than coercion itself.” What about threatening prisoners with rape? When it comes to the Islamists, Elshtain cites the beheading of Daniel Pearl. When it comes to the Americans, she muses on Laurence Olivier’s dentistry in Marathon Man. Small wonder there’s “no argument there”: there is no there there.
…
If the unreality of these discussions sounds familiar, it is because they are watered by the same streams of conservative romanticism that coursed in and out of the White House during the Bush years. Notwithstanding Dershowitz’s warrants and Levinson’s addenda, the essays endorsing torture are filled with hostility to what Elshtain variously calls “moralistic code fetishism” and “rule-mania” and what we might simply call “the rule of law.” But where the Bush White House sought to be entirely free of rules and laws—and here the theoreticians depart from the practitioners—the contemplators of torture seek to make the torturers true believers in the rules.
There are two reasons. One reason, which Michael Walzer presents at great length in a famous essay from 1973, reprinted in Torture, is that the absolute ban on torture makes possible—or forces us to acknowledge the problem of “dirty hands.” Like the supreme emergency, the ticking time bomb forces a leader to choose between two evils, to wrestle with the devil of torture and the devil of innocents dying. Where other moralists would affirm the ban on torture and allow innocents to die, or adopt a utilitarian calculus and order torture to proceed, Walzer believes the absolutist and the utilitarian wash their hands too quickly; their consciences come too clean. He wishes instead “to refuse ‘absolutism’ without denying the reality of the moral dilemma,” to admit the simultaneous necessity for—and evil of torture.
Why? To make space for a moral leader, as Walzer puts it in Arguing about War, “who knows that he can’t do what he has to do—and finally does” it. It is the familiar tragedy of two evils, or two competing goods, that is at stake here, a reminder that we must “get our hands dirty by doing what we ought to do,” that “the dilemma of dirty hands is a central feature of political life.” The dilemma, rather than the solution, is what Walzer wishes to draw attention to. Should torturers be free of all rules save utility, or constrained by rights-based absolutism, there would be no dilemma, no dirty hands, no moral agon. Torturers must be denied their Kant and Bentham—and leave us to contend with the brooding spirit of the counter-Enlightenment, which insists that there could never be one moral code, one set of “eternal principles,” as Isaiah Berlin put it, “by following which alone men could become wise, happy, virtuous and free.”
But there is another reason some writers insist on a ban on torture they believe must also be violated. How else to maintain the frisson of transgression, the thrill of Promethean criminality? As Elshtain writes in her critique of Dershowitz’s proposal for torture warrants, leaders “should not seek to legalize” torture. “They should not aim to normalize it. And they should not write elaborate justifications of it . . . . The tabooed and forbidden, the extreme nature of this mode of physical coercion must be preserved so that it never becomes routinized as just the way we do things around here.” What Elshtain objects to in Dershowitz’s proposal is not the routinizing of torture; it is the routinizing of torture, the possibility of reverting to the “same moralistic-legalism” she hoped violations of the torture taboo would shatter. This argument too is redolent of the conservative counter-Enlightenment, which always suspected, again quoting Berlin, that “freedom involves breaking rules, perhaps even committing crimes.”
I’ve seen many encomiums and generous words for Elshtain on Facebook and elsewhere. That is understandable: she was clearly a voice who inspired many, and she seems to have been a warm and generous person. I hope, however, that in the coming days people will wrestle with her words more fully and more carefully.
Update (August 16, 9:30 am)
Henry’s got a good post on historical forgetting and the Vietnam War. He’s been reading Nick Turse’s latest book on Vietnam, which uncovers extensive evidence of far greater war crimes committed by the US than was previously known, and writes: “My Lai was closer to being the rule than the exception. Casual murder by US troops of women, children and old people as well as young men, torture, rape and collective reprisals were endemic, even before one gets into the more impersonal forms of slaughter.” Henry wonders why this book hasn’t occasioned more discussion and reflects on the forgetting of that war in the US.
This is all by a way of an introduction to why I found Elshtain’s prose so grating, her posturing so empty. I know some people thought I was being unduly harsh in my post about her. But when I talked about the vacuousness of her prose, the unreality of her realism, this is what I had in mind. Elshtain could write passages like this—
One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby.
—without ever meditating on, even mentioning, the kinds of historical facts that Henry discusses in his post. She would talk about historical forgetting, and chastise others for their forgetting, at the very moment she was enacting it on the page.
Also below, commenter Geo writes:
Glad you began by pointing out what a tedious, thoroughly pedestrian stylist she was — colorless, rhythmless, and self-important. Beyond that, a vintage example of the professional contrarian, exalted to eminence for renouncing radicalism and continually scolding her former leftist and feminist comrades.
This is an important point. The relation between style and substance is tricky. Not every great thinker is a great stylist: Rawls immediately comes to mind. But one of the reasons Rawls was such a terrible stylist (not the only reason, of course, there were plenty others) was that he was such a painstaking thinker. Reading Rawls, you can see the sweat, the labor, almost excruciatingly so, that’s going into the sentences. Too much sweat, if you ask me. But that’s because he refused to avoid so many conceptual obstacles (not all, to be sure, but many) that his theory threw up in front of him. With Rawls, every paragraph feels like mountain climbing; there’s just so damn much that gets in the way of his theories that he refuses to overlook. Again, not always (he could ignore quite a bit, as decades of commentary have shown), but often.
With Elshtain it’s the opposite. Some people thought she was an accomplished stylist but she wasn’t. Not by a long shot. The style was flat, not smooth; she went for sheen rather than sheer. The style concealed the problems with her formulations: not by artful labor, but by blandness and banality.
Elshtain didn’t simply avoid topics. Every thinker does that, to some extent, and with the best ones, you see very clearly where and how they’re doing it. (Doesn’t Arendt have a line somewhere about how what makes a great thinker great is not what he gets right but what he gets wrong?)
With Elshtain, it was worse: it was as if the topics had simply been removed in advance of her arrival on the scene. If Rawls was climbing mountains, Elshtain was driving on highways, humming along a nicely paved road, cleared of all traffic by the state police, in an air conditioned car. Never once encountering the sand or the soil, the gritty materials, not even a pebble, upon which that road was paved.
{ 92 comments }
Anderson 08.15.13 at 7:59 pm
But let’s turn to sleep deprivation and a slap in the face. Do these belong in the same torture category as bodily amputations and sexual assaults?
Grrr … people who don’t realize that sleep deprivation can be torture have not bothered to apprise themselves of the facts. They sound like Rumsfeld saying he stands up all day, why can’t a prisoner?
Phil 08.15.13 at 8:22 pm
It’s as if Ireland v UK never happened. Or maybe not – that judgment established a fine line between ‘torture (banned)’ and ‘inhumane treatment (also banned)’ which BushCo legals duly got their chisels into and worked into a chasm.
I looked into real ticking bomb cases a while back but can’t remember what the score was – it was either “it has really happened, but only once or maybe twice” or “Dershowitz said he’d been told it had really happened, but he didn’t get the details”.
Anderson 08.15.13 at 8:31 pm
Robert Farley noted a rare “ticking bomb” scenario during WW1.
The problems with the stupid scenario are legion; IMHO it’s a mark of someone’s lack of familiarity with the subject of torture that he even takes it seriously.
The Dark Avenger 08.15.13 at 8:58 pm
I’ve always thought she was a poseur since the exchange between her and Gore Vidal about his essay, “Some Jews and the Gays”. Thanks for reinforcing my initial impression.
Wonks Anonymous 08.15.13 at 9:01 pm
Those who engage in civil disobedience are willing to receive punishment for their acts. Why not demand the same of those patriotic torturers faced with hypothetical ticking time-bombs? If soldiers are willing to die for their country, shouldn’t someone be willing to serve time? Instead they can destroy evidence of their torture, brag about said obstruction of justice in a book and promote said book on Fox News.
Gareth Rees 08.15.13 at 9:10 pm
Alistair Horne’s history of the Algerian War (A Savage War of Peace) describes a ticking-bomb scenario:
Teitgen had himself been tortured in Dachau by the Gestapo.
Salem 08.15.13 at 9:10 pm
The USA is not a signatory to the ECHR, so it may as well not have, as far as US conduct is concerned.
More relevant is the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Convention, and the 8th Amendment. Maybe Furundžija too, if you think that kind of thing is meaningful.
Fu Ko 08.15.13 at 9:16 pm
The “ticking time bomb” reasoning is fully general. You can use it to abolish literally any law. Speed limit? You ignore it when there is a ticking time bomb. Legal and moral principle not to assault an innocent guard who knows nothing of the urgency of the situation? We all know that Bruce Willis would knock him out with a single punch, apologize to his unconscious body in a genuinely friendly way, and go on to defuse the bomb.
Clearly, we need to legalize not just torture, but literally every crime. Because ticking time bomb. Also Bruce Willis.
geo 08.15.13 at 9:18 pm
Glad you began by pointing out what a tedious, thoroughly pedestrian stylist she was — colorless, rhythmless, and self-important. Beyond that, a vintage example of the professional contrarian, exalted to eminence for renouncing radicalism and continually scolding her former leftist and feminist comrades.
Anderson 08.15.13 at 9:41 pm
8: you remind me of a classic Dave Barry column on downsizing the federal government:
Except that Barry is a humorist, and Elshtain purported to be serious.
Corey Robin 08.15.13 at 9:41 pm
Wonks Anonymous: “Those who engage in civil disobedience are willing to receive punishment for their acts. Why not demand the same of those patriotic torturers faced with hypothetical ticking time-bombs?”
Actually these guys go there. If you read part 2 of my piece, which I link to above, I talk about this. There’s a whole discourse comparing the trial of the torturer to the trial of the civil disobedient. They love that stuff. Adds to the drama.
Anderson 08.15.13 at 9:41 pm
10: obviously, [blockquote] works only for one paragraph at a time here.
LFC 08.15.13 at 9:43 pm
Glad you began by pointing out what a tedious, thoroughly pedestrian stylist she was — colorless, rhythmless, and self-important.
Her Women and War (1987; 2nd ed. 1995) is stylistically ok. Or such is my vague recollection, based on the parts I’ve read (it’s been a while). Style to one side, Women and War is a seminal (if you’ll forgive that word) book in the war-and-gender literature. Which is not to defend what she wrote about torture etc.
Anderson 08.15.13 at 9:46 pm
13: ovular?
LFC 08.15.13 at 9:51 pm
14: lol
Number Three 08.15.13 at 9:52 pm
That Atlantic piece was awful, no doubt, and JBE’s post-9/11 apologias were a disgrace. What I would say is that there is a place for the professional contrarian, and that some of the bloggers at CT are something close to that, no? I think of JBE as the political theory version of Dennis Miller. She may have been losing her edge in the 1990s, but she lost her mind after 9/11.
Phil 08.15.13 at 10:46 pm
When I referred to “real ticking bomb cases” above I was thinking of cases where torture has in fact been used to induce the bomb-planter into giving up the life-saving information, only in real life rather than on 24. These seem to be fairly scarce.
I think Corey’s touched on one particularly important point, which is that stressing the moral enormity (and absolute illegality) of torture makes less of a dent in the Dershowitzian special pleading than we might think it would. There’s a nasty strain of sub-Fascist moral agonising in the background of these arguments (sometimes in the foreground) – as if to say, “this is vile and unforgivable, but perhaps we must do it!” Or even, “this is vile and unforgivable – are we strong enough to do it?” At which point I can’t stop thinking about Himmler’s musings about the SS man bravely overcoming his own conscience, so I’ll shut up before I godwin the joint completely.
pedant 08.15.13 at 11:05 pm
“I was too much a democrat and too aware of the human propensity to sin to believe that humans could create a perfect world of any sort on this fragile globe.†This led her to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a robust theoretical argument about just war.”
Un-f***ing-believable. Aware of sin. Iraq war. Just war. These may belong in the same paragraph, but not with the logical connectives supplied.
I’m aware of the human propensity to sin, and the impossibility of creating a perfect world, so I will swallow wagon-loads of self-deceptive sophistry about democracy promotion and how we are bringing a new dawn to the Middle East, all of it peddled by manifest liars who also work for oil companies.
Yeah, that’s some prime-time realism there!
Kent 08.15.13 at 11:13 pm
Thanks for the link and write up. She was one of my thesis readers lo these many years ago and performed truly admirably. Which is NOT a given as many here no doubt know. Apart from my advisor she was the only one to truly appreciate what I was trying to accomplish in my dissertation. And she took the time to suggest new avenues of exploration that were well beyond what I had written but were right on the mark and exactly what I needed to hear — this despite my work being only very orthogonally related to hers, at best.
I finished the degree in 97 and left Chicago shortly thereafter so I didn’t see her up close and personal during the post 9/11 meltdown but it truly pained me to read her at that time. It seemed her brain just shut down.
She was a better thinker than a writer, IMO, and a better reader than most, and extremely generous with her time. Despite her (awful!!) political judgment post 9/11 I am still grateful to her.
Andrew Burday 08.15.13 at 11:29 pm
Minor typo: the essay at the LRB is behind a paywall (actually a “registration wall”, but I don’t know a specific term for that). It’s probably also behind a firewall, but that’s not relevant here.
Barry 08.16.13 at 12:27 am
Number Three 08.15.13 at 9:52 pm
” That Atlantic piece was awful, no doubt, and JBE’s post-9/11 apologias were a disgrace. What I would say is that there is a place for the professional contrarian, and that some of the bloggers at CT are something close to that, no?”
‘Contrarian’ in practice means somebody making falsely brave arguments in favor of removing the limits on what the elites can do.
Barry 08.16.13 at 12:28 am
Phil 08.15.13 at 10:46 pm
” When I referred to “real ticking bomb cases†above I was thinking of cases where torture has in fact been used to induce the bomb-planter into giving up the life-saving information, only in real life rather than on 24. These seem to be fairly scarce.”
For for every one of those, there are 10,000 cases where the purpose was state terror, pure and simple.
Bloix 08.16.13 at 12:29 am
The Israel Supreme Court demolished the “ticking time bomb” excuse for torture in its opinion in a 1999 ruling available here: http://www.btselem.org/sites/default/files/hc5100_94_19990906_torture_ruling_eng.pdf
To paraphrase, the court’s position is this:
Torture is an example of the crime of aggravated assault, that is a non-consensual touching with intent to do serious bodily harm. Anyone who commits torture is liable for criminal prosecution.
Like any criminal defendant, a person accused of torture can admit the act but raise the defense that the act was necessary to prevent injury to himself (ie self-defense) or to another. Thus, if an interrogator is being investigated or is indicted on a charge of torture, he can certainly contend in his defense that he did so to prevent the explosion of a “ticking time bomb” – that is, a specific, identified threat of imminent harm to others.
But the mere possibility of a ticking time bomb is not a justification for an administrative directive, outside the purview of the courts, that permits interrogators to commit the crime of aggravated assault without consequences.
Herschel 08.16.13 at 2:54 am
Like any criminal defendant, a person accused of torture can admit the act but raise the defense that the act was necessary to prevent injury to himself (ie self-defense) or to another. Thus, if an interrogator is being investigated or is indicted on a charge of torture, he can certainly contend in his defense that he did so to prevent the explosion of a “ticking time bomb†– that is, a specific, identified threat of imminent harm to others.
Well, no. The parties to the U.N. Convention against Torture specifically committed to disallow such a defense. Article 2 Section 2 of the convention:
No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat
of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as
a justification of torture.
Of course, the “ticking time bomb” scenario is utter horseshit to begin with. The situation is never that a state authority knows there is a bomb going to go off, knows they have someone in custody who knows where and when the bomb will go off, and knows that if they torture the person he or she will give the authorities information that can be used to prevent the bomb going off. They only think there might be a bomb, think they might have someone in custody who might possibly know about it, and think that if they torture the poor devil, who is possibly completely innocent of any involvement or knowledge, they might possibly get information that might possibly be useful in defusing the bomb that they think might exist. Tenuous grounds to violate absolute treaty obligations, not to mention moral ones.
pedant 08.16.13 at 3:05 am
And isn’t JBE’s story just entry no. 542 in the on-going demonstration that Chicago is the Heart of Darkness, a.k.a. Mordor?
Straussianism, neo-cons, freshwater econ, Friedman and other Randians, etc. etc. etc. Not simply conservative. Deeply, perniciously, corrupt. The wound where the most vile toxins are infiltrated into the bloodstream of public discourse.
It’s a good university, right? Probably good at something, outside of the social sciences? Botany? The conservation of medieval tapestries?
Gene O'Grady 08.16.13 at 3:59 am
pedant, Chicago’s English and Classics programs have historically been excellent, and to my personal knowledge Classics still is.
I’m afraid when I hear “Chicago School” I still think of On Critics and Criticism rather than Milton Friedman. Was looking at the book the other day and its sheer physical beauty made a deep impression on me.
I believe that Chicago is key to the new, excellent, and much needed English translation with notes of the complete works of Seneca. Always reminds me of the time a street person noticed that I was carrying a copy of Summers’ 1910 commentary on the letters and not only praised my taste but quoted from one of them.
roger gathman 08.16.13 at 4:30 am
Are we to believe that the ticking bomb scenario works in reverse? Say you know a sitting leader of a country is about to declare the invasion of another country and the bombing of its capital city, followed by its occupation. Would it be ethical to assassinate said leader, thus leading to the saving of thousands and hundreds of thousands of lives>
But I guess Assassination: the debate wouldn’t attract eager moral philosophers, for the good reason that they would then be liable to oh, investigation and imprisonment for inciting assassination. Funny thing about those rules…
Belle Waring 08.16.13 at 4:37 am
Anderson: Bruce Willis is also drafted in my 2004 exploration of the issue.
JW Mason 08.16.13 at 4:45 am
The subject of a ticking bomb cannot come up without a link to this post. (Remember when blogs were awesome?) Nobody ever asks the tough moral question of whether it might be best to just give the terrorists what they want, what with the innocent lives and all.
JW Mason 08.16.13 at 4:47 am
I’d forgotten CT will not accept links that end in numbers. (I know, right?) Supposed to be this post: http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/10/18/5548.
bad Jim 08.16.13 at 6:09 am
JW Mason, thanks for that link. It brings to mind something that Joan Baez (yeah, whatever) wrote about pacifism, that hypothetical questions deserve hypothetical answers. If someone presents you with a contrived conundrum, you’re allowed to respond with a deus ex machina.
Bruce McCulley 08.16.13 at 6:15 am
On the question of what the University of Chicago might be good at, here’s some old (but I think still relevant) evidence: http://www.secondcity.com/media/mediaplayerfull/41/0/
Hidari 08.16.13 at 7:33 am
If we accept the premise of the ‘ticking time bomb’, would it be ethical for the Taliban (or whoever) to capture and torture Barack Obama in order to force him to reveal where his next
racist terrorist attack on innocent people in Pakistan, sorry, highly targeted drone strike that only kills insurgents would take place? Just askin’.Phil 08.16.13 at 9:52 am
for every [ticking bomb case], there are 10,000 cases where the purpose was state terror, pure and simple
True. Henry Shue’s 1978 essay on torture – which ought to be much more widely available – draws a distinction between torture as a means to an end and torture whose only purpose is to destroy the victim, then demonstrates that there’s actually no bright line between the two: once you embark on torture, you are trying to destroy the other person. Herschel’s comment is also relevant here:
They only think there might be a bomb, think they might have someone in custody who might possibly know about it, and think that if they torture the poor devil, who is possibly completely innocent of any involvement or knowledge, they might possibly get information that might possibly be useful in defusing the bomb that they think might exist.
I’m just interested, perhaps rather ghoulishly, in the question of whether there are any documented “ticking bomb” cases. As I said, I have a hazy memory of Dershowitz saying he’d been told it had definitely happened just like that (in Israel, I think), but then weaselling when asked for names and dates. Other than that I can’t think of anything specific. You’d think that in all the (civil) wars and (counter-)revolutions there have been (since the invention of time-delay fuses) it would have happened at least once. Did everyone think like Teitgen and Vukovich? (I mean, good, if so.)
Ronan(rf) 08.16.13 at 10:05 am
Even if you ignore the ticking time bomb scenario’s inherent stupidity though, you’re still left with the fact that US torture policy had nothing to do with stopping a ticking time bomb..
surely you wouldn’t use positional tortures, or sleep deprivation (or even waterboarding) to get info in a TTB situation, as they’re so time consuming, you’d need a series of torture professionals (subject to all domestic labour protection, probably unionised) spread throughout the world, (to get to a suspect at short notice) who had spent decades honing their craft, who knew *exactly* what to do to get information in such a short space of time, and who had no restrictions on what they could do
This isn’t CIA officer Bud Short making it up as s/he goes along, it’d have to be a real professional, with standard techniques, training days, professional networks….and so on
Barry 08.16.13 at 10:54 am
” As I said, I have a hazy memory of Dershowitz saying he’d been told it had definitely happened just like that (in Israel, I think), but then weaselling when asked for names and dates. ”
Is there a documented case of Dershowitz ever telling the truth?
ajay 08.16.13 at 10:54 am
I’m just interested, perhaps rather ghoulishly, in the question of whether there are any documented “ticking bomb†cases. As I said, I have a hazy memory of Dershowitz saying he’d been told it had definitely happened just like that (in Israel, I think), but then weaselling when asked for names and dates.
There were a couple of vaguely similar cases in WW2 where special forces divers were caught after planting bombs on or near warships in harbour. One was Operation Gamma, by Italian divers against the British fleet in Alexandria [wikipedia]:
” [Lead diver de la Penne] successfully placed the limpet mine, just under the hull of [HMS Valiant]. However, as they both had to surface, and as Bianchi was hurt, they were discovered and captured.
Questioned, both of them kept silent, and they were confined in a compartment aboard Valiant, under the sea level, and coincidentally just over the place where the mine had been placed. Fifteen minutes before the explosion, de la Penne asked to meet with Valiant’s captain Charles Morgan and then told him of the imminent explosion but refused to give further information, so that he was returned to the compartment. Fortunately for the Italians, when the mine exploded just before them, neither he nor Bianchi were severely injured…”
And one of the British X-craft crews in Operation Source was captured after placing their charges under the Tirpitz, and taken aboard Tirpitz – I’m not sure if there was an actual interrogation, or if it was just coincidence.
But the important point about these is that in neither case was torture used, and the threats used against the Italian diver didn’t produce useful results.
pedant 08.16.13 at 12:31 pm
“But the important point about these is that in neither case was torture used….”
Hmmmm. That *may* be right, but may also be worth a moment’s thought.
Suppose I read that during WWII, a US airman bailed out over Germany. The Germans, mistakenly, thought he knew something about wonder-weapons, so they wanted to interrogate him. Their method of enhancing the interrogation was to strap a limpet-mine to his rib-cage, and to tell him that it was going to go off in the near future, unless he talked first.
I think I would say that counted as torture.
The Brits in this case did something like that, only with more uncertainties attached–they didn’t know how closely they had put the prisoner into proximity with the mine, nor how directly the prisoner’s health would be affected by it. And they themselves did not know when it would go off (though we could tweak the German case to reproduce that).
But they did, intentionally, put the prisoner as close as they could to what they believed was harm’s way, and they did so with the intention that by putting the prisoner in fear of his life, he would be more likely to cooperate with the interrogation.
So why wasn’t this torture?
I’m open to arguments on both sides, but it seems to me there is a case that this *should* count as torture. Not that it will say anything general about TTB cases, just that I want to get this historical incident right.
Corey Robin 08.16.13 at 1:05 pm
If anyone wants to get a good sense of just how vacuous (in the sense of devoid of content) Elshtain’s prose was, how unrealistic her sense of reality was, I urge you to read Henry’s new post on the massive crimes the US committed during the Vietnam War. Henry’s been reading Nick Turse’s book and uses it as an opportunity to reflect on historical memory. I know some people think my OP on Elshtain is harsh. But I was thinking of her ability to write sentences like these without ever, ever meditating on, thinking about, or even mentioning those crimes the US committed in Vietnam: “One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby.”
As Geo points out above, this is terrible, stylistically, but it’s one of those instances when the style really does reveal the substance (or lack thereof). Not every great think is a great stylist. Rawls certainly was not. But one of the reasons Rawls was a terrible stylist was that he was grappling so hard with the substance at hand; he was constantly bumping up against the obstacles he refused to ignore (not that he couldn’t have handled that material more deftly, but you see the labor — excruciatingly so! — in his thinking in those crowded sentences.) With Elshtain’s prose, it’s as if you’re floating down an river, never bumping into anything, not because the writing is so fluid, but because she’s cleared the path in advance of any obstacles.
Phil 08.16.13 at 1:12 pm
pedant – I think it makes a difference that the threat was introduced by the person being interrogated, is aimed at the people doing the interrogating, and (in particular) continues to threaten those people during the interrogation. IOW, I think we can reasonably exclude cases where the ticking bomb itself is the only source of torture.
pedant 08.16.13 at 1:26 pm
Phil–could be. But don’t captors have a general duty to keep their captives safe? And why would it make a difference to the US airman case if his plane had been carrying limpet mines?
(Again, the question probably has little general relevance, since suicide bombers are not going to care).
Ronan(rf) 08.16.13 at 1:44 pm
“(Remember when blogs were awesome?)”
Blogs are much more awesome now (can something be more awesome?) Old timers have perfected their writing skills, new timers have popped up from all over the world, all different social contexts, life experiences etc, there’s literally an expert for everything at ones fingertips, and espousing not just conventional expertise..a lot of the commenters here have awesome blogs, interesting, informative, beautifully written etc
Perhaps comments sections aren’t as awesome anymore, but Id have my doubts. That seems more likely memory bias.
aimai 08.16.13 at 1:59 pm
I don’t read any political philosophy any more so I don’t remember ever reading any JBE but it seems odd to excoriate her for the line about “presentism” and forgetting. I mean, its clunky but its true–talk to any American and they are entirely ignorant of our own recent political past, economic realities, etc..etc…etc… Most people have absolutely zero connection with history at all, even (or especially) the history and politics of times they lived through and are content to remember, at an 8 year old level, even wars and depressions. For a whole lot of sociological and psychological reasons people prefer to stick to dim memories of reality rather than to study it and really understand it, and the more you push back against these deep, formative, memories of dimly misunderstood things parents and grandparents said, of a child’s eye view of war or politicians, the more they become filled with resentment. The more they throw up their hands and simply deny the facts. I’m sure that wasn’t her point, but the sentence you point to isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read.
pedant 08.16.13 at 2:21 pm
I Assume CR’s complaint is about the gap between JBE’s invocation of the platitude, and her own failure to foster any remembering about Vietnam (or more strongly: her own collusion in the institutional repression of such memories).
“I was thinking of her ability to write sentences like these without ever, ever meditating on, thinking about, or even mentioning those crimes the US committed in Vietnam….”
It’s the gulf between platitude and practice; the Tonkin gulf perhaps.
So, yeah, the sentence she wrote isn’t that bad, and if you or I wrote it people would just say, “there they go being platitudinous.” But she had the professional opportunity to combat the platitude, and did not.
Belle Waring 08.16.13 at 2:29 pm
Dearest Ronan(rf): I hardly know how to say this, as I do not wish to spoil your naïve pleasures. The sentiment that ‘a lot’ of the commenters here write interesting, informative, beautifully written things is–while touching in its childlike faith–false in every particular. More generally, I am fascinated to see how polite everyone can be when they choose to do so. And why has no one suggested that Corey should not have posted on this subject, and is writing about The Wrong Thing?
ajay 08.16.13 at 3:02 pm
Good points on 38 and 40. Is there a meaningful distinction between torture and threats of death? And, yes, there’s an obligation (under GC2 and 3) not to expose PWs to danger unnecessarily, and to evacuate them as soon as possible out of the front lines, which the British failed to comply with.
mud man 08.16.13 at 3:08 pm
Pedant #25, also Jerry Coyne. Who does good work in Evolutionary Biology, I hear.
… do people have recommendations around contemporary Communitarianism?
pedant 08.16.13 at 3:25 pm
“Is there a meaningful distinction between torture and threats of death?”
Sure, plenty of them, but I believe that they are both prohibited by the relevant conventions:
“GCIII covers the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) in an international armed conflict. In particular, Article 17 says that “No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”
Protocol II specifies that:
Among the acts prohibited against these persons are, “Violence to the life, health and physical or mental well-being of persons, in particular murder as well as cruel treatment such as torture, mutilation or any form of corporal punishment” (Article 4.a), “Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment, rape, enforced prostitution and any form of indecent assault” (Article 4.e), and “Threats to commit any of the foregoing acts” (Article 4.h).
(from the Wiki page on Torture).
So, typically, when it’s not okay to blow up a prisoner with a mine, it’s also not okay to threaten to do so.
Phil 08.16.13 at 3:40 pm
But, unless they have actually found the (ticking) bomb, attached it to the prisoner and retreated to a safe distance, the interrogators aren’t making the threat in that scenario.
Peter Erwin 08.16.13 at 3:41 pm
pedant @ 25:
It’s a good university, right? Probably good at something, outside of the social sciences?
Some good climate science gets done there, I believe.
(Raymond Pierrehumbert of the Geophysical Sciences department — and one of the people running the Real Climate blog — had fun gently mocking the climate-science-illiteracy of Superfreakonomics by pointing out to Steven Levitt that all he had to do was walk a few blocks across campus and ask people who actually knew about these things…
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/an-open-letter-to-steve-levitt/ )
Phil 08.16.13 at 3:43 pm
…and besides, that kind of fiddly “morally equivalent to responsibility for something morally equivalent to torture” case isn’t what Dershowitz (or Walzer) was talking about. If people are going to justify actual torture by reference to ticking bomb cases, they ought to be asked to cite at least one actual ticking bomb case – and if they won’t, they should have their feet held to the fire. Um, metaphorically.
pedant 08.16.13 at 3:47 pm
I don’t know, Phil. The Brits believed that the mine was attached to the hull of the ship. They believed that it would explode beneath the waterline, doing immediate damage to anything in close proximity, and likely sinking the ship. They could have brought the Italina prisoners on shore and asked them a few polite questions there. Indeed, they may have had a duty to bring them on shore if they thought the ship was in danger of sinking.
But instead, the prisoners “were confined in a compartment aboard Valiant, under the sea level, and coincidentally just over the place where the mine had been placed. Fifteen minutes before the explosion, de la Penne asked to meet with Valiant’s captain Charles Morgan and then told him of the imminent explosion but refused to give further information, so that he was returned to the compartment.”
I.e., the Brits keep confining them in exactly the place where, as far as the Brits know, they are most likely to get blown to bits. I think they are making a threat.
pedant 08.16.13 at 3:49 pm
Phil, re your follow-up–totally agree that what the Brits did in re the Valiant does not at all license what Dershowitz et al. want.
Anderson 08.16.13 at 3:59 pm
And why has no one suggested that Corey should not have posted on this subject, and is writing about The Wrong Thing?
Because most everyone here is comfortable treating torture as what the Other does, whereas thinking about how we ourselves might be racially or sexually prejudiced just makes us all uncomfortable, which is obviously *your* fault for Posting Like A Girl.
otpup 08.16.13 at 4:37 pm
Please. Chicago is a world-class university. Sure it’s econ is bad, but it is still representative of the mainstream (which is to say, it is as much a problem with the discipline as a whole). There are a few other right wing pockets but so what. In some ways, Chicago is cleaner than the Ivies which often bend over backwards to be influential rather than intellectual.
Rich Puchalsky 08.16.13 at 4:46 pm
“And why has no one suggested that Corey should not have posted on this subject, and is writing about The Wrong Thing?”
I’d already written that Corey shouldn’t have posted on that subject, and was writing about the Wrong Thing, on a couple of his recent posts. And John, too, I insisted was writing about the wrong thing when he did his latest piece about whatever Andrew Sullivan wrote recently, and before that whatever other conservative he was supplying with intellectual coherence that the conservative didn’t possess … and Henry before that, etc. It’s not something that people like you doing in any case, no matter who you’re addressing.
bianca steele 08.16.13 at 4:52 pm
I for one look forward to an Internet that consists solely of people arguing that other people are talking about the wrong things in the wrong way.
Dave Maier 08.16.13 at 4:55 pm
Re: Chicago, I’m tempted to call their philosophy department “an outpost of sanity,” but let’s just say they have a lot of really great people there.
Scott P. 08.16.13 at 4:59 pm
“I don’t know, Phil. The Brits believed that the mine was attached to the hull of the ship. They believed that it would explode beneath the waterline, doing immediate damage to anything in close proximity, and likely sinking the ship. ”
The British would probably claim plausible deniability. They had no positive information that the Italians were planting mines, or that the Valiant was in danger. Under those circumstances, the location of the prisoners was not against international law. If the Italian prisoners wished to convey information to the contrary, or to complain about possible dangers in their place of confinement, they were free to do so, and the British would promptly act upon it.
mud man 08.16.13 at 5:45 pm
makes us all uncomfortable, which is obviously *your* fault for Posting Like A Girl.
Possibly this was intended to be helpful. Probably you thought you were being ironic.
Anderson 08.16.13 at 6:00 pm
60: well yes, if you pluck a line out of context, you can do all kinds of things to what a person intended.
LFC 08.16.13 at 6:06 pm
@Belle Waring:
That’s not what Ronan said. If you go back and re-read his comment at 42, he is referring to commenters’ own blogs, not to their comments in the CT comments section.
LFC 08.16.13 at 6:17 pm
Re C. Robin on Rawls and Elshtain in update to OP and above:
I feel I haven’t read enough Elshtain to comment on her in this context.
But w/r/t Rawls, I think Corey is largely right: great thinker, bad writer (partly, but only partly, b.c of his taking into account the obstacles).
LFC 08.16.13 at 6:18 pm
well, “bad writer” is too harsh on second thought. ‘Not a great stylist’ is closer to what I meant.
The Fool 08.16.13 at 9:34 pm
Whenever these ticking time bomb discussions arise they never fail to be accompanied by post after post that completely miss the point of the exercise. The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle. It is NOT meant to be realistic. That should be fairly obvious, but it is amazing how reliably people will come into the comments of a post like this and start arguing along those misbegotten lines.
Just like Einstein’s falling elevators in space or Nozick’s utility monster or Rawls’ original position or Parfit’s teletransportation. If you find yourself arguing the realism or the frequency of the scenario, then you simply prove that you have fundamentally failed to grasp the argument you presume to critique.
Anderson 08.16.13 at 9:49 pm
65: you are demonstrably incorrect, inasmuch as torture in real life has in fact been justified by appeal to this “thought experiment.” Nobody was arguing that we should actually put some poor bastards in falling elevators.
The Fool 08.16.13 at 9:59 pm
@66: the ticking time bomb thought experiment is not at all unique among thought experiments in having real world implications.
Anderson 08.16.13 at 10:06 pm
Nope, Fool, sorry. It’s not a “thought experiment” when it’s actually being put into effect — when people are actually being tortured on the basis of “ticking bomb” reasoning. You are going to have to troll stupider people than the ones around here. Have a nice day!
John Protevi 08.17.13 at 1:29 am
Picking up on Anderson @1, see this 2004 BBC article, which has some striking testimony on sleep deprivation torture: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3376951.stm
And
Anderson 08.17.13 at 1:56 am
I’d seen the Begin but not the Schlapobersky – thanks!
Belle Waring 08.17.13 at 2:24 am
LFC: the statement that ‘a lot of commenters here write things which are interesting etc.’ is perfectly congruent with the fuller claim, narrower in scope, that: ‘a lot of commenters here write things that are interesting etc. on their own blogs.’ I did not negate the claim that their comments here were interesting, beautifully written, or anything of the sort, as no such claim was originally made. You may consider my paraphrase unkind, but it’s not logically false.
Bruce Wilder 08.17.13 at 3:26 am
The Fool @ 65: Whenever these ticking time bomb discussions arise they never fail to be accompanied by post after post that completely miss the point of the exercise. The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle. It is NOT meant to be realistic. That should be fairly obvious, but it is amazing how reliably people will come into the comments of a post like this and start arguing along those misbegotten lines.
The ticking-time-bomb scenario may be pernicious precisely because it lends itself to being misunderstood, and trusted, in the intuitions of people with authoritarian leanings, ill-accustomed to abstract, analytic reasoning. That it is misleading in this way *is* highly predictable, and makes me suspect the intentions of intellectuals, who tout it, as part of the justification for erasing taboos against torture. The point of highlighting its un-realism is to undermine its intuitive appeal to people accustomed to thinking in concrete and conventional terms about moral questions, an appeal productive of great evil.
AM 08.17.13 at 4:41 am
On the allure (esp. for liberals) and dangers of the ticking time bomb scenario: David Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb.” Good stuff, especially for teaching. Ask students to read it. Show them any torture clip from 24 (I use one involving impromptu torture with a stripped lamp cord). Discuss.
William Burns 08.17.13 at 11:32 am
The trouble with the ticking time bomb and a lot of the other discourse on torture is that it assumes that the point of view of the torturer is primary. If you asked people not, “under what circumstances is it legitimate to torture” but “under what circumstances would it be legitimate for you to be tortured” you’d get a different sent of answers.
Mao Cheng Ji 08.17.13 at 11:57 am
“The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle.”
That’s just not true. It came up in an article advocating torture warrants and sterile needles under fingernails. It was exactly the opposite of a thought experiment, it was a policy proposal.
The Fool 08.17.13 at 3:03 pm
@Anderson:
I don’t have to advocate any specific torture to make a ticking time bomb (TTB) argument. I can use it to undermine deontological ethical principles in favor of utilitarian ones. I am doing so as we speak, and I am not at the same time advocating anyone’s torture.
Your point that the TTB arguments could be applied to a real world situation means no more than if someone said Einstein’s elevator thought experiment was wicked because in the end those Einsteinian physical principles could be used to build nuclear weapons,
The point is to argue that mysticism has no place in ethics, including any mysticism of rules or rights.
Andrew Burday 08.17.13 at 3:23 pm
“With Elshtain, it was worse: it was as if the topics had simply been removed in advance of her arrival on the scene. If Rawls was climbing mountains, Elshtain was driving on highways…”
At the risk of clumsily saying something Corey meant to be implicit, I can’t resist pointing out the similarity between those lines and the famous lines in Isaiah 40:3-4. I don’t know if it means anything, but in the context of Elshtain as a “Christian realist” it’s striking.
LFC 08.17.13 at 4:10 pm
BWaring@71: noted. (Not really worth going into further, I think.)
Katherine 08.17.13 at 5:43 pm
The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle. It is NOT meant to be realistic.
You might want to share that amazing insight with politicians rather than this comment thread them. I personally witnessed the TTB scenario being raised by an MP in the Foreign Affairs Committee, to question/challenge the head of Amnesty International (UK) on AI’s absolutist stance against torture.
The Fool 08.17.13 at 6:32 pm
@Katherine
Since I don’t mystify any rules, I also don’t mystify the rule against torture. That doesn’t mean I’m in favor of torture. Actually I hate torture.
For real. Only in a narrow set of unlikely conditions would I condone torture — circumstances that certainly do not extend to cover anything we did in Iraq or Central America in the 80’s, for example.
But until some god comes down and tells me there’s a certain rule that is 100% always right, I can’t be an absolutist about any rule. I don’t know what the MP said whom you refer to, so I don’t know if I can endorse the argument he made against AI. I take it he was citing scripture for his own purposes, but I wouldn’t rule out an anti-absolutist position a priori.
Ronan(rf) 08.17.13 at 6:49 pm
“Whenever these ticking time bomb discussions arise they never fail to be accompanied by post after post that completely miss the point of the exercise. The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle. It is NOT meant to be realistic. That should be fairly obvious, but it is amazing how reliably people will come into the comments of a post like this and start arguing along those misbegotten lines.”
I do see what the fool is saying here, and its something I’ve thought before..do we take an absolutist position against torture in all circumstances, and why? The arguments against TTB tend to focus on the scenarios unlikeliness, not the moral questions of whether torture is *always* wrong, and why
geo 08.17.13 at 6:53 pm
Fool @76: The point is to argue that mysticism has no place in ethics, including any mysticism of rules or rights.
Couldn’t agree more. Down with deontology, up with utilitarianism. Down with metaphysics, up with pragmatism. Rules and rights do have their place, though. Remember Mill in Utilitarianism:
“Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanac. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated, and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong … Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by [and] to argue as if no such principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained until now and always must remain without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, of absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.”
So those who argue, given the (historically) very strong propensity among those in authority to abuse those subject to it, for an inviolable rule against torture have, practically speaking, a plausible case. Of course they often speak metaphysically rather than practically, which is annoying.
Nine 08.17.13 at 7:31 pm
The Fool @80 – “Only in a narrow set of unlikely conditions would I condone torture”
Can you elucidate the narrow circumstances under which you would condone torture ? Just so as to demystify that statement ?
Niall McAuley 08.17.13 at 8:07 pm
The Fool writes:The scenario is raised as a thought experiment to test a principle. It is NOT meant to be realistic.
In principle, any situation which you can imagine which would justify me torturing someone would also justify me torturing them and accepting punishment for breaking the “no torture” law.
The only reason to remove the law is so that torture it may be used routinely, in situations which I (the torturer) don’t think warant breaking the law and going to jail for the rest of my natural.
The Fool 08.18.13 at 6:30 pm
@Nine
When would I condone torture? I don’t know exactly where I would end up drawing the lines in all cases, but a paradigm case would be the ticking time bomb scenario where millions of people were at risk of a nuclear detonation. Some say that’s impossible, blah blah blah, but in my imagination, at least, it is not.
Mao Cheng Ji 08.19.13 at 2:47 am
@85, I agree that there are no absolutes, but you seem to be inventing another rule: a bomb + millions of people. What if it’s just one person? Your child, for example.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep the rule, and just add an asterisk: there are no absolute rules.
The Fool 08.19.13 at 1:47 pm
@Mao: it would certainly be a horrible situation, but you can’t sacrifice millions of lives for one of your own. Psychologically it would be very tough to actually do (though many have made similar choices before in war); ethically, with millions of lives on the line, it’s an easy and uncontroversial call.
Also, a few recent comments suggest that I support eliminating laws against torture. I do not.
Stephen Voss 08.20.13 at 3:47 pm
I have never heard of Jean Elstein or of Corey Robin either. If Robin’s reports are to be trusted I would not agree with many of her ideas.
But this is not to say that I would choose the moment of her passing to descend to Corey Robin’s level of tiny-minded nastiness and meat-grinding viciousness.
I don’t know who writes the comments on his hit piece, but many of them as well seem not to care whether they desecrate the person in their rush to desecrate her views. If even one of you is capable of shame, I encourage you to go to your room, shut the door, and do a little meditating on your willingness to spread the twistedness in your soul in such a public manner.
Corey Robin finds just one thing to be sad about, in his intemperate attack on this woman’s beliefs and character. He is sad, he says, that one of the earlier diatribes against this woman is no longer available on internet.
Corey, please forgive me for failing to lend my tears as you weep over the inaccessibility of a bit of your body of work on her.
You observe that she claims a Christian, Augustinian foundation. Of course that is something that you can disclaim. But that does not rule out the possibility of charity on your part. One day you might consider the option of writing in a generous, humane, and magnanimous way which reflects respect for the one you disagree with.
Whatever your own ethical foundation may be, however near your political views may be to mine, they horrify me if they can move a person to the level of inhumanity you have displayed in the requiem you chose to write for a woman you disagree with.
etseq 08.22.13 at 4:01 pm
She was also very hostile to gay rights. She was a board member of David Blankenhorn and Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for American Values that was formed originally to battle the “scourge of single parenthood” but morphed into an anti-gay marriage astroturf group in the late 1990s. She also wrote a strange article deploring “gay liberation” in the early 80s called Homosexual politics: the paradox of gay liberation http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/40547572. There is a response by a Richard Rosenfeld at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/40547631 but I don’t have free access to jstor so I can’t read it.
Needless to say, this fits right in with her communitarian/neocon view of the world and the family…
etseq 08.22.13 at 4:38 pm
Does Stephen Voss normally comment on random internet articles in which he “[has] never heard of Jean Elstein or of Corey Robin either…” – that is, both the subject and author of an article. It must be a slow semester at the University of Kentucky for a full professor of politcal science to waste several paragraphs criticizing something he apparently knows or cares little about….
Just a little snark back at a very rude comment…
Substance McGravitas 08.22.13 at 5:24 pm
Horror is for manners, not ideas.
Barry 08.22.13 at 6:05 pm
“Whatever your own ethical foundation may be, however near your political views may be to mine, they horrify me if they can move a person to the level of inhumanity you have displayed in the requiem you chose to write for a woman you disagree with.”
Well, your ethical foundations seem to put ‘not pointing out bad things about the deceased’ over ‘not torturing people’, so I think that we can all figure out where you are coming from.
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