A review of Michael Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil below the fold.
There’s a lot to like in Michael Ignatieff’s new book, The Lesser Evil. It’s like a breath of fresh air (even if depressing) to read a thoughtful examination of terror and responses to it that is sober and historically informed. Ignatieff recognizes that some (not all) of those who resort to terror may have legitimate political goals and he is willing to take seriously and grapple with the possibility that terror might be justified and effective (two different things) in some cases. As Anthony Lewis writes in the New York Review of Books: “Reading him is a bit like having a conversation with an eminently reasonable but convinced and powerfully convincing man.” He is reasonable, and Lewis is right that “It is impossible to read Ignatieff’s calls for sensitivity and awareness in these matters without noting the bleak absence of those qualities in what George W. Bush and his people have done to civil liberties in the name of fighting terror.” It’s odd, however, that the reader has to note this since, beyond a few scattered remarks, Ignatieff is strikingly reluctant to make explicit these criticisms of the Bush Administration. But there’s something else I find frustrating about the book.
Ignatieff calls his position “the lesser evil” approach, and he describes it as an alternative between two extremes. He presents these extremes in different ways throughout the book, but basically on one side are civil libertarians who emphasize rights and on the other side are realists (or pragmatists) who are willing to sacrifice rights for security. The lesser evil approach recognizes the importance of rights, but is willing to sacrifice them when necessary for security. Ignatieff insists on calling such sacrifices “evil” in order to emphasize that we must not become complacent about them. We must never “allow the justifications of necessity – risk, threat, imminent danger – to dissolve the morally problematic character of necessary measures.” (p.8) The emergency suspension of rights must always be subject to adversarial scrutiny, both within government institutions and through the press. “On the view of checks and balances taken in this book, the courts rather than the executive must remain [in] control of due process standards for both civilian and military detainees.” (p.40) Here’s a summary of his “middle ground” position:
A lesser evil position holds that in a terrorist emergency, neither rights nor necessity should trump. A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual. Neither a morality of consequences nor a morality of dignity can be allowed exclusive domain in public policy decisions…. Rights may have to bow to security in some instances, but there had better be good reasons, and there had better be clear limitations to rights abridgments; otherwise, rights will soon lose all their value. At the same time, a constitution is not a suicide pact: rights cannot so limit the exercise of authority as to make decisive action impossible. (pp.8-9)
This setup is misleading in a couple of different ways. The alternatives he rejects are not symmetrical. First, as a matter of political reality, it is a serious distortion to treat the defenders of rights and the defenders of necessity as equal and opposite forces, each posing a threat to the sensible middle. He doesn’t say that they are equal threats, but that is how the argument is set up. Implicitly, he is saying something like this: yes, the United States went too far in rounding up nearly five thousand aliens and holding them without charge after September 11 (p.10), but on the other hand, if we follow the lead of the civil libertarians in the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, we’ll be putting ourselves in great danger – carrying out a suicide pact. (Again: this is implicit – he doesn’t name any particular civil libertarian group or individual.)
Obviously, in terms of political power in the U.S., there is no comparison between these two forces. But Ignatieff himself brings out a further asymmetry. In times of crisis, he argues, the trend – and therefore the greater risk – is always toward the violation of rights. Abridging the rights of a minority “is relatively easy … because a majority of citizens is unlikely to bear any of the direct costs of abridgment…. Hence a majority of citizens is likely to believe that risk trumps rights, while only a civil libertarian minority is ever likely to believe that rights should trump risks.” (p.59) If this is the temptation, then as a policy matter, there is a greater need for a bulwark against one extreme rather than the other. Furthermore, in a powerful discussion of “the temptations of nihilism”, Ignatieff worries about the psychological effect of resorting to extra-legal violence, whereby violence comes to be seen as an end in itself. “Agents of a democratic state may find themselves driven by the horrors of terror to torture, to assassinate, to kill innocent civilians, all in the name of rights and democracy.” (p.118) It turns out his worries were prescient:
A lesser evil approach to the war on terror would assume, for example, that agents of a liberal democratic state should be able to hold the line that divides intensive interrogation from torture, or the line that separates targeted assassination of enemy combatants from assassinations that entail the death of innocent civilians…. But a perfectionist case against such an approach would argue that morally equivocal means are hard to control and thus liable to end in betrayal of the values that a liberal democracy should stand for. Hence liberal states should not allow those who defend them to have any of the moral discretion implied in lesser evil approaches. (p.118)
Unfortunately, this “perfectionist” argument is looking awfully powerful these days.
The two sides are not symmetrical for another reason. It’s not hard to find people – politicians, pundits, and theoreticians – who argue that safety should always trump rights. Some simply deny the existence of rights altogether or in international relations, for example. But it’s not so easy to find anyone who seriously argues that rights must always trump security – I don’t believe he cites any. Some people do argue that certain rights, such as the right against torture, are absolute and should never be sacrificed. (In fact, this is Ignatieff’s own position that he defends at length.) But nobody says, “protect our rights come what may at any cost to security,” but plenty of people (including those in power) in effect say “protect our security come what may at any cost to our rights.” When the ACLU, for example, argues that the current no-fly list violates passenger’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, they are not arguing that rights must always trump safety concerns. Rather, they are insisting that individuals should be able to find out why they are on the list and follow a procedure to have their names removed. There may be a disagreement about what procedures would allow innocent individuals to have their names removed without endangering airline safety. But this is not because the ACLU denies the legitimacy of a concern for safety. They argue that the current system can be made to protect rights without increasing risks. Now they may be right or wrong about this, but this is exactly the kind of lesser-evil argument that Ignatieff endorses. Indeed, it is precisely a claim for the openness and accountability that Ignatieff thinks is necessary for any suspension of rights to be legitimate. The suggestion that rights-defenders are dangerous extremists, unconcerned with security, rather than adopting exactly the position Ignatieff defends, is a serious distortion – and a politically dangerous one, to boot.
Finally, at a theoretical level the positions are, once again, not symmetrical. Ignatieff observes that the formulation of abstract rights is relatively easy – it is their application in concrete circumstances that is sometimes difficult. Part of the difficulty follows from the fact that rights sometimes conflict with one another. And: “Security … is a human right, and thus respect for one right might lead us to betray another.” (p.21) In other words, properly understood, the rights perspective already includes a recognition of the importance of security – it is not an external concern to be balanced against rights. Sometimes, rights conflict, and any reasonable rights perspective must provide an account of when and how some rights ought to be compromised for the protection of others – including the right to security. Ignatieff comes close to making this explicit when he writes: “The case for suspension of rights also ought to require proving that you suspend some liberties in order to protect other equally important rights. If these suspensions cannot be shown to enhance the right of the majority to live in security, then they have no justification.” (p.49) But if this is right, then it is just not true that terrorist emergencies should “call into question … the status of moral standards encapsulated in the idea of human rights.” (p.33) The framework of human rights is robust enough to include a right to security that, in times of emergency, conflicts with other rights. There is work to be done in figuring out how those conflicts should be resolved and how rights should be understood and applied in new circumstances, but this doesn’t involve sacrificing or compromising the framework itself.
At a substantive level, I’ve suggested, Ignatieff adopts what amounts to a civil libertarian position. This comes out at many points – for example: “In a war on terrorism, unlike the situation that Lincoln faced in the Civil War or the one that Roosevelt faced after Pearl Harbor, it is not obvious why the president’s power should be increased.” (p.39) He certainly comes down on the side of a “moral” rather than “pragmatic” reading of democracy: “even in emergency, even if some liberties must be suspended, a constitutional state must remain answerable to the higher law, a set of standards that protect foundational commitments to the dignity of every person.” (p.44) His essential sympathy for the civil libertarian side may be most clear when he summarizes his standards for evaluating policies during a war on terror:
First, a democratic war on terror needs to subject all coercive measures to the dignity test – do they violate individual dignity? Foundational commitments to human rights should always preclude cruel and unusual punishment, torture, penal servitude, and extrajudicial execution, as well as rendition of suspects to rights-abusing countries. Second, coercive measures need to pass the conservative test – are departures from existing due process standards really necessary? Do they damage our institutional inheritance? Such a standard would bar indefinite suspension of habeas corpus and require all detentions, whether by civil or military authorities, to be subject to judicial review. Those deprived of rights – citizens and noncitizens – must never lose access to counsel. A third assessment of counterterror measures should be consequentialist. Will they make citizens more or less secure in the long run? … A further consideration is the last resort test: have less coercive measures been tried and failed? Another important issue is whether measures have passed the test of open adversarial review by legislative and judicial bodies, either at the time, or as soon as necessity allows. Finally, ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind,’ together with the more pragmatic necessity of securing the support of other nations in a global war on terror, requires any state fighting terrorism to respect its international obligations as well as the considered opinions of its allies and friends. If all of this adds up to a series of constraints that tie the hands of our governments, so be it. (pp.23-24)
But Ignatieff has a strange reluctance to admit that that he is, in fact, embracing a civil libertarian, rights-based position. It’s as though he is presenting a stealth defense of human rights – not wanting to admit what he is doing, he portrays civil libertarians as extremists so that he can embrace their actual position as a sensible middle ground.
To my mind, the most compelling point – one he makes repeatedly in several different ways – is this:
If terrorism is a form of politics, it needs to be fought with the force of argument and not just with the force of law. A war on terror that is not guided by a clear political strategy, to win support for democratic government and drain support from terror, is bound to fail. Indeed, it is a mistake to evaluate the effectiveness of military or police actions apart from their political impact. (p.82)
This is even true – in a modified way – with a group like Al Qaeda. Such groups “cannot be engaged politically and must instead be defeated militarily.” Even for them, however, “A claim of justice and a chance of success are critical for finding suicide recruits. Improving homeland security, building walls to keep terrorists out, may reduce their chances of success, but unless the basic motivation for terrorism – the perception of injustice – is addressed, no strategy against terror can succeed by purely military means.” (pp.99-100)
This leads to a final point. Ignatieff has been a well-known, if somewhat reluctant, supporter of the war. Yet, he mentions Iraq only a few times, very briefly. This past March, he reflected on the war and his support for it in the New York Times Magazine. He wrote:
I never thought the key question was what weapons he actually possessed but rather what intentions [Saddam] had…. So supporting the war meant supporting an administration whose motives I did not fully trust for the sake of consequences I believed in.
So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn’t trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences.
It may be that he underestimated how far his hopes diverged from the motives of the Bush Administration. But it’s simply impossible to believe that it came as a sudden realization that intentions shape consequences. As I have pointed out, he is eloquent and convincing when he insists that we must look at the political consequences of military action in the war on terror, and that means we must always be attentive to the realm of symbols and intentions. But his reluctance to apply his principles to the war in Iraq is very odd. Perhaps, I initially thought, he doesn’t think of it as part of the war on terror at all, but as an unrelated humanitarian intervention. He does think of it in humanitarian terms, but he certainly saw a link to the war on terror when he wrote in January, 2003:
Iraq is not just about whether the United States can retain its republican virtue in a wicked world. Virtuous disengagement is no longer a possibility. Since Sept. 11, it has been about whether the republic can survive in safety at home without imperial policing abroad…. Iraq represents the first in a series of struggles to contain the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the first attempt to shut off the potential supply of lethal technologies to a global terrorist network.
Whatever explains his reluctance, his principles should apply to evaluate our policy toward Iraq. And it is pretty clear – at least in retrospect – that the war fails most of his tests – we have violated basic human rights; it has not made us safer; the public debate was not open and honest. But most of all, we have severely damaged our standing in the opinion of the world and therefore crippled our ability to engage in a political fight against terror and for justice.
{ 36 comments }
chun the unavoidable 05.21.04 at 9:12 pm
Am I the only one who thinks that people who supported the Iraq war, particularly in the “blogosphere,” should be made to wear scarlet “I”s in public and be shunned in polite society?
I exclude the right-wing nationalists who still support it from this to the degree to which they are honest about their motivations.
SomeCallMeTim 05.21.04 at 9:26 pm
I don’t know if I’d go so far as the scarlet “I,” chun, but I’m with you in principle.
I think that there should be a sort of buddy system – if you supported the war, certain classes of important decisions should be cleared with a less naive (or less stupid, possibly) “buddy.” You would continue to use your “buddy” in this fashion for, say, a year. If you ever praised Bush’s “leadership skills,” two years. If you’re still on the fence about the war, forever.
bob mcmanus 05.21.04 at 9:27 pm
Excellent work. Thank you.
bull 05.21.04 at 10:11 pm
Hey guys, the game ain’t over yet, and it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. So knock it off with the strutting and preening.
chun the unavoidable 05.21.04 at 10:52 pm
Actually, bull, it ended last night; and NBA fans won’t have to suffer through another execrable Nets Finals this year.
bull 05.21.04 at 11:10 pm
Two statements from your piece seem wildly exaggerated. You state that “It’s not hard to find people – politicians, pundits, and theoreticians – who argue that safety should always trump rights†and that “plenty of people (including those in power) in effect say ‘protect our security come what may at any cost to our rights.’†Always? At any cost? Can you provide any examples of people who make such arguments?
Shai 05.21.04 at 11:19 pm
the sentence following it looks like a clarification to me
Nat Whilk 05.22.04 at 12:16 am
Chun the Unavoidable wrote:
“Am I the only one who thinks that people who supported the Iraq war, particularly in the “blogosphere,†should be made to wear scarlet “Iâ€s in public and be shunned in polite society?”
Would Senator Kerry be made to wear one that blinks on and off?
bob mcmanus 05.22.04 at 2:08 am
“Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.”
…Susan Sontag, NY Times Magazine, May 23
Sontag
Why do they hate us? How does an illiberal culture view “a culture of shamelessness?” This is much deeper than torture.
Dan Simon 05.22.04 at 4:03 am
Chun–okay, I’ll bite. I supported the war in advance–albeit just barely, out of concern for the potentially catastrophic level of resulting casualties. In retrospect, I was wrong chiefly in being far too pessimistic. From my perspective, as a non-American non-nationalist, the war was, and should still be judged to have been, a resounding success, for Iraq, and for all humankind.
Of course, from a purely parochial American perspective, the US government appears poised to snatch failure from the jaws of success, by setting ridiculously high goals for itself that it seems to be in the process of knocking itself out (and destroying its own prestige) trying to achieve. But for the rest of us, for whom America’s image of benevolent omnipotence is not the highest value, it seems to me that you have it precisely backwards. Those who opposed the war in Iraq ought to be embarrassed by their faulty estimation of the consequences–with the exception of unabashed American imperialists, who are perhaps entitled to rue the tarnishing of America’s reputation for being ready and able to reshape the world at will.
Assuming that you are not such a person, then, can you seriously argue that Iraq, and the world, are the worse for America’s having relatively painlessly removed a very evil regime from a long-suffering land?
Zak Catem 05.22.04 at 4:24 am
Dan, that would require being able to predict the future. The truth is, we can’t possibly know at this point. It does look quite likely that, after the US leaves, the situation in Iraq is going to devolve into an ugly free for all, with the Kurds jumping in from the North from time to time. That might clear up fairly quickly, or it might turn into another Liberia. Or it might result in an oppressive theocracy, or perhaps even another military strongman as bad or worse than Hussein.
One thing that’s certain is that a dictatorship has to get pretty horrendous before civil violence becomes preferable. Ask any Afghan why they preferred the Taliban over a continuation of the fighting that had scourged their country for the previous fifteen years.
bob mcmanus 05.22.04 at 4:31 am
” Iraq, and the world, are the worse for America’s having relatively painlessly removed a very evil regime from a long-suffering land?”
Dan, as someone who supported the war and still does, I really have to say it is too soon to tell.
If we were to pull out tomorrow, there is a strong chance that Muqtada Sadr would control Iraq, and that is not an improvement. I had hoped the question would be settled by now
…..
My previous post raises another point. America is now a country where an average 20-something female reserve soldier from West Virginia has sex with her boyfriend in front of an Iraqi prisoner, and captures it on video for the purpose of passing the show around.
This is no longer unusual behavior, and probably irreversible. There are parts of the world that are going to resist the spread of these, our American values, quite vigorously, with whatever means are at their disposal.
Carlito 05.22.04 at 5:33 am
“Because we won in a manner so unconventional and so convincing, we are unlikely to have to fight again, soon.”
“…we have won a great victory in Iraq, and an even greater one in the world. The next time we say to someone, “Don’t make us come over there”, they won’t. America’s already-great diplomatic power has now been massively enhanced, through a clear demonstration that any explicit or implicit threats of military operations we might make are not empty.”
Steven DenBeste, April 11, 2003
doghouse riley 05.22.04 at 7:07 am
Of course, from a purely parochial American perspective, the US government appears poised to snatch failure from the jaws of success, by setting ridiculously high goals for itself that it seems to be in the process of knocking itself out (and destroying its own prestige) trying to achieve.
From a purely practical perspective, the rush to war, dictated by political and not humanitarian concerns, has assured that the US will not be utilizing military force to benefit mankind in the foreseeable future, absent some direct threat that makes conscription popular. The conduct of the war, with its reliance on reserves and the failure to gain broad international cooperation, has fractured our manpower and materiel assets, perhaps for a generation, as Vietnam did. Those “ridiculously high goals” (and their equally high price tag) are part and parcel of jumping into the enterprise without any accountability for its terms.
Lance Boyle 05.22.04 at 9:26 am
Bob McM-
“If we were to pull out tomorrow, there is a strong chance that Muqtada Sadr would control Iraq, and that is not an improvement. ”
If the US pulled out tomorrow, even if fair elections were held, al-Sadr would probably control Iraq.
So much for democracy eh?
Kind of the point of the original post. The willing surrender of rights and principles for security.
–
As far as Lynndie England’s images representing American values to the world, I feel very strongly that those values are not American at all, that they have nothing to do with America, that they’re a symptom of what amounts to virtual enslavement or more accurately domestication of an entire economic class. Domestication in the sense of cattle and sheep. In the sense of being culled and bred.
That the masters of these domesticated creatures are ill in spirit and mind, and incapable of guiding what they control toward anything but destruction, seems more obvious every day.
bellatrys 05.22.04 at 11:11 am
No, lance, they’ve always been part of America, because they’ve always been part of humanity. They weren’t limited to “the decadent Romans” in tbe past, they were simply covered up, like marital rape, the rape of slave women, the rape of schoolgirls in Sherman’s triumph, the travestying of justice that made one law for whites and another for blacks, the gaucheness of rape/murder live action dramas of the Grand Guignol, the lynching souvenier postcards of the 1890s into living memory, all of it – it’s always been there, in the US and in the Raj. We were just too ‘civilized’ to acknowledge it, and it’s been censored out of our histories, the mainstream ones, movies and schoolbooks and popular retellings, along with the cusswords and the wounded soldiers’ guts being eaten by pigs while they were alive – until very recently.
Except by folks like Ambrose Bierce and Goya, who the world has done their best to ignore. If Bierce and Goya had had the internet access of today, history might be somewhat different.
pepi 05.22.04 at 12:56 pm
As far as Lynndie England’s images representing American values to the world, I feel very strongly that those values are not American at all
It’s not a matter of _American_ values. Americans don’t have a prerogative or monopoly on _human_ values and ethics. America didn’t invent human rights and legal standards. And the rest of the world can still discriminate between the deeds of a group of people (and the policies of the current administration that may have encouraged them) and America as a whole.
I’m not really arguing with your points but the whole idea that those tortures were “un-American” as Rumsfeld said, as if by definition, simply by virtue of being Americans, no one in America could ever behave like England and Garner did. It’s a concept that assumes a fundamental superiority to the rest of the humanity. This is the kind of thinking that does most damage, abroad and at home alike. The whole city on a hill, land of milk and honey thing, taken to ideological extremes for propaganda, with that extra Christian fundies touch on top. America doesn’t have to be the best. America doesn’t have a prophetic mission. America is a country, not a religion. It would be enough if the people like Bush and Rumsfeld and all who are governing the US – or will govern it after November – acted and talked on the basis of the realisation that they, like all Americans, walk on this earth like anybody else, breathe and eat and drink and shit the same way, even if they’re living in the land of the free and the home of the brave. And when some Americans do something horrible, it’s just wrong by _any_ standard, not supposedly “American” – or “Christian” – ones.
pepi 05.22.04 at 1:03 pm
No, lance, they’ve always been part of America, because they’ve always been part of humanity.
Exactly. But the whole promised land mythology has always been too much a part of public and political discourse in America, so it often gets in the way of that acknowledgement.
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto…
(I had to look that up, yes…)
Gwydion 05.22.04 at 3:15 pm
Things we know now, but did not know then: there was no stock of ready to hand WMD; Saddam Hussein was not about to attack us or his neighbors; Saddam Hussein had no significant links to Al Qaeda; and the Iraqis do not wish to be governed by the USA or its puppets. Taken together, these things now make the decision to invade Iraq an act of reckless folly. The 2002 pro-war camp–of which I unfortunately was a member–can at least console itself that these were things that could not then have been known. Knowledgeable experts had assured us that the possession of WMDs was a slam-dunk case. The 2002ers must still, however, answer for neglecting facts that were already known in 2002: the incompetence, arrogance, and venality of the Bush war-camp; the failures in Afghanistan; the lack of either UN or NATO support; the refusal of the Bush administration to discuss in any detail the post war plans for Iraq; the fractious nature of domestic groups in Iraq; the desire of the Kurds for self-government; Rumsfeld’s shock and awe war plans; and the Bush administration’s craven deference to Prime Minister Sharon. Given these facts, we 2002ers have every reason to feel foolish. The 2002 anti-war camp has every reason to gloat. We 2002ers ought to join with the anti-war camp in ridding ourselves of the political leaders who got us into this fucking mess.
Nat Whilk 05.22.04 at 8:22 pm
Gwydion wrote:
“We 2002ers ought to join with the anti-war camp in ridding ourselves of the political leaders who got us into this [expletive deleted] mess.”
Kerry is alleged to have “voted for the Iraq war resolution . . . [and have] . . . voted against an alternative that would have authorized force only if the U.N. Security Council sanctioned it.” Does that mean we need to vote for Nader, or was Kerry an innocent dupe?
Lance Boyle 05.22.04 at 8:22 pm
Pepi-
“…parts of the world that are going to resist the spread of these, our American values, quite vigorously”… -Bob McManus
–
That’s what I meant to reply to. The “our” most especially.
The larger question of whether there are “American” values at all, or even “human” values, in the sense of innate and common to all is pretty unanswerable I think.
That at various points in our brief history we have been a kind of beacon of hope for the possible in human affairs though, is solidly established. The French had that revolution, other constitutions have been written based on ours, and just generally when things have looked bleak, there have been those imprisoned champions of the oppressed who spoke of the example of American ideals.
Which is more what I meant. America as trademark has been co-opted. Rebranded. It’s kind of like – anybody who gets ahold of the P.R. machine gets to say what America is, now. So Bush and his brain-stem posse are America; or Ms. England is; or Giuliani is; or Kobe Bryant is; but the will of America, to be something more than an enforcement agency for the financial interests of its elite, that’s getting swept aside as though it never existed.
But it did, and it does. And only because there were people who fought for those higher things, as principles, not as established gains, but as possibilities.
We seem to get stuck on the awful record of our shame, but we’re only being presented two choices. Ignore and deny those shameful things, or wallow in the crippling guilt they bring.
There’s another way through that. Honest recognition of the past, but unwavering commitment to the future, and action based on that commitment; loyalty toward what still could be.
Even if it’s over, too late, we can go out trying. It would be better than the only alternatives I see – panic and numb immobility, or the collaboration of hedonistic denial.
Lynndie England represents as much a hooded and leashed prisoner as she does the oppressor’s sadistic hand. It’s just that her hood is more abstract, and her leash, too.
bob mcmanus 05.22.04 at 9:12 pm
Seems to have been three or four misunderstandings of my post. It wasn’t the torture or brutality of Lynndie England that was my point.
It was the sex.
Maybe it is so taken for granted we don’t even see it. And don’t get me wrong, I am no prude or censor or moral judge.
But Bush-voting couples in rural Alabama now make videos of themselves having sex and post it on the internet. This is our culture, where Paris Hilton has no shame, and is not even expected to.
These are the values we are exporting. We are utterly shameless.
What is shame? At what point in our moral history did it get transmuted to “personal guilt” and nobody’s business but our own? What does it mean that we are a shameless society?
And yes, Why do they hate us? Cause they are barbaric? Or because we are? They just might rather die or kill us all before they take for granted that their daughter’s wedding night might be, by her choice, be posted on the internet.
bob mcmanus 05.22.04 at 9:19 pm
And I guess few followed the link, for this was Sontag’s point.
Not the torture. But that the torturers wanted it on video, to show their friends.
Lance Boyle 05.22.04 at 10:08 pm
Bob-
That’s an inspirational clarification.
But there’s a misunderstanding of my post in your clarification of your post.
I meant it’s not “our” culture. That thing that produced Paris Hilton is not “us”. That thing stole our childhoods. Literally. It stole us, when we were children. Or worse, rigged everything so the choice was voluntary servitude or suffering and death at the margins.
And the sex is just the final commodity, though I guess you could make a case for “Showbiz Moms and Dads” being the final final.
“Pimp My Kid”
But kids are the outcome of sex aren’t they? So we’re still in the same category there. The commodification of every human need. Artificial stimulation of desire. You like sweet things? Tons of sugar baby!
Whatever you want, there’s that thing hovering over your life that will sell it to you.
And it’s forbidden to look at the way it’s gotten in between you and what was freely yours until it got there.
We’re completely isolated and we’re given the companionship of this thing that knows us better than we know ourselves. The TV was the wolf that ate your grandmother and climbed into her bed. Only no hunter came. And she raised you, telling you stories and baking you cookies and pies.
And she gave you Paris Hilton’s reptilian body whether you want it or not.
My point is you’re right on until you ask people to take on the burden of guilt for what’s happened here. That’s Stockholm syndrome there. My point is the commodification of sex that those images are the result of came right out of the box Fox News nests in. The guilt is not America’s, or the American people’s; we didn’t do this any more than that Iraqi man on the floor with the dog collar around his neck did that to himself.
Let’s not blame the slaves for the plantation.
pepi 05.22.04 at 10:54 pm
Bob: those are called porn films, not “values”. They’re a big US export industry, indeed. Unlike Abu Ghraib, they’re legitimate business.
There is a huge difference between consensual, voluntary pornography that doesn’t violate any Geneva conventions and human rights declarations, and videos and pictures of _abuses_, not consensual acts of pleasure, that you’re inflicting on involuntary subjects.
I find it rather sad that that difference should be ignored.
So, no it’s not about the sex at all. It is all about the torture and the rape. They belong in very different camps. And there’s no need to make brutal generalisations about what supposedly represents a whole culture. The decadent doom-preaching gets tiresome when it makes a big mess of different things…
Lance: I’m afraid I don’t quite follow, because I don’t really share all that romanticised vision of any nation. To me America is a big diverse pulsing mess, that can be fascinating and frightening at the same time, depending on what it is you’re looking at. It’s never one thing. It’s about the people I know and a lot of other things that are more personal and truly cultural than anything to do with politics. A beacon of hope it sure has been for many in the past and even today. But that has more to do with practical economic conditions than anything too lofty.
I don’t share that romanticised view of the past either. Abu Ghraib is absolutely nothing compared to some of the things that the US supported in Latin America. Or to institutionalised slavery and racism. Or to how America came about at all. Every country in the world has crimes in their past, and history is full of cruelty and violence too, not just ideals and wonderful things to put in a constitution. I just think, maybe, if that _too_ was simply accepted instead of being covered up in all that glorious idealistic revisionism of past present and future, there would be less of the ideological crap that often verges on jingoism and makes the work of political propagandists and religious fundamentalists so damn easy. Because it so often gets in the way of truth-seeking and accountability, both individual and collective. By putting so much at stake that even the basic notion a government may lie on anything from marital to military affairs has to involve an epic saga of Tolkenian proportions between absolute good and evil in which everything gets either completely lost or completely restored. Reality doesn’t work like that.
The larger question of whether there are “American†values at all, or even “human†values, in the sense of innate and common to all is pretty unanswerable I think.
Well, I didn’t mean to touch on philosophical issues. I was simply talking of things like human rights which are recognised by most countries with a working legal system. They’re not called universal for nothing.
bob mcmanus 05.23.04 at 12:42 am
“And there’s no need to make brutal generalisations about what supposedly represents a whole culture.”
Pepi, read the Sontag. And look around. What does the growth of “Reality TV” mean? Could it be that the audience identifies, or fantasizes about having their own courtships recorded and broadcast? The “Professional Porn industry” is facing some very strong competition from amateurs and semi-pros.
How many web-cams are out there? Maybe they are not all in bedrooms and bathrooms, but there is a significant percentage of Americans who don’t mind watching TV and eating popcorn and talking with their boyfriends…and having it sent out over the internet.
And blogs. With no offense, I know a whole lot about John and Belle I would not have known thirty years ago. And they are a fairly restrained blog compared to some. But blogs are just another kind of constant exhibitionism.
Something big is going on, and I think you are vastly underestimating it.
To get deep, or psuedo, Lynddie England filmed her atrocities in a kind of doublethink or dissociation. Life isn’t real unless it is on TV, yet if it is on TV it really isn’t quite real.
Lance Boyle 05.23.04 at 2:06 am
The funny part is there’s probably more agreement behind the scrim than there appears.
How about a prosthetic deity, that this is all headed toward a full-consciousness Old Testament god, only made out of human minds linked by machine. Oprah-mind. It’s all merging.
I think Bob’s right as rain.
But it isn’t just Reality TV it’s Reality TV and make-over shows and glamour-cop shows and the seamless blur into Reality News, it’s all headed toward the same place. An entirely prosthetic mind with absolutely nowhere to go and nothing to do but be. And then not.
Meanwhile there’s Elima-Date.
Or, if you want hopeful signs of human presence in the midst of soulless seduction, there’s Third Watch.
–
The highest compliment most people can give a musician is that her music is marketable. “You could make money at it.”
It wasn’t always like that. The actual recording and replaying of musical moments isn’t the point so much as the mediated retail experience of that.
And the weird and unholy relationship between an 11 year old’s index finger and the London Philharmonic. The Brandenberg Concerto(recorded live) gets shut off with one stab at a button. That makes one party tremendously more powerful than the other(s).
Whereas that same 11 year old at a live performance of that same event would be overawed and intimidated by the power of the orchestra. And have only a cowed exit as a way of escaping the sound.
And remember weliveinpublic.com, back when it was still unnerving?
That shift in the dynamic toward the presence of the mediated thing trumping the thing itself, while the consumer/mediator trumps both, coupled with retail commodification of pretty much everything and dogmatic official insistence that consumer choice is all that matters, eventually results in self-commodification.
Which results in soullessness and a bereft existence.
Which results in soldiers who are indistinguishable from the demonic.
Bush is highly symbolic in this, and needs to be purged, but the things and forces that put him in the White House are what’s to blame, and they won’t be as easy to remove. And they aren’t American. They aren’t coming from the American people. We’re displaying the symptoms, we have the disease and it’s contagious as hell, but we aren’t the pathogen.
–
Pepi-
I agree with you mostly entirely, but isn’t or wasn’t slavery a “practical economic condition”? Didn’t it take lofty appeals and idealist fervor to excise it? And weren’t there volumes of pragmatic rebuttal based on realistic assessments of current conditions?
You could argue the Civil War was a tragically unnecessary result of John Brown’s rhetoric but I think you’d get some resistance.
This isn’t Manichaean duality, not quite; but if this all goes where it seems to be headed it will be. Because non-existence is the black to existence’s white.
There were good things in the principles of the early patriots, if not in their practice.
All nations aren’t equal, and the only reason we can have this discussion now is the placing of ideals before and above, and ahead of, pragmatic men. “Go that way. It’s possible.”
Any promise is a dream. A world-view that’s only comprised of present reality and bits of the past will stink. We need promise, dreams, ideals, the almost between us and the possible.
Nostalgia’s not the same as an invalid yearning for a healthier life.
Zak Catem 05.23.04 at 2:58 am
What can have provoked this torrent of world-weariness, Lance? Things aren’t quite as awful as you think, it just seems that way if you watch telly. What actually happens to people is that they grow up, get jobs and families, and don’t have much time for TV except on the weekends. Some of us watch sport for two days straight. Some rent movies. Some take the time to have sex the old fashioned way, without cameras. Some of us actually go out and do things. In any case, most of us aren’t slowly sinking into a morass of amateur smut and mindless dreck. Cheer up: reality TV, like cheesy seventies game shows, is a fad that is already beginning to lose its appeal. Even at the height of its popularity, the majority of Americans found better things to do than to watch it.
People will always watch cop shows, though. They’re easier to write than lawyer shows and hospital shows, and they’re exciting. Every now and then, someone even tries to make a good one. If you’re lucky enough to be in Australia, you could find worse things to do than stay up late on Monday nights to catch the Wildside re-runs.
As for depravity in the ranks, I can only suggest that this is what comes of recruiting hillbillies.
Lance Boyle 05.23.04 at 4:49 am
Zak-
Thanks for the mature guidance. Maybe you should hop over to Gaza and clue some of those folks in as to how bright and cheerful life can be for responsible adults with jobs and obligations. Looks like they need a good stern word or two from someone who knows what’s up. Especially those unemployed teenagers.
–
I bet my TV-hour watching per annum’s about 1/100th of yours, though the last year’s been a little higher than normal. I know about these shows, I don’t watch them, haven’t seen more than a few minutes of any of them, except for Third Watch. I don’t need to.
Just like I don’t need a biography to know from a few smug phrases when someone’s a twit.
Maybe you’re from Australia, but in the US that hillbilly crack’s no different than saying “…that’s what comes of recruiting niggers”, or wogs, or abos, or whatever derogatory term your particular geography provides you with.
But then you knew that already, didn’t you?
–
That irrepressible joi de vivre though, that’s irreplaceable. You should mass-produce that, then drive down the highway and throw it out the window. Lke flowers.
And when you’re back at home, and things like those GI Jane bondage-and-discipline pictures show up, just close your eyes until they go away. They will. Everything will if you wait long enough.
Zak Catem 05.23.04 at 5:57 am
Lance, I’m not saying the world is a perfect place. I’m just saying it isn’t getting much worse than it’s always been, although it is discovering new ways to be unpleasant. People have been doing appalling things to each other for millenia. What you see as a decline in sexual morality is more likely just an increase in openness about this sort of thing. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. And if you think the US discovered torture just this year, you must be mad. The only thing new here is that people are recording it with cameras. There’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t have done this in Vietnam if there’d been a digital camera craze on at the time. Be grateful for it. Would you rather we’d never found out?
By the way, the preferred phrasing is, “I don’t own a TV and I don’t even miss it.”
Lance Boyle 05.23.04 at 7:16 am
Zak-
20 years no TV at all. 10 with maybe 40 or 50 hours annum. Childhood of the usual, though we didn’t have a television at home until I was 7. Neither did a lot of kids I knew, I’m not young and we were poor.
–
In order to say something as banal as “…[the world] isn’t getting much worse than it’s always been…” you’d have to have a deep and wide understanding of the world and its histories. In order to get me to take that statement as true on your say-so you’d have to demonstrate a little of that understanding. No go.
I’m not complaining about the Abu Ghraib images. I’m not complaining about anything, what I was doing was riffing along at the margins of pepi and bob’s discourse. What I’m doing now is tucking you in.
I’ve seen “the world” as it is in America for a while now – the changes I’ve tracked have increased in depravity, cynicism, and inhuman callousness exponentially. In the public Zac, in the public. There have been good changes as well, certainly, but I’m talking generally, overall.
The lion and the elephant are at the brink of extinction. That this is seen as a kind of thwarting of a particular segment of the consumer population, an aesthetic scarcity, like Ben and Jerry’s running out of Cherry Garcia©, proves my point.
There’s less outrage now about the slaughter of civilians in Iraq, though it’s better-documented, than there was at the exposure of My Lai, and there’s a lot more My Lai going on in Iraq.
It’s hard to quantify something like that but I’m not guessing about it, it’s visible.
You keep offering me advice about things I need to change that I don’t even feel to begin with, which makes it hard to respond to you. I read Alma Guillermo-Prieta’s dispatches from the killing ground at El Mozote, in the New Yorker when they came out. This kind of distant horror isn’t news to me. Where you’re dangerously, as opposed to irritatingly, wrong is in your blithe assurance that things have always been like this.
They haven’t. And if you draw a line between how they were, through how they are, and carry it out a little further, it goes to a very bad place.
It’s a critical moment. There’s a lot of unfocused energy around. I understand people who want to pretend to themselves that everything’s basically ok, I support that really, as a private response. But as a public posture it’s weak, and it gets in the way.
Zak Catem 05.23.04 at 7:39 am
I think we may be slightly at cross purposes here, and I think it’s possible that I’ve confused what you’ve said with some of what Bob said further up. My point isn’t that the world is getting better geopolitically or environmentally or in any other larger sense. What I am saying is that people have always been much as they are now. There have always been plenty of jerks, people have always had kinky sex, high school kids have always beaten up on the class nerd, and most of them never bothered to read Proust. And so on. If it’s more apparent today, it’s because we are given less opportunity to ignore it.
As a pointless aside, I call foul on comparing Vietnam era outrage to Iraq war outrage. There was a draft on then, and that affected peoples attitudes towards the war immensely.
Anyway, this conversation has gone on for too long already. I hereby concede and withdraw all the points I’ve made, and admit that things jest ain’t what they was, and there used to be more trees ’round here, what’s more. Besides, it’s getting on to evening where I am, and that’s when all the good shows come on.
pepi 05.23.04 at 11:14 am
bob macmanus: you know, it’s always very easy to start seeing decadence all around and forget what it was like oh, only fifty or hundred years ago. What were the dominant cultural mentalities back then? Was it all good? A ‘better’ culture to live in than today overall? For who? for rich white straight men, or for everybody else?
Think about it before you condemn the present as a one big bag of filth.
Yeah, today there’s reality tv. People watch tv to be easily and cheaply entertained, it’s not a crime. Some of those shows are funny, some are crap and may influence people to think and do crap things. Yeah, tv and technology encourage exhibitionism. Big news. Big deal.
You’re talking mass entertainment there. That’s not exactly identical with culture at large. There’s a lot of things that belong to the cultural domain, and also make it to mass entertainment, that have nothing to do with trash tv and can be good quality. Lots of people in America still write good books, make good works of art, good music, and good films. Just because they may not always be the blockbusters, doesn’t mean they’re not there. There’s not just Jackass, you know. If you don’t notice that or are not interested, you can’t blame that on reality tv, can you?
Regarding porn, pro or amateur – it always existed. Just because the representation of pornography used to be more artistic – temples in India, paintings in ancient spas – doesn’t mean that kind of thing wasn’t going on.
Have some historical perspective, and you see there’s nothing new in those tendencies, what’s new is only the ways in which they get expressed.
And what is most important is this: no one is _forcing_ anyone to be filmed on tv, or spill their personal stories in front of a camera. Ditto for porn. No one is forcing people to watch those things either.
In Abu Ghraib, prisoners were forced, abused, tortured.
I’m sure you already understand that huge difference. So no need to downplay it or go all doomsday-preacher on unrelated things.
Also, those who took the photos in Abu Ghraib were not doing that for sheer exhibitionism – they were doing so to show their superiors, those who ordered them to roughen up inmates for interrogation, how good they were at those roughening up techniques.
Those photos and videos had that precise aim.
So it seems that has very little to with Paris Hilton. Or the state of contemporary culture and mass entertainment in America.
pepi 05.23.04 at 11:24 am
Ah, and blogs, eh, I missed that… I don’t know, Bob, you seem to me to be making a mess of many things. Blogs are not just the personal kind. But what if personal blogs are exhibitionist in some ways? Didn’t people publish journals even before the advent of blogs? Isn’t there still a quality screening there, or are all personal blogs like trash tv too?
And again, how does that even remotely relate to Abu Ghraib?
How does reading about someone’s baby or dating or shopping relate to seeing people getting tortured by military personnel in a prison during a war?
Come on, Bob. Take a step back, cheer up a little, and think about what you’re saying there.
pepi 05.23.04 at 11:47 am
Lance: look, I’m not saying there’s no need for ideals at all. Ideals relate to ethics and ethics are the basis of laws and laws are the basis of any organised society. So yes of course the ideals and values do play a big part in improving a society and its mentalities and laws, as in the slavery example.
What I’m saying is something else – in the image a nation has of itself, image incorporating its past history and its projection on the future, in the image that lies at the basis of public-political discourse, it’s healthier for it to be honest and grounded in reality rather than in a myth. It’s healthier to accept bad things as part of _human_ nature rather than trying to wash them away as something un-American, ie. not just something that doesn’t conform to those ideals and values a nation has – and _shares_ with others (and not just in terms of Geneva conventions and declarations of human rights but in cultural terms too) – , that’s obvious and normal to see it like that, but something that is _inherently_ alien to that image of America. Like ‘sins’ that should not even be conceivable in the promised land.
It probably boils down to a secular vs. Puritan mentality, or influence on mentality. A pragmatic idealism vs. impossible manicheism that inevitably leads to hypocrisy.
I don’t know if that’s clearer, but I thought I had explained it clearly already with the bit about the ambiguity of that “un-American” definition.
America didn’t just pop out of nowhere, creationism-style. It’s not a new world. It belongs to the one and only human world there is.
Lance Boyle 05.23.04 at 8:44 pm
pepi-
“Belongs to” the way the child belongs to its parents.
Or a slave to her master. Or the present to the past. I’m not severing the connection. I’m pointing toward an ideal that was pointed toward by people who came before me. Too much pragmatism is a solvent.
What I hear from Bob is not so much the sex as the packaging of the sex, and I think it’s an urgently pertinent observation. By fixing the hedonism against the Puritanical repression the freedom of the one looks healthy. But neither is, and they both come out of a similar scam. Social control by attaching control-structure feeding mechanisms to essential human needs. The Catholics did this super-successfully, by creating artificial sexual guilt, and then providing a release for that guilt that involved subservient postures toward the church. Attaching that guilt to children who have no coherent sexual feelings just before the onset of adolescent hormone tsunamis, along with providing the basic gifts of early education, means you have a self-perpetuating and reinforcing lock on the majority, and a fairly easily maintained filter for the rebellious. This has counterparts in other religions and groups, and works for any inevitable human need, sex, food, status, etc.
Want to feed your kids? Get down in the mine. Hunger in this example replacing artificial guilt.
What I heard Bob saying is the mediated confirmation of identity creates kind of the opposite of that scam, though it’s parallel. Kid needs image-confirmation to be, life becomes reality TV, which isn’t real, so there’s a hole, a vacuum at the heart of being, and feeding the hole with evidence of identity that’s media-formatted just amps the cycle.
Bob said it was “deep” or “pseudo” but I think it’s pertinent as all get out.
Badger-baiters are my favorite template for the past as bad place. Or the guys who originally threw Staffordshire terriers into the pits with bulls. All those death-sport contest guys. That’s real old, but I think it’s a mistake to generalize it out to omni-presence in the human cultural genome.
One of the more egregious scams that’s been run on the thinking public is the idea that all humans are essentially made up of the same qualities and drives, the same characteristics in all of us. The human-as-integer thing.
I think, based on a certain amount of experience, that there are profound differences among us, and not mutable ones. I think the badger-baiters are an example of one kind of human. I think repugnance toward activities like that and worse marks another kind. And yes the outward marks can be induced, just as plastic surgery can mask racial display.
What’s that mean?
Maybe that things are not the same and never have been, that the threads that are common are not essential, but current. That nothing is core to the human presence, it’s a continuum like the primate dissolve from that early pre-hominidish figure into the rhesus and the chimpanzee, and Lynndie England.
The illusion we were given is that what it is to be human will be the same in whatever humans are around. This bleeds urgency from the preservation of certain kinds of humans, even as they disappear. Integers are replaceable with other integers.
The mediation of human experience, especially when the media itself is under the control of an invisible minority, makes that integer-like illusion even more dangerous. People feel even less real than they once did, even though if you go back far enough I think the experience of individuality is subsumed by group-membership, social participation as internal even more than external belonging.
In between is all this freedom and Enlightenment.
Again I agree with you, but like the flag, these ideals are all we have. The military guys I’ve heard address this have an inarguable point, that we are not alone here, that without power we’re prey.
Without ideals we’re brutes. There are no ideals in the mediated arena but blind hedonism and completely obscured direction and control. There’s outrage about Abu Ghraib, but there’s fascination and sexual thrill right there too. In a regressive loop of commercial supply and demand, where desire is the only sacred thing, you would expect people to begin to see themselves as more or less marketable, as products.
The illusion is this is a stable dynamic. The illusion is it isn’t going somewhere unexpected, at least by the participants.
Slavery again. First it was, then it wasn’t. The change was the result of emotion more than reason. Reason founders against biological assertion. Emotion doesn’t.
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