Our Chickens May Come Home To Roost

Terror and Torture are today's buzzwords. We are on the slippery slope of proclaiming that the end is justified by any means: torture, the overthrow of governments, and dishonesty in public statements from elected officials. As if things weren't bad enough, Philip Roth has confirmed my worst nightmare: anti-Semitism becomes the official policy of the United States in Roth's alternative universe of 1940-1942. Jews in U. S. concentration camps? Couldn't happen here? Tell that to all of the U. S. citizens of Japanese ancestry who were herded into concentration camps (sans execution chambers and ovens) in the western United States between 1942-1944. In Roth's exercise in what if, it is U. S. Jews, not Japanese-Americans, who are herded into camps between 1940-1942. The demonization of terrorists is rampant. Rush Limbaugh uses language to describe terrorists that would make Josef Goebbels proud. Japs, Kikes, or Sand Niggers; take your pick. If this is (fair & balanced) revulsion, so be it.

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
Inadmissible Evidence: Terror, Torture, and the World Today
By GEOFFREY GALT HARPHAM

Since September 11, 2001, two terms have come to dominate the cultural conversation: terror and torture. These familiar words have been given new emphasis in light of recent events. Although they are not etymologically related, they do have several points in common, and, together, they suggest the real nature of the crisis that confronts us. The crisis rightly has military and political dimensions, but it is more than that. The current obsession with terror and torture bespeaks a deep and perhaps irreversible rupture in the ways we think of ourselves as a society and as a nation among others.

That rupture becomes visible in two new books. In one, Sanford Levinson, a professor of law and government at the University of Texas at Austin, has brought together some of today's leading legal, political, and moral theorists to debate the questions that have been on everyone's minds since the revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere -- the conditions, if any, under which torture might be justified in policy or law. Torture: A Collection, is being published by Oxford University Press this month, and its audience will in all likelihood be largely restricted to academe.

Almost simultaneously, Houghton Mifflin is bringing out Philip Roth's fictionalized alternative history, The Plot Against America. The extraordinary interest that gathered around the novel even before it was published reflects not only the growing public esteem for this distinctively American author but also a hunger for another way of thinking through the phenomenon of widespread public fear with which we have become so intimate in the last few years, the era of terror. The audiences for the two books overlap slightly, their ostensible subjects not at all. And yet, the present crisis provides a context that embraces both and illuminates the way torture and terror are knotted together.

What links the two terms is not just violence and suffering, but a pattern of deep internal affinities. The two terms, seemingly so stark and unambiguous, actually bleed into each other in a dimly lit zone between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, the rational and the irrational. The peculiar logic that structures both terror and torture is never direct or simple, but somehow deformed or twisted. In fact, the word "torture" is linked to the Latin torquere, to twist. It also refers to the overrefinement of meaning, no better example of which could be found than the tortured logic required to justify the continuing practice of torture since it began to be widely condemned in European countries a little more than 200 years ago. Twisting, applying torque, is the essence of torture: One is only tortured, in a strict definition, insofar as one is forced, by pain, to betray or violate oneself.

Terror, too, deforms reason. Terrorism is always explained, and the rationale is part of the terror itself. An explosion in a ballroom, a plane dropping out of the sky, poison gas released in the subway -- those acts do not constitute terrorism unless some group claims responsibility for them. Typically, the terrorist organization implies that the chaos it has created is not an end in itself, but furthers some larger political goal or, grotesquely, a moral goal that could not be achieved by other means. The key to the distinctive logic of terror is not just the immense distance between the panic in the streets in one place and some desired political outcome in another, but the radical difference in kind between means and end.

With its suggestion that profoundly abhorrent or nihilistic actions can be undertaken in pursuit of common, even universal goals, terror marks a kind of evil quirk or aberration in moral reasoning and a deep rebuke to the idea that human life makes sense. Many kinds of death -- illness, accident, natural disaster, military conflict -- do not threaten that idea. But the widespread fear that people might be used simply for the shock value of their damaged bodies, mutilated or destroyed for the sake of the (probably lost) cause of others we can neither understand nor respect, makes public and inescapable a fear that we generally keep to ourselves: that all the value, meaning, and purpose we try to realize in our lives can be abruptly negated, not for no reason -- a thought we can almost bear -- but for reasons so unreasonable as to represent a perversion of reason itself.

The suggestion that the real issue at stake in terror and torture is the character of human life is confirmed with a perverted eloquence by the more extreme responses of the media to the continuing horrors of Iraq, prominently including Abu Ghraib. According to Rush Limbaugh, some of our enemies in Iraq are not simply "sick" or "perverted," but "subhuman," even "human debris." Such wild statements provide an amplified vernacular echo of statements made by various government officials arguing that terrorists, suspected terrorists, or "unlawful combatants" are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. Since the conventions invoke as the basis of their authority "the principles of humanity" and "the dictates of public conscience," the denial of protection implies that some people fall outside the margins of humanity.

That kind of expulsion from the human community recalls Huck Finn's reply, when asked whether anyone was killed in a steamboat explosion: "No'm. Killed a nigger." Huck was, at the time, in disguise and merely trying to mime ordinary social discourse. But for the apologists for Abu Ghraib, all people who are connected, no matter how distantly, with terror are what "niggers" were in the world of Huck Finn -- entities that may look like people but are not, things that can be killed without "anyone" being hurt.

Perhaps the deepest point of similarity between torture and terror is this: Almost by definition, they refer to the actions of others, not to ourselves. An imperative of denial structures our understanding of the very words. Almost all of the contributors to Levinson's book on torture register what Henry Shue, a professor of ethics and public life at Cornell University, calls "the peculiar disgust which torture evokes." Still, most of the contributors discuss, despite their aversion, ways of approving the use of torture under the right circumstances, like the "ticking bomb" scenario, in which innocent lives will be spared if the location of the bomb can be determined. Michael Walzer, a political theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., writes with evident pain about the "dirty hands" of the politician who does what is necessary for the greater good -- torture -- by setting aside his ambition, insignificant in the context, to act morally.

Running through this volume, however, is a furtive but urgent consensus that even if torture has, after September 11, become more thinkable, the ban on it in policy and law must remain; it must, as Levinson says, be "unequivocally and absolutely forbidden by the law of civilized nations." Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University, creates a ripple of anxiety by arguing here, as he did in Why Terrorism Works (Yale University Press, 2002), that the use of torture might be reduced and circumscribed if it were subject to prior approval in the form of a "torture warrant." Writing in response, Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics and ethics at Harvard, finds it appalling that one could contemplate a legal sanction for torture -- but even she allows that there are circumstances in which, as Dershowitz says, it might "work."

Several of the writers here, including Levinson himself, manifest a queasy reluctance to raise the issue at all. Shue refers to the Pandora's box effect of talking about torture, which risks normalizing a subject that ought to retain its aura of extreme aversion. But while the distinguished thinkers here -- who also include Ariel Dorfman, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Posner, and others -- were working on the essays that would articulate their disgust, memoranda were circulating within the U.S. Justice Department that explored ways in which the strictures of the Geneva Conventions could be circumvented. It was those and other communiqués licensed by the war on terror that informed practice on the ground.

The sudden spread of the term "terror" is the most dramatic contemporary example of the Pandora's box effect. We in the United States have suffered only one September 11, but the concept of terror is ubiquitous today; indeed, it is routinely invoked as the rationale for sweeping changes in domestic and foreign policy. Terror is everywhere. We tell ourselves that we "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here," but the Patriot Act virtually presumes that they are already here, circulating more or less freely, renting videos, visiting the public library, doing ordinary things. Terror has become as impossible to locate as Osama bin Laden himself. So confounded have we become by the threat it represents that, in our desperation, and for the first time, many Americans have begun to overcome their aversion to torture and contemplate it as a legitimate instrument of policy, a tool of homeland defense.

One of the functions of literature in a time of crisis is to disclose, within the urgencies of the present, unsuspected possibilities, alternative modes of feeling or patterns of action, turns that might be taken. In The Plot Against America, Roth explores the path that America might have taken if Charles A. Lindbergh, running on a pacifist-isolationist platform, had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940. As Roth imagines it, the Lindbergh presidency embraces a militant nationalism that overwhelms the principles on which it is ostensibly based and leads directly to a military alliance with Germany and to the brink of war (with Canada!). On a more intimate level, it unleashes a pent-up wave of anti-Semitism that produces an American Kristallnacht and a general climate, for Jews, of terror. In a wild conclusion, Lindbergh is deposed by his Nazi masters, and Roosevelt is re-elected to the presidency; the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor (on December 7, but a year later), the United States enters the war, and we rejoin history's familiar course, fiction giving way to fact.

In essence, Roth has taken little chunks of fact from the world of 1940 (collected at the end in a series of chronologies) and put them into a kaleidoscope. The novel is the account of what the narrator, "Philip Roth," 7 years old in 1940, sees when, rummaging through the attic, he comes upon his old plaything, gives it a twist, and puts it to his eye. The result is a highly detailed and sharply observed parallel universe, a wild two-year detour that did not, in the end, change anything -- we still win the war -- but which nevertheless reveals an ugly possibility.

You can learn a good deal about the present by what did not happen, an alternative that can function as analogy. The climate of "perpetual fear" announced in the book's first sentence seems disturbingly familiar. Reviewers have noted a series of hard-to-miss parallels between the present and Roth's fictive past -- the plain-spoken president in a flight suit, the cloying invasiveness of "patriotic" programs, the emphasis on national (and, in Roth's novel, racial) unity, the insistence on the primacy of America. Roth offers such affinities but does not insist on them. Despite its factual porousness, his book has a kind of aesthetic completeness, in which an informed but free imagination rather than a determined political polemic -- of which Roth is fully capable -- structures the whole. The governing sensibility is that of a ruminative, sober academic, perhaps a historian.

Several years ago a historian, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, created controversy with his book Hitler's Willing Executioners (Knopf, 1996), describing how the Holocaust was carried out not by ideology-driven fiends but by "ordinary Germans." They were guided by their leaders, including Hitler and Supreme Party Judge Walter Buch, who wrote, "The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence." Such sentiments about other people, as we have seen, have begun to enter our own public discourse. In effect, Roth has substituted Lindbergh for Hitler in Goldhagen's title, disclosing a streak of terror within American society in 1940 that did not, because of reasons at the time, come to dominate society. If Levinson's volume forces us to confront our own willingness to sanction torture, Roth's novel invites us to consider the place of terror in our own society.

As he floats down the Congo River, Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, observes the natives on the shore -- "a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage ... the black and incomprehensible frenzy." Stunned by the spectacle, he approaches the tempting verge, and draws back. "The earth seemed unearthly," he comments, "and the men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours."

That recognition clearly costs Marlow an imaginative and moral effort, as a similar recognition cost Huck. But if those two fictional characters could make it, without the resources of an advanced and enlightened society to back them up, surely we can as well.

Geoffrey Galt Harpham is president and director of the National Humanities Center. His books include Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Duke University Press, 1999).

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education