Some Nasty Thoughts About Torture

Trump has popped back out of his latest rabbit hole declaring that, gosh, he has talked to some people (great people) and found out that, wouldn't you know it, torture actually works, so maybe he will bring back waterboarding after all. This is actually consistency, Trump-style: during the campaign he promised his hungry crowds “waterboarding and a lot worse,” before briefly changing his mind, in a fit of magnanimity after his November triumph. Now he is changing it back.

But it strikes me that here, for once, it is Trump who is taking people literally-but-not-seriously; and we should respond, I want to say, seriously-but-not-literally. Was it ever smart to have opposed torture by claiming that it "doesn't work"? I have never thought so.  Hearing the words, I instantly reflect that of course torture works, in the most immediate and basic sense, very implacably and infallibly, and that anyone who has suffered a bad tooth extraction or had an arm twisted by a bully knows this perfectly well, at some level, whatever he or she may say about it now.

But here I am the one being too literal. The slogan, really, is no flat statement of fact, but more a fiction to live by, true in its way but decidedly figurative. And it is a political formulation, holding together a somewhat uneasy coalition between various different reasons to despise and eschew torture. On the one hand there are mainly practical concerns: that resorting to torture would make America a pariah among nations, destroying our ability to make effective alliances; that the practice of it might prove so demoralizing and disorienting, so corrosive to our belief in ourselves and each other, that society might cease to function. Understand “work” in a broad sense, and “Torture doesn’t work” takes in such pragmatic considerations. But the slogan also offers something to escapists and even, one has to say, with the proviso that this means all of us at least sometimes, to hypocrites who simply prefer not to think clearly about the topic, not until we have to, though we probably know deep down that we would do anything, absolutely anything, to save the life of a spouse or keep that dirty bomb from going off in Times Square. For them (us) it offers a wistful fantasy of mere flesh somehow resisting the irresistible onslaught of the dead-eyed man with the electrodes. I could hold out, we tell ourselves, knowing better. People can do that, so the more practical approach, as Trump was saying a while back, is to offer the bad guy a cigarette and a beer, instantly changing him into a cooperative good guy. What, you never heard of a change of heart?

Often, these days, this fantasy expands into a pseudo-pragmatic argument that on examination is too silly for words, though it is offered with a straight face everywhere, notably in the Senate’s report on torture, and is more or less the official progressive position. The claim is made that torture fails to work because it works too well; because the victim is so broken that he tells the torturer “anything he wants to hear,” and that the torturer is then somehow helpless to sort out the kernels of true intelligence from the chaff of desperate over-reaction, even though (get this) the victim really wants to help his tormentor at this stage. Winston Smith loves Big Brother, but Big Brother can’t figure out how to take advantage of the situation. Right. So we don’t even have to discuss the morality of torture. It is simply ineffective, and we can put it out of our minds.

Of course any child can spot the problem here: the interrogator simply double-checks your answers against other data, and your panicked unintentional prevarications quickly fall away, leaving the nuggets of true information uncamouflaged and crystal clear. Separating truth from falsehood, even culpable truth from virtuous falsehood, is what interrogators are trained to do.

No one, I think, really believes the pseudo-pragmatic take on the anti-torture slogan — not deep-down and lucidly. No one who has ever been to the dentist, anyway. Still, the argument is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is shorthand, rather, and metaphor. A way of saying, I am not going to go there. Not only will I not practice torture or endorse it, I am not going to contemplate it fiercely and fully in the way you ask. I will not enter into those hateful philosophical conundrums into which you try to lure me, asking what I would do if my infant child were suspended by a thread over a tub of acid and the only man who knew where was strapped to the table in front of me, horridly leering, refusing to speak. From those visions I turn away, as if from pornography: I know what is there, in a general way, but I don’t choose to go into it just now. In the incredibly unlikely event that such a situation really presents itself, that will be time enough to decide. This is not hypocrisy, so much, but something more like decency.

Which is fine, except that Trump always knows just how to exploit mere decency. If we say, “Torture doesn’t work,” he emerges grinning from his bunker of self-contemplation to say, “Well, if that was your only objection. . . ” leaving us confused and wrong-footed just long enough for him to close the sale. He proceeds to show that torture has sometimes yielded true intelligence, as of course it has, and that’s that. Later, when we realize that he really didn’t care a shred whether torture “works” or not, that he simply needs to torture somebody (it hardly matters who), giving his base a dose of sadistic pleasure in order to leave them debauched and guilty and all the more surely bound to him — later will be too late. 

Oppose torture on practical grounds, and you find yourself defending a weak position.

So when our decent but evasive slogan is met with the literalistic counter-stroke, we need to be prepared, I think. We must be ready to say, “Well, that is not quite what we meant. Our real reason for opposing torture — for rejecting it utterly, for declining to argue the point — is that no reason is necessary. The overwhelming repugnance I feel when you mention the prospect, the feeling that life saved by such means might not be worth saving, is reason enough in itself. Rejecting torture is just one of life’s fundamentals, sacred if you like. Torture is just wrong, because it is because it is because it is.”

Not logic, really, but adequate to the case, in this imperfect world.

With these provisos — too many, no doubt, and too fussy — I am happy to march under the banner progressives have agreed upon:

Torture doesn’t work.