Philosophers and theologians like to have fun.
This is why crowds of academics flock to hear a shaggy-bearded, jumper-wearing Slovenian psychoanalyst called Slavoj Žižek who serves up an intoxicating cocktail of resurrected Marxism, pop culture references and gleefully rude jokes.
If the DNA of Eddie Izzard, Lenny Bruce and an Old Testament prophet were fused by renegade geneticists, someone like Žižek might emerge in the test tube.
Curious, I downloaded a few of his presentations; I’d be hard-pressed to tell you what his “point” was, but one insight is bouncing around my brain.
He said when a society argues about when it is acceptable to torture someone, that culture has already moved to a place where it is corrupted.
This pollution of western politics can be seen through a quick surf through news-sites and blogs. The debate in the United States has shifted from whether it is ever right to torture someone, but whether this “works”.
The concept is no longer anathema. It is up for debate; politicians do not consider it self-evident that simulating drowning a man 183 times in one month is not wrong.
This is exactly what happened to senior Al-Qaeda suspect Khalid Shaykh Muhammad in March 2003.
The odious acts of terrorism and barbarity carried out by Islamist extremists have shocked and frightened the West. They have taken beheading – something we thought was locked in the history books – and hauled it into the realm of news headlines.
But we also thought that torture was a medieval monstrosity, that the only people in modern times who sanctioned it were loose cannons or Nazis.
It was simply beyond the pale, and now it is not. Now that images of ticking bombs are easy to imagine, senior figures contemplate legally acceptable ways of causing excruciating pain or blinding terror.
The extent of the UK’s acquiescence during the War on Terror should be dragged into the daylight if Gordon Brown wants to leave Downing St with his moral compass intact.
But it is especially disappointing that the defence of torture is being articulated so forcefully in the United States, where it is a founding principle that moral instincts and impulses should be revered.
The Declaration of Independence begins with the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”.
Good souls in Britain are in anguish about whether representatives of far-right parties should be invited onto mainstream current affairs shows.
Just as “torture” (or “enhanced interrogation”) is now part of the mainstream lexicon, what other ideas we once considered banished will cease to be taboo?
We knew that our predecessors had fought hard for the values of civilisation. But we never appreciated how fragile and perhaps fleeting these accomplishments would prove.
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3 comments:
Very well said. Can you link to Žižek piece? Cheers!
This is an extraordinary commentary and, as an American, it really makes me wonder what has happened to a nation that so believed in human rights and human fairness.
while i respect and admire patriotic passion, it has allowed us, since 9/11, to ignore the erosion of basic human (and constitutional) rights...and we wake up eight years later accepting the horror of torture as commonplace...it's not sad, it's frightening and cannot be allowed to continue.
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