The Market Likes Torture: Should Uncle Sam?

posted by Dave Hoffman

National Review commentator Jonah Goldberg offers this essay defending torture. I think Goldberg’s piece is an unusually foolish and corrosively cynical pastiche, dressed up as home-spun common sense. But go ahead, give him a read. Then come back for my thoughts.

Goldberg starts with a lazy swipe against politically engaged actors and actresses:

“Hollywood is against torture, which ranks somewhere in the parade of horribles ahead of SUV ownership and perhaps even voting Republican. No doubt Barbra Streisand and Alec Baldwin have delivered many a dinner-table stem-winder against the Bush administration’s defense of “coercive measures” in extreme circumstances.”

This is a rich image – naive liberal actors (!) posturing from the comfort of a boozy dinner. But it is a fantasy. “No doubt” Streisand lingered over dessert at that entirely made-up dinner talking about Jonah Goldberg’s refusal to serve in the military, despite his strong push to intensify military activities in Iraq. “No doubt” over an expensive after dinner wine Baldwin called Goldberg to task for ad hominem arguments that make little sense. Wow, making up hypotheticals can be fun, even outside of class and exam-writing!

With that lead, Goldberg switches topics, and examines

“what people mean by torture. If you mean hot pokers in unwelcome places, pretty much everyone is against it, save perhaps in the famous ‘ticking-time bomb’ scenario. But the meatier part of the argument is in the more nuanced area of ‘coercive measures,’ ’stress positions,’ and what one unnamed official once described to the Wall Street Journal as ‘a little bit of smacky-face.’”

Most folks of good-will realize this is a line-drawing problem. We now know quite a bit about torture as practiced by the CIA, and there is no need for euphemism. Is water-boarding torture? Until Goldberg answers that question, it is irresponsible to stake out a spectrum between a slap and a violation with a poker, and throw up your hands as to the middle ground.

Goldberg continues that elites who condemn all non-poker- scenarios out of hand are too rigid. Why? Because torturing evil men to save good people is a powerful narrative move in many major studio releases, including Patriot Games, Mississippi Burning, and Rules of Engagement. On its own terms, the argument is confused, as some of the examples given (an actor “shot a POW in the head to get another man to talk”) would violate Goldberg’s categorical rule. But let’s dig deeper.

My great-aunt, who had Alzheimer’s before she passed, used to watch violence on television and get terribly upset. “Those people are hurting each other,” she would cry. It is this inability to distinguish violence on television and in the movies from real life that makes us worried about children’s consumption of the product. But for mentally competent adults, a taste for cinematic violence simply is different from a taste that the United States beat, drown, starve and freeze real people to get information from them. Maybe the public wants the United States to torture people, by which I mean torture as it is defined in the McCain Amendment, but it sure seems uncomfortable with the topic when specific examples are given.

This relates, I think, to another example Goldberg unwisely seizes – that from NYPD Blue. Goldberg exults that “Andy Sipowicz, played by Dennis Franz, smacked around criminals all the time.” He sure did. But as the fictional detectives themselves acknowledged on the show, coercion was illegal and morally wrong. From an early exchange between a veteran and a new detective:

John Kelly: What’s on your mind, James?

James Martinez: I wanted to ask you, when you sent me outside, you gave me your gun and so forth, uh… I wanted to ask you what happened in there, why the guy gave it up.

John Kelly: You mean, did I beat it out of him?

James Martinez: Yeah, if that’s why he confessed.

John Kelly: I didn’t beat him.

James Martinez: Then why’d he give it up?

John Kelly: Because he’s guilty, and he knew I was willing to beat it out of him to get the truth.

James Martinez: So if it came to it, you would have beaten him?

John Kelly: Let me put it to you like this. I never raise my hand to a guy if I think he’s guilty or if I’m trying to find out if he’s guilty. But if I’m sure he’s guilty and the case is gonna walk unless I raise my hand, I do what I gotta do.

James Martinez: Even though you’re breakin’ the law?

John Kelly: Okay, you’re askin’ me if I believe in the Constitution. Yes, I believe in the Constitution, and I hang on to that as long as I can. But in the case of a murderer like this, who’s gonna walk, I leave my gun and my jewelry outside, along with the Constitution.

James Martinez: And if you’re wrong about this guy?

John Kelly: Well, then God forgive me. (pause) If you… if you want, I can make somethin’ up prettier than that, James. But that’s the way it is.

James Martinez: Okay.

Later episodes made clear that the detectives knew that if they were ever caught beating suspects, the bosses who had asked for the beating, the witnesses whose testimony would have been avoided, and the public that endorsed the entire system would turn together in revulsion against the behavior. Even though we know what is being done in our name, we simply don’t see ourselves as a society of torturers. And that is to the good. Goldberg’s view is corrosively cynical, and too permissive as a result. We can know some coercion is rarely necessary – the ticking bomb problem – without condoning it, because we know that almost all of the time, it isn’t necessary, and its harms far outweigh its benefits.

Goldberg continues:

Hollywood plays a role in shaping culture, but it also reflects it. It both affirms and reflects our basic moral sense (which is one reason why it dismays some of us from time to time).

It is hardly imaginable that Hollywood would — or could — make long-running TV shows or successful movies where the protagonist is a soaked-to-the-bone racist. Why? Because audiences would reject the premise and so would filmmakers.

I agree that the studios releasing widely-distributed movies cater to the market, and the market has less of a taste than it used to for explicitly racist films. I also agree that media is a taste-maker. But so what? Let’s assume that movies encourage the belief that torturing is morally uncomplicated, and celebrate “good” torture. (This passes, in Goldberg’s view, for nuance.) Unless Goldberg thinks that market outcomes tell us something about inherent worth, instead of expressed preferences, we could easily conclude that law should work to be a contrary taste maker – that law’s goal should, in part, be to turn its face against the market-clearing amount of entertaining torture we’ve been given by the studio system.

Just when I thought I had Goldberg pinned down to an actual point, he shifts direction again:

My guess is that when presented in cinematic form, even larger numbers of people [than the 61% who supported some forms of torture in a recent poll] recognize that sometimes good people must do bad things. I’m not suggesting, of course, that the majority is always right. But it should at least suggest to those preening in their righteousness that people of good will can disagree.

What was the point of Goldberg’s column? Let’s review: First, Hollywood liberals, democrats and Andrew Sullivan want you to adopt a broad meaning of torture. Be careful with those crazies. Second, you have probably enjoyed movies with scenes of torture. This suggests that you want your government to torture people, up to, but not including, the “red hot poker” exception. Only Nazis use red hot pokers.

Deeply silly.

And this is a columnist for a major metropolitan paper, and a writer for one of the leading conservative thought-organs in the country. It makes me wonder how much longer the conservative movement can survive its exposure to power. Robert Caro, in his biography of Johnson, argued that power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals. I hope not.

 December 11, 2005 at 12:24 am   Posted in: Current Events    Print This Post

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