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December 17, 2005
Tim Rutten:
Regarding Media
McCain stands his high ground
So where does that leave the tough-guy commentators?
The tough guy wing of the American media's commenting class always has been prone to what C. Wright Mills once called "crackpot realism."
It's a little difficult to define precisely, but since its relationship to serious thinking is rather like that of pornography to art, you generally recognize it when you see it. A crackpot realist usually assumes an air of weary patience while instructing you on how their superior grasp of the "real world's" exigencies demands that you accept a morally preposterous conclusion.
This was a bad week for the tough guys, who suffered a stinging defeat when an overwhelming House vote forced President Bush to reverse his position 180 degrees and accept Sen. John McCain's proposed ban on torture. The 308 representatives in the majority joined 90 of the Arizona Republican's Senate colleagues in endorsing a legal prohibition on the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of any prisoner detained by the United States anywhere in the world.
The administration, which has allowed the routine torture of Al Qaeda terrorists held in secret CIA facilities or in prisons run by American allies, fought McCain's proposal to the bitter end. Bush had threatened to exercise his first veto to keep the proposal from becoming law, but tossed in the towel when the overwhelming votes in both congressional chambers made it clear that wouldn't work.
Over the last couple of weeks, they've repeatedly attacked McCain and his amendment's supporters as soft-hearted, soft-headed hypocrites out to make the U.S. defenseless against the Islamo-fascists' next murderous plot. (We'll leave it to the guys who dug this noxious rhetorical pit to figure out just how they're now going to extract Bush from its depths, since Thursday he stood alongside McCain and said, "We've been happy to work with him to achieve a common objective.")
Earlier this week, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial cited a Newsweek piece McCain had written in which he said he believed torture should be outlawed, even though it was possible to imagine extraordinary instances in which "an interrogator might well try extreme measures." According to the editorial, this demonstrated that "what lies at the heart of his amendment is moral hypocrisy: We're supposed to ban rugged interrogation in general to make us feel better about ourselves, but only until such interrogation is required; then do whatever it takes."
The Journal's critique built on a widely quoted 4,000-word essay by the columnist and television commentator Charles Krauthammer that appeared in the Weekly Standard this month. He assailed McCain and supporters of his proposal for "moral preening and phony arguments," building his case around a hypothetical proposition he phrased thusly: "Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking."
So should you hang him up by his thumbs to make him tell you? Since the obvious answer is of course you would, Krauthammer's position is that a legal ban on torture is hypocritical, or as he characterizes it, a kind of piety.
THIS is merely a debater's trick, the kind of platform performance that confuses ingenious consistency with moral seriousness. The fact of the matter is that without a prohibition, torture isn't reserved for the most extreme imaginable case; it becomes a fact of everyday life. As ABC News recently reported, 11 of the 12 senior most captured Al Qaeda terrorists have been subjected to the torture called waterboarding.
If one of those characters had been sitting on knowledge of a ticking atomic bomb, you can bet Dick Cheney would have told us all about it by now.
It's the habit of crackpot realists to behave as if no other lives but theirs have been lived. The West's great traditions of moral reasoning long ago recognized that the defense of innocent life in the infinite variety of historical circumstances would, from time to time, create unavoidable and forgivable moments of moral exception.
"Necessity knows no law" was the way Thomas Aquinas put it. Moses Maimonides, another of the medieval thinkers who did the heavy lifting to reconcile faith and reason, drew special attention to the Torah's admonition, "Lo ta' amod al dam re' echa" (Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor). The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin devotes pages of discussion to the principle of pikuah nefesh, which governs the licit suspension of moral law to save a life.
In other words, our Western culture has been here before. In fact, one of Krauthammer's most trenchant critics is the politically conservative Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. "Establishing a principle is not 'merely for show,' " he recently wrote. "Recognizing clearly but sotto voce, that there will sometimes be exceptions to the principle is not hypocrisy. Those who, under the most extreme circumstances, violate the rule must be held strictly accountable to higher authority. Here the venerable maxim applies, abusus non tollit usus, the abuse does not abolish the use…. Please note that in saying this, one does not condone the decision. It is simply a recognition that in the real world such decisions will be made."
This writer has spent his entire adult life working at journalism, much of it involving grindingly controversial issues — capital punishment, abortion, gun control, terrorism, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, a litany of misery and contention nearly four decades long. After a while, very little seemed "out of the question" or "beyond the pale." However, if anyone ever had said that, in deep middle age, it would be necessary to engage seriously the question of whether the United States of America should torture people, they would have been dismissed as lunatic — and the bartender would have been told to take their car keys.
Yet, here we are.
That's why it's hard to say that this week produced what our political analysts glibly call a winner. The legal, legislative and rhetorical exertions of the last months notwithstanding, all that really was accomplished was to recall this frightened nation to the sanity of its moral center. It's hard to call that progress, or to know exactly which feeling to take away from it — relief, perhaps; pride, no.
There is, however, a hero in all this, and that's John McCain. As a downed Navy pilot, he was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese. They didn't break him, and neither has the culture of expediency and cowardice that now prevails in our politics.
Armed with conviction and the moral authority of his own experience, he stood against the president, the vice president and his own party.
Now, as McCain said when he sat next to Bush in the Oval Office on Thursday, "We've sent a message to the people of the world that the United States is not like the terrorists. We are … a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people, no matter how evil or bad they are."
For once, we also were a nation that could tell posturing tough guys from a real man.
Link
Tim Rutten:
Regarding Media
McCain stands his high ground
So where does that leave the tough-guy commentators?
The tough guy wing of the American media's commenting class always has been prone to what C. Wright Mills once called "crackpot realism."
It's a little difficult to define precisely, but since its relationship to serious thinking is rather like that of pornography to art, you generally recognize it when you see it. A crackpot realist usually assumes an air of weary patience while instructing you on how their superior grasp of the "real world's" exigencies demands that you accept a morally preposterous conclusion.
This was a bad week for the tough guys, who suffered a stinging defeat when an overwhelming House vote forced President Bush to reverse his position 180 degrees and accept Sen. John McCain's proposed ban on torture. The 308 representatives in the majority joined 90 of the Arizona Republican's Senate colleagues in endorsing a legal prohibition on the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of any prisoner detained by the United States anywhere in the world.
The administration, which has allowed the routine torture of Al Qaeda terrorists held in secret CIA facilities or in prisons run by American allies, fought McCain's proposal to the bitter end. Bush had threatened to exercise his first veto to keep the proposal from becoming law, but tossed in the towel when the overwhelming votes in both congressional chambers made it clear that wouldn't work.
Over the last couple of weeks, they've repeatedly attacked McCain and his amendment's supporters as soft-hearted, soft-headed hypocrites out to make the U.S. defenseless against the Islamo-fascists' next murderous plot. (We'll leave it to the guys who dug this noxious rhetorical pit to figure out just how they're now going to extract Bush from its depths, since Thursday he stood alongside McCain and said, "We've been happy to work with him to achieve a common objective.")
Earlier this week, for example, a Wall Street Journal editorial cited a Newsweek piece McCain had written in which he said he believed torture should be outlawed, even though it was possible to imagine extraordinary instances in which "an interrogator might well try extreme measures." According to the editorial, this demonstrated that "what lies at the heart of his amendment is moral hypocrisy: We're supposed to ban rugged interrogation in general to make us feel better about ourselves, but only until such interrogation is required; then do whatever it takes."
The Journal's critique built on a widely quoted 4,000-word essay by the columnist and television commentator Charles Krauthammer that appeared in the Weekly Standard this month. He assailed McCain and supporters of his proposal for "moral preening and phony arguments," building his case around a hypothetical proposition he phrased thusly: "Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking."
So should you hang him up by his thumbs to make him tell you? Since the obvious answer is of course you would, Krauthammer's position is that a legal ban on torture is hypocritical, or as he characterizes it, a kind of piety.
THIS is merely a debater's trick, the kind of platform performance that confuses ingenious consistency with moral seriousness. The fact of the matter is that without a prohibition, torture isn't reserved for the most extreme imaginable case; it becomes a fact of everyday life. As ABC News recently reported, 11 of the 12 senior most captured Al Qaeda terrorists have been subjected to the torture called waterboarding.
If one of those characters had been sitting on knowledge of a ticking atomic bomb, you can bet Dick Cheney would have told us all about it by now.
It's the habit of crackpot realists to behave as if no other lives but theirs have been lived. The West's great traditions of moral reasoning long ago recognized that the defense of innocent life in the infinite variety of historical circumstances would, from time to time, create unavoidable and forgivable moments of moral exception.
"Necessity knows no law" was the way Thomas Aquinas put it. Moses Maimonides, another of the medieval thinkers who did the heavy lifting to reconcile faith and reason, drew special attention to the Torah's admonition, "Lo ta' amod al dam re' echa" (Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor). The Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin devotes pages of discussion to the principle of pikuah nefesh, which governs the licit suspension of moral law to save a life.
In other words, our Western culture has been here before. In fact, one of Krauthammer's most trenchant critics is the politically conservative Father Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. "Establishing a principle is not 'merely for show,' " he recently wrote. "Recognizing clearly but sotto voce, that there will sometimes be exceptions to the principle is not hypocrisy. Those who, under the most extreme circumstances, violate the rule must be held strictly accountable to higher authority. Here the venerable maxim applies, abusus non tollit usus, the abuse does not abolish the use…. Please note that in saying this, one does not condone the decision. It is simply a recognition that in the real world such decisions will be made."
This writer has spent his entire adult life working at journalism, much of it involving grindingly controversial issues — capital punishment, abortion, gun control, terrorism, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, a litany of misery and contention nearly four decades long. After a while, very little seemed "out of the question" or "beyond the pale." However, if anyone ever had said that, in deep middle age, it would be necessary to engage seriously the question of whether the United States of America should torture people, they would have been dismissed as lunatic — and the bartender would have been told to take their car keys.
Yet, here we are.
That's why it's hard to say that this week produced what our political analysts glibly call a winner. The legal, legislative and rhetorical exertions of the last months notwithstanding, all that really was accomplished was to recall this frightened nation to the sanity of its moral center. It's hard to call that progress, or to know exactly which feeling to take away from it — relief, perhaps; pride, no.
There is, however, a hero in all this, and that's John McCain. As a downed Navy pilot, he was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese. They didn't break him, and neither has the culture of expediency and cowardice that now prevails in our politics.
Armed with conviction and the moral authority of his own experience, he stood against the president, the vice president and his own party.
Now, as McCain said when he sat next to Bush in the Oval Office on Thursday, "We've sent a message to the people of the world that the United States is not like the terrorists. We are … a nation that upholds values and standards of behavior and treatment of all people, no matter how evil or bad they are."
For once, we also were a nation that could tell posturing tough guys from a real man.
Link
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