Given the release of the torture report by the Senate Armed Services Committee this week,as well as the recent comments by Ross Douthat, and today’s New York Times’ editorial, the following is worth some thought:
In his unflinching Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas described how the Spanish punished the indigenous peoples of the New World. He recounts ghastly inversions of Gospel images and imperatives amidst a general run of tyrannical violence. One commander ordered his soldiers to mutilate the faces of the conquered as mock “testimony” to missionary activity for “the Holy Catholic Faith.” Another burned his victims alive thirteen at a time, “in honor of the Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”
The use of Christian imagery to mark the triumph of Spain over its captive population was (and is) revealing. In The True History of the Conquest of New Mexico, Bernal Díaz testified to the unthinking contempt with which the conquistadors encountered the religion of the indigenous peoples. When Montezuma took Hernando Cortés to the temple in which the Aztec gods were said to dwell, Cortés seemed tempted to laugh, telling his host “Lord Montezuma, I do not understand how such a great prince and wise man as yourself can have failed to come to the conclusion that these idols of yours are not gods, but evil things— devils is the term for them.”
The idols of the Aztecs were not gods, but this did not prompt Cortés and his men to live the Gospel and invite others to join them. The superiority of Christianity was taken by the conquistadors to mean that the Spanish, as members of the visible Church, were obviously superior beings, and thus were entitled to brand the bodies of the captives with grotesque parodies of Christian history and faith.
In the gamut of violence inflicted by a victor’s officialdom upon the recalcitrant defeated, horror is often accompanied by monotony: there are the inevitable assaults, deprivation of food and sleep to captives, threats to spouses and children. But there are moments of distinction that ooze out amongst the rote grind of punishment. De las Casas notices one peculiar to Spain in its conquest of the New World, but it reveals a more general pattern of distinguishing marks in violence and torture practiced upon a defeated people. The victims and captives of a dominant power are very often branded with what their captors perceive as their distinctive mark of cultural superiority.
In France, for example, scientific technocratic rationality in service of centralizing power has long been a source of national pride, bringing the world the metric system and dirigisme in education and health care. Yet from the profligate use of the guillotine to the “science” of coercive interrogation in colonial Algeria, it is precisely this sense of superiority that has manifested itself in French cruelty. The bodies of those who opposed the French government in revolution or, in an imperial context, the mission civilisatrice were marked with the power of the technocratic rationality they had “irrationally” sought to thwart.
In the Bush years, the United States came— at the very least— perilously close to becoming a de jure torture state. It should not surprise us that like its political predecessors, America has also given its forays into torture its own distinctive mark. There are occasional pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific moments in America’s misadventures at Guatanamo and Abu Ghraib, but here the source of cultural superiority appears to manifest itself differently: America’s distinctively prominent form of coercion and torture is sexual humiliation.
Sexual humiliation appears in perverse and disturbing profusion in the photos from Abu Ghraib, now recognized as evidence of something much more systematic than the excesses of a few low-ranking officials. As Jane Mayer writes in her recent book The Dark Side, the imperative to coerce prisoners into assuming sexual positions or to simulate sexual acts (where they would be repeatedly photographed), to force prisoners to remain without clothes for days or weeks, to humiliate male prisoners by forcing them to stand naked in front of female interrogators, or the gratuitous use of anal suppositories was by no means confined to Abu Ghraib, but was part of a deliberate program of degradation. It was implemented by the CIA for “interrogations” around the world.
This sexual humiliation is uniquely prominent (and painstakingly recorded) by America’s torture regime. Yet what is the triumphant cultural imperative with which this regime marks its victims? In postmodern American culture, it is the assumption that ever-increasing exposure, above all sexual exposure, is a supremely valuable category of information about human beings that both discloses selves for what they really are and is itself an emancipatory act. It is as close as our ironic, unbuttoned postmodernist culture can come to a liberating truth. In relation to the regime of eroticized exposure, citizens of the Islamic world, guilty or guiltless, are found to be risibly repressed and retrograde, much as the Spanish found Montezuma in his room of idols— and are subsequently marked with the visible signs of our evident superiority.
Naturally, this is not say that rejections of sexual reticence and concealment are simply evil, any more than being a member of the visible Church, or respect for the human sciences are evil. Nor is it say the varied cultural propensities of a defeated people— human sacrifice, or denying women their rights— are good.
That said, a look at the past tells us that a distinctive torture regime against other peoples often manifests itself when a dominant culture has already begun to corrupt what is good and creative in itself, and to make a distinctive aspect of its own culture an instrument of domination and pride within its own boundaries. The Iberian peninsula was awash with religious coercion at home— in which faith was sometimes bizarrely defined by bloodlines rather than, well, faith— long before a violently superficial (no oxymoron) religious triumphalism found expression abroad through the conquistadors. Various noxious forms of “enlightened” radical materialism and positivism had long provided an ugly and sometimes profoundly intolerant metaphysical underpinning to the human sciences in France long before, say, the torture chambers of Algeria, or even the cruelties of the Great Terror. And it may very well be that our culture too, has begun to apply the promise of revealing what was hidden or repressed in a kind of compulsive and destructive way, redolent more of arrogance than therapeutic solicitude, let alone human dignity and freedom.
What is to be done? Of course American torture must come to an end, and the new administration must make it an urgent priority. But America’s responsibility does not end there, and will not end in a year or ten. Well beyond the range of government policy, Americans must begin to think carefully about our own expansive cultural regime of eroticized exposure. The past gives us some assurance— if also a sobering demand— that this is our particular responsibility. Often it is precisely the nation responsible for a cultural imperative turned toward coercion that also produces its most powerful and original antagonists and ultimately, its healers.
In response to Spain’s atrocious exploitation of the New World and its peoples, de las Casas and Spanish scholastics like Vitoria created a language of human justice transcending religious and political boundaries, a language that would ultimately become the language of human rights. France, the pays natal of many “human sciences” would repeatedly produce exceptional minds acutely aware of the ways in which these “sciences” often discounted and diminished the full humanity of their subjects, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Henri de Lubac to the late writings of Michel Foucault.
In Spain and France alike, to criticize what appeared to be a special providential gift or unique genius of the culture initially required resolute independence from prevailing opinion. Our situation will require the same independence. For fear of sounding less than ecstatically American (on the Right) or less than ecstatically progressive (on the Left), foot-shuffling evasions can easily take the place of honesty when faced with the limits and shadows of a powerful source of personal and collective affirmation in American culture. America has yet to produce a candid intellectual reckoning with what are our sometimes questionable notions of eroticized exposure as a kind of fundamental knowledge and liberating truth. The distinguishing mark of our recent torture regime is a vivid sign that the time to begin that reckoning has come.
