by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 29, 2004
Over thirty years ago Ursula LeGuin wrote a story called "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". More of a philosophical parable than a standard work of fiction, the story was an exploration of a moral dilemma LeGuin drew from William James. James posed the dilemma more or less this way: If it were somehow possible to create a perfect world of peace and harmony for many thousands of people, but only if all that goodness depended on the suffering and torment of one person, would the trade-off be worth the price?
James described his hypothetical scapegoat who made Utopia possible as "a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things", and this is the image that LeGuin takes for her story. She spends several pages describing the happiness, health and creativity of the citizens of her utopia, Omelas, and the security and contentment in which they live. Then she turns to the tiny canker on which all the goodness rests, the caveat, the "however" clause amid the happiness: in a filthy basement, kept alive but unnourished, tormented by loneliness, neglect and physical pain, a child is kept in a state of perpetual suffering. LeGuin writes, "They all know [the child] is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars…depend wholly on this child's abominable misery."
We do not live in Omelas. It's impossible to imagine that we would go on living in a place if our happiness were based on such a devil's bargain. Surely the knowledge of a suffering child would keep us from ever finding rest in the quiet night or pleasure in the bright sunlight of our safe haven… wouldn't it? Wouldn't the canker down at the core of things haunt us to the point of misery?
That's what I want to believe. But in the real and imperfect world in which we live, there is also a devil's bargain, though of another kind. It isn't a bargain that guarantees Utopia exactly. We know our country isn't Utopia and we know that our safety and happiness are relative things; nothing is perfect. But within the realm of the imperfect, we'd like to be as happy, safe and untroubled as we can be -- that's the universal yearning of human beings everywhere.
It's that yearning of ours that poses for us a question not all that different from the one that faced the citizens of the imaginary Omelas: How high a price are we willing to pay for our safety and happiness? How high a price in the form of someone else's suffering? And to make it more complicated -- and therefore more realistic -- let's assume that the person doing the suffering is not a child and is not innocent. Let's assume it's a bad guy, an enemy, someone we have good reason to believe means us harm. How much are we willing to have that one suffer -- that enemy of ours -- in the name of making ourselves more safe?
In a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly, Mark Bowden framed it more bluntly, not as a question but as a statement of fact. He wrote, "To counter an enemy who relies on stealth and surprise, the most valuable tool is information, and often the only source of that information is the enemy himself. Men…who have been taken alive in this war [against terrorism] are classic candidates for the most cunning practices of this dark art. Intellectual, sophisticated, deeply religious, and well trained, they present a perfect challenge for the interrogator. Getting at the information they possess could allow us to thwart major attacks, unravel their organization, and save thousands of lives. They and their situation pose one of the strongest arguments in modern times for the use of torture."
The thought of torture horrifies us. It hurts to imagine someone, anyone, setting about the task of deliberately inflicting severe pain on another human being. It seems monstrous. We associate it with a long-ago chapter of history like the Inquisition, or a far-away corner of our current world where the habits of modern law and democracy haven't yet taken hold, where nothing like our Eighth Amendment has ever been seen -- the one that protects us from cruel and unusual punishment.
It's comforting to think of torture as distant in this way, an archaic practice that's almost gone, surely nothing to do with us. But this distancing amounts to a deliberate self-deception. There are many things our government is busy about in the name of our security. Some of them run so radically counter to our highest values that they confront us with a complete contradiction, a scenario in which what we're doing is the precise opposite of what we say we honor and cherish.
Here are some things we know. We know that over six hundred men, captured in combat in Afghanistan, have been held by our government for over two years at the Guantanamo base in Cuba. We know that by calling them "enemy combatants" these people were deliberately placed in a legal limbo, where neither U.S. law nor the Geneva Convention could be applied. We know that over thirty of these captives have somehow managed to commit suicide.
We know that at least several thousand other men have been arrested in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. We know that once captured, many of the prisoners are subjected to treatment we'd be hard pressed to know by any name but torture: they are beaten, bound for many hours in contorted positions, left naked and drenched in water in coffin-like cells -- and these are just the practices to which U.S. officials have admitted. We know that hundreds of these men have been deported to third countries for interrogation, a process called "extraordinary rendition" The countries to which captives are sent, like Jordan, Egypt and Morocco, are named by our own State Department as nations where torture is routinely practiced.
There is no public information about how many prisoners are being held, or where, or what their names are, or for how long they will be held. There is no national or international accountability. There is no way to monitor the prisoners' treatment or their condition, no recourse for them to follow if their rights, or their bodies, are violated. How do any of these facts live together in our minds with our notion of ourselves as Americans? We have grown accustomed to understanding our own nation as the one that stands on the high moral ground, the one that shines a light for all the other nations of the world to follow when it comes to individual rights. Our Constitution has blazed the way for more than two centuries, a model that others point to when they get the chance to write their own rule of law. We think of America as the place where the standards for human rights were born, and ourselves as the people who carry the banner for the oppressed. We're the ones who write the letters for Amnesty International, aren't we?
But our country isn't on the high moral ground right now. We're standing in a swampy land we seem to have wandered into without any debate or awareness. Where is our map, and how will we use it to bring ourselves out onto solid ground again?
Alan Dershowitz is a civil libertarian who has come under fire recently for a radical suggestion. He argues that since our government is in fact using torture as one of its weapons against terrorism, that practice should be named and acknowledged. He thinks it should be brought into the light of public awareness and legalized, under certain narrow guidelines, so it can be monitored and controlled.
Legalizing torture is a shocking idea, but the argument Dershowitz makes is a rational one. He makes it on the basis of what he calls 'the dilemma of tragic choice', a situation in which he sees only three options for us, none of them good ones. These are the three choices: We can refuse torture as a tool, but by doing that we compromise the security and safety of our people. Or, we can tolerate torture but keep it hidden and technically illegal, as we're doing now, but then we compromise the rules of democracy and accountability. And third, we can create a legal structure in which torture is sometimes accepted -- but then we've compromised our human rights principles and blazed a bright trail away from human rights, for others to follow.
Dershowitz is a smart man and he's done all of us a service by forcing the questions around torture further out into the light where they have to be attended to. But the three 'tragic choices' he outlines are not quite the ones we face in real life. The first one in particular is a little too narrow to reflect the world in which we live. Listen to the first one again: We can refuse torture as a tool, but if we do so we compromise the safety and well-being of our people. Is that true? The question carries some weight for me because although I am not a complete pacifist, if I'm forced onto the Dershowitz triangle this is the point on which I will take my own stand. I do not believe that torture can be justified. Beyond that, I do not believe that torture can make us safe.
What if a hardened al-Qaeda leader is captured alive, and it's a pretty good bet, almost a certain thing, that he's involved in another plot along the lines of September 11? All morally acceptable means of persuasion have failed. If he doesn't talk, hundreds or maybe even thousands of people might die. If you were the one in charge of his questioning, what would you do? If I were in charge, what would I do?
The first answer, the one that people like Dershowitz want us to see as inescapable, is that we would do whatever we could to make the man talk, in the name of saving innocent lives. And for some of us, some of the time, that is what we would do, even if our choice made us into torturers. But does that make this one the right choice? And aside from right and wrong, is it even a choice that makes us safer?
As with everything else, the scenario gets more complicated in the light of the real world. In the real world, human beings make mistakes. That means that for every truly guilty enemy who is tortured for his information, some unknown number of innocent people will also be tortured because we think they're enemies with information. In the name of our safety, in the name of our own Omelas, how many mistakes do we think we can live with?
A 33-year-old Canadian, Maher Arar, thinks that one mistake is one too many. In September of 2002 Arar landed at JFK airport on his way home to Canada, where he's been a citizen for over fifteen years. US officials arrested him, refused to let him see a lawyer and refused to send him home. Despite his Canadian passport Arar was deported to Syria, where he was held and tortured for more than ten months before Canada finally secured his release.
We could also point out that in the real world, rules are not applied fairly. We already know the ways in which our laws are bent by the gravity of racism, landing more heavily on the backs of people who are brown or black. How would this translate when it came to torture? Would we even be talking about torture, about whether it's legitimate and under what circumstances, if our enemies were blond and blue-eyed, if they had names that sounded more like our own names, if we could imagine them more clearly within the tribe we call our own?
But there are stronger arguments for rejecting torture, even under conditions that might seem to be compelling. One of them is pragmatic: no matter how many terrorists we capture and compel to spill their secrets of destruction, it will not add up to more safety for us as a nation. This is a lesson that Israel has been learning for many years now, to its lasting grief. There are not enough walls that can be built, not enough enemies that can be captured or killed, not enough bombs that can be dropped, to add up to anything that could be called peace and well-being.
It is just as true for us. If we were the questioners and had in front of us an almost certainly guilty enemy, it's possible that one attack could be thwarted if torture made him talk. But in the same way that a battle can be won while the war is lost, a day of safety can be won while destroying the ground on which real peace, real safety, must stand.
The means cannot justify the ends, because in the real world we inhabit the means have a nasty way of becoming the ends. The shape of the lives we want to lead begin in the pathway we choose toward those lives. If we are willing to torture in the name of building safety for ourselves, we help create a world in which torture is legitimate. In that world no one is made safer.
The shape our world takes doesn't come about all at once. It's made little by little by our choices. So if we are not watchful, bit by bit we help shape a future for ourselves that is not only less safe than the one we hope to save, but less good as well. A generation ago, as our nation was dealing with the excesses of Watergate, Supreme Court Justice William Douglas wrote to a group of young lawyers: "As nightfall does not come all at once," he warned, "neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air -- however slight -- lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."
In the same way that we have to continually ask ourselves what sort of world we want to live in, we also must ask ourselves the more intimate question of what sort of people we want to be. Of course we want for ourselves and for our children safety, peace, happiness. Without even half thinking about it we can tick off the things that make up our own small visions of Omelas, of Utopia. But somebody lives in that Utopia. Somebody lives in the homes we imagine for ourselves and for our children. Who are they? Are they people who are capable of building their homes and their happiness on blood? Are they people who can rest easily in the peaceful night, knowing that in the name of that peace some unknown others, perhaps guilty and perhaps not, are being beaten or shocked or maimed?
I want us to be people who say "no" to that question. Not because the ones we torment might be innocent, as appalling as that thought is to us, but even if it were certain that they were guilty. This isn't a naïve refusal of all defense when we are under attack. It is a moral imperative to choose, in the face of evil, some limits in our response that hold us back from evil, that keep us from doing in some form the same violence we condemn in someone else. I want us to be people who are strong enough to see that the world is not only bright and beautiful but also risky, that it is risky not only to life and limb but to spirit and soul. I want us to see that this is the greater risk. I want us to be the ones who reject Utopia when it is built on a canker.
At the very end of her story Ursula LeGuin writes, "At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the child does not go home…Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates…They leave Omelas, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas."
For more information on this topic:
Mark Bowden, "The Dark Art of Interrogation", The Atlantic Monthly, October 2003
Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, "U.S. Decries Abuse But Defends Interrogations", The Washington Post, December 26, 2002 (several preceding and subsequent Post articles as well)
Alexader Cockburn, "The Wide World of Torture", The Nation, November 8, 2001
Jaideep Mukerji, "An Extraordinary Violation" (on detention of Canadian Maher Arar), Al-Ahram Weekly On-Line, 13-19 November, 2003
American Civil Liberties Union: www.aclu.org