Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: My Starting Point

The proximate cause of my desire to write about Americans and torture was this passage from a post on Hullabaloo that Patrick Nielsen Hayden quoted approvingly last January:

Every person alive in America today grew up with the belief that torture is wrong. Popular culture, religion, folklore and every other form of cultural instruction for decades in this country has taught that it is wrong, from sermons and lectures to films about slavery to photographs of Auschwitz to crime shows about serial killers. It is embedded in our consciousness. We teach our children that it is wrong to torture animals and other kids. We don't say that there are exceptions for when the animals or kids are really, really bad. We have laws on the books that outright outlaw it. The words "cruel and unusual" are written into our constitution.

Digby, in expressing his genuine and legitimate anger, is only telling half the story. The words "cruel and unusual" were written into the Constitution by James Madison, who owned a plantation that ran on slave labor. Madison may or may not have whipped his slaves with his own hand, but without a doubt he employed overseers who did.

Yes, Americans are taught that torture is wrong. And we are also taught that it is right. The belief that torture is wrong may be embedded in our consciousness; but the belief in the efficacy and rightness of torture is embedded in our unconsciousness. Those sermons, lectures, films, photographs, and TV crime shows depict the horrors of torture in loving detail. We are told over and over again not only that torture is bad, but that this detail of torture is bad, and so is this one, and this one. At once, while society teaches us that torture is bad, it teaches us how to torture.