The appalling photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison make us ask, “What would lead Americans to act that way?” We may not console ourselves with the thought that these people are “other,” psychotic sadists, perhaps, or inhabitants of a perverse dehumanizing culture.
After all, they are us, America’s sons and daughters.
So, if we can bear to think further, in our grief and shame, we cannot avoid asking the next question: “Is there something in America’s political culture that helps explain why these people would act this way?” I believe there is.
When people torture and humiliate, they are treating their victims as mere means, objects they can use at will to satisfy their own desires. They are denying that their victims have a fully human status, a dignity that demands respect, a soul.
One sign of that denial is the hooding of the prisoners, concealing the face, the bearer of human expression, the window of the soul. Why should good American soldiers, many of them raised in families with strong ethical and religious standards, think that way about their Iraqi prisoners?
At least one part of the explanation can be found in a shift in America’s stance toward the rest of the world.
Throughout the history of international relations, two different conceptions of the relationship between nations have contended against one another.
One view holds that the space between nations is a place of naked power and force. The interests that govern foreign relations are those of national security and strength alone.
All reference to moral norms is mere hypocrisy or illusion. This view, found already in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, appears repeatedly, especially when thinkers are trying to show how realistic and unsentimental they are. This was the opponent against which the great 17th Century political theorist Hugo Grotius argued for his moral view of international relations.
Slightly later, it was Thomas Hobbes’ enormously influential view of the situation between nations as a “state of nature,” an idea many subsequent thinkers took over and developed.
One view
Today, it is the underpinning of modern “realist” views of foreign relations. The Hobbesian view begins as simple description: Nations are really motivated only by power and security interests. But then a normative note creeps in: This is the grown-up way to see the world, this is the hard-headed way to run the affairs of a nation.
According to the Hobbesian view, then, nations are like sports teams: They aim, and rightly aim, at victory and domination, often including the humiliation of the other side. And although there may be some rules limiting their conduct, they would be right to get around those rules whenever national security dictates it.
Thus Hobbesians are likely to be sympathetic to the idea of preventive or pre-emptive war: It is much easier to get the better of an enemy when you get in ahead of their assault on you. They are also likely to be skeptical of rules that dictate humane treatment of the enemy–for the other side figures in the view as just that, the other side, a looming threat to one’s own projects.
Noticing and responding to the humanity of the people on the other side is seen as mushy soft-heartedness, even appeasement. The people on the other side are objects that have to be corralled or displaced on the way to an effective pursuit of national security.
The other view
The Hobbesian view keeps being countered, however, by another very different view of foreign relations. This view was sketched by the Roman politician and philosopher Cicero in the 1st Century B.C. It provided Hugo Grotius with the basis for his classic work “On the Law of War and Peace” in 1625. Immanuel Kant developed it influentially in “Perpetual Peace” (1795), imagining it as the basis for a lasting peace among nations. And it is the theoretical basis, today, for the international culture of human rights.
This view holds that in the space between nations, even though there is no sovereign and hence little or no positive law, there are still binding moral norms. At the heart of these norms lies the idea of human dignity–of the human being as a creature with a soul, a creature who deserves to be treated as an end, not merely as a means.
Grotius connected the idea of respect for humanity with a total ban on preventive or pre-emptive war. Although responding to an actual outrage could sometimes be just, he held that responding to a merely possible or imaginary outrage was a way of using other people as means to your own ends.
He also used the idea of human dignity to frame Western philosophy’s first extensive account of the limits on the treatment of people in war, giving particular emphasis to the importance of avoiding dehumanizing or cruel punishments.
Finally, he appealed to human dignity to argue that no one should be stripped of rights in wartime more than is strictly necessary to prevent aggression to others. Property should not be appropriated from the vanquished, and members of the enemy population should retain civil and legal rights.
At one time in the late 20th Century, it looked as if the Grotian view was winning out around the world. A burgeoning international culture of human rights was garnering increasing acceptance from the community of nations. By now it has generated many valuable international agreements that seek to protect human dignity.
The U.S. never fully went along, refusing to ratify many important international human-rights documents (including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child). Nonetheless, there were at least some signs that the U.S. was moving in a Grotian direction, accepting moral constraints on the pursuit of national self-interest and showing respect for the community of nations as a cooperative gathering of dignified human beings who pursue common goals.
Swing toward Hobbes
The foreign policy of the current administration has jolted us sharply to the Hobbesian side. Nothing is clearer than the contempt of our administration for liberal internationalism and the politics of deliberation and mutual respect.
Power, security, getting them before they can get you, this is how the big boys think.
Patriotism is modeled on the mentality of the sports fan, not on the idea that each nation inhabits a world of human souls, in which all nations ought to strive to preserve human rights and dignity. So many policies express contempt for that moral vision: the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo; the insistence that anyone deemed an enemy combatant has no right to legal counsel; the doctrine of preventive war itself.
Should we really be surprised when torture follows?
The role of prison guard can easily be abused, in the absence of a robust culture of human rights. When our leaders hold that culture in contempt and suggest the idea of the sports fan as a superior image of hard-headed foreign policy, what should one expect loyal and patriotic soldiers to do?
Abu Ghraib, albeit extreme, is no aberration. It is the logical fruit of America’s current foreign policy.
By their fruits you shall know them.
