Pious Pose and Profane Prose or “Keep the Conventions. Break the Commandments”

One thing that has struck me about all the gnat straining and camel swallowing of the sundry torture defenders I have encountered is their curious devotion to the inversion of Christian values. Over at What’s Wrong with the World there was a thrilling rhetorical flourish at one point of the discussion, in which I was berated for “pious pose and profane prose“. It really was an admirably catchy turn of phrase: sort of like “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries”. Admittedly, both flourishes are in the service of defending grave evil and ridiculing opposition to grave evil, but you have to give them props for sticking in your head–like a Kit Kat jingle.

Anyhow, it reminded me of a little exchange I had recently in my own comboxes. Zippy, remarking on the growing pattern of lies emerging from the “Torture Works” wing of the media, remarked:

The point is that the Rubber Hose Right is, well, a pack of dupes and liars when it comes to discussing the extent to which torture “works”.

To which I responded (caution, naughty word ahead):

I eagerly look forward to the latest round of fainting spells over your heart-rending “lack of charity” toward apologists for torture.

All I can think of is “Gentlemen! Fighting in the War Room!” – President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove

The bizarre priorities at work in the, ‘ow you say, Enhanced Interrogation Enablement Community are grotesque. Write “Those animals tortured that man to death” and torture defenders *still* have the gall to lie ‘Hey! Bush just defined ‘torture’ differently than you”. You get a tut-tutting scold replying, “A truly Christian person would say, “Those *gentlemen* administered approved enhanced interrogation techniques in a regrettably over-enthusiastic way. President Bush ordered what he felt was alright and you have no right to say he was wrong. I think you are very mean to him!”

If you reply, “Don’t you ever tire of telling God-damned fucking lies that insult everyone’s intelligence including yours?” the torture defender, eyes welling with tears, expresses shock and deeply spiritual dismay at your profanity (even though it’s actually more in the nature of a precise theological formulation combined with a little vulgarity just to blow off frustration).

It’s like so much of torture apologetics consists of a satanic inversion of Chesterton’s maxim: “Keep the conventions. Break the Commandments.”

As I contemplate this weird inversion of Christian morality, what also strikes me is the peculiar way in this the Sermon on the Mount gets turned on its head. Jesus’ preaching aims to kill sin at the root–in the heart. He says, for instance:

“You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother * shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults * his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell * of fire.

Likewise, with adultery, he famously remarks that if you so much as look upon a woman lustfully, you have already committed adultery in your heart.

It is, shall we say, a difficult standard to live up to.

But as torture apologetics continues to lay waste to clear Catholic moral thinking among those who have, hitherto, defended human life, it proposes to us (just as abortion apologetics does) an entirely different way of thinking about sin. The goal is to lower the standard so far that *nobody* is guilty of sin.

So, for instance, the abortionist tells us to ignore the question of whether the thing we are killing is a what or a who? We are pressed, not to look at the sin which is in our heart, but at how close you can get to murder without technically doing it. First trimester? Second trimester? What *is* infanticide anyway? The bar is always moved lower.

In exactly the same way, the torture apologist seeks to see how much he can dehumanize his victim without “crossing the line” of some technical legal boundary. And so you get the spectacle of Christian theologians and philosophers suggesting things like “The fact that [KSM] went through 183 spills means that it wasn’t torture to him” as specimens of “serious and careful” deliberation on the question of torture.

Yet such serious and careful thought does not stop for one moment to realize that you may as well say of a rape victim that “the fact that she was raped a dozen times in a gang bang means that it wasn’t torture to her“. What never enters the discussion is that, in a torture situation as in a rape, it is the torturer, not the victim, who decides how many time the torture is inflicted.

The notion is based on a false idea and on a dubious assumption. The false idea is that , in cases of torture, everything “would ultimately depend on the suspect’s perception of things” If it were really torture, the argument goes, then nobody would endure it 183 times. The victim or torture opponent must therefore be liars or bleeding hearts to call the procedure “torture”. With identical logic, a member of Britain’s National Front recently remarked that “Rape is like being force fed chocolate cake.” Both sex and dunking in water are harmless and even *fun*, as millions will attest, just as millions attest that caterpillars are cute and a little loss of sleep never hurt anybody. It’s only a whiner who turns it into psychological torture by their *perception*. So the problem is really with the victim. His perception is what makes it torture. The actions of the so-called torturers, like those of the so-called rapists, are being described by purely subjective hysteria. Physically, no harm is done to either the “torture” or “rape” victims. No tissue damage. Nothing that shocks the conscience of the so-called “torturers” or “rapists”.

In short, Jesus has it all wrong. People who force waterboarding on a “victim”, like people wno force sexual relations on a “victim” are simply performing a physical act with good intentions (just ask them!). It’s only the perception of the victim that makes it “torture” or “rape”. So we should go as far as we can, but be careful not to cross the line into something truly immoral, such as using the F word.

And anybody who tells you different is just posing piously.