Satanic Courage

One reader asks:

I hate it that torture has become a Movement Conservative issue. My last reading of Edmund Burke found nothing that would justify torture as any sort of conservative value.

While I believe that it should be discussed, how in the world did torture suddenly become part of our repertoire?

While Tom Kreitzberg is pondering:

Why is the ticking time bomb question so universally irresistible?

Answer: Because we are terrified of 9/11 and would crawl through sewers to avert another one.

It owes something to the psychological logic of Moloch-worship, the notion that getting morally and spiritually serious means being willing to sacrifice what makes you most human in order to placate the hard gods of this world and survive. I highly doubt the practitioners of ancient human sacrifice *liked* what they were doing. But they formed the notion that you had to ‘ow you say, “go to the Dark Side” in order to “mean business”.

I recall a priest once mentioning “the pride that is the opposite of courage.” It is an arresting remark. There does, in pro-torture rhetoric, often occur the refrain of “realism” (meaning “fantasy scenarios”) and “courage” (meaning “steeling yourself to be brutally immoral”). I remember reading over Himmler’s speeches to SS troops, urging them on to have the “courage” to continue slaughtering innocent people in hypothermia experiments because the needs of the war effort demanded that it be done for a good end (saving German pilots from hypothermia). He tells them not to listen to the pantywaist counsels Christian moral exhibitionists who don’t understand that such things *must* be done in war, etc. I was struck then, as now, with the odd confusion of courage with brutal immorality.

Reminds me of Pieper’s comments on the four cardinal virtues and the order in which they are prioritized. Without prudence, justice and temperance, fortitude can be a real killer.