Bulletins from the World of Epistemic Closure

This new buzzword is still all the rage on the Internet and basically means “pigheaded refusal to think outside tribal pieties”.

Two rather delectable specimens turn up over at First Things.

The first is a terrific essay by David Hart in which he looks at the truly profound shallowness (to coin a phrase) of the New Atheists and their little yell kings and cheerleaders in comboxes and the media. After a thorough analysis of their mule-headed refusal to so much as know what they are talking about before sounding off about it, the comboxes begin.

In the comboxes, a bunch of atheists turn up to explain why it’s actually very brave and right and good for the New Atheists to pose as though they know what they are talking about as they ignorantly spout off against things that Christians do not actually believe. Their position is so self-evidently right, brave and rational that they don’t need to know what they are talking about in refuting fools who are self-evidently wicked, stupid or insane. Plus, they all agree with each other, so there you are.

Meanwhile, elsewhere at First Things former Marine Joe Carter takes notice of SERE trainer Malcolm Nance’s recent offer to help soft-handed speechwriter and torture apologist Marc Thiessen: namely, that Nance will be happy to waterboard him and persuade him of the fact that it is torture. Thiessen, America’s #1 Catholic apologist for the glories of the Bush/Cheney torture regime has, in the past, patiently stooped down from his Olympian height to instruct Joe Carter that he was “grossly uninformed” about waterboarding, a subject in which he claims expertise due to being a speechwriter for Bush/Cheney, while dumb old Carter was just a soldier who has actually put his ass on the line for his country while Thiessen was getting plump in the Oval Office writing speeches for Dick “Other Priorities” Cheney.

Nance’s offer is simplicity itself: Let me waterboard you, Big Man. Then you can truly pontificate on who is grossly uninformed.

Carter notes the offer… and, faster than you can say “chickenhawk” he is instantly beseiged with a boatload of Thiessen apologists who explain at length that Thiessen’s position so self-evidently right, brave and rational that he doesn’t need to know what he is talking about in refuting fools who are self-evidently wicked, stupid or insane. Plus, they all agree with each other, while Carter has contracted ritual impurity by actually linking the disgusting Mark Shea, who is clearly outside the tribe and plainly Unclean. He needs to stop making nonsensical demands that Thiessen put his money where his mouth is and stop saying that torture is torture just because Malcolm Nance, who knows what he is talking about, says so. Damp-handed courtiers on the payroll of the men who ordered torture are our obvious go-to guys here: not soldiers who have to endure the consequences of these disastrous policies by carrying them out.

The only *reasonable* argument offered against Carter comes from a guy who makes the point that if waterboarding *is* torture, then inflicting it on Thiessen in order to prove that point is, itself, consequentialist thinking. I can grant that he makes a good point.

Of course, the other consideration is that the sort of torture being inflicted is primarily psychological. Precisely what separates SERE training from the torture of a victim is that the trainee is in a situation where he knows the trainer has his good in mind and is undergoing it to be a better soldier.

On the other hand, with Thiessen such a social contract would not exist. Nance would do it in order to scare the living hell out of him and the result would be, well, torture. So though there is part of me that thinks it delectable to let the guy get a taste of his own medicine, I’d be against it.

On the other other hand, if Thiessen showed a thimbleful of the courage that Christopher Hitchens showed and volunteered to be waterboarded (by a dispassionate third party who was not bent on making him crawl) I could at least respect the guy. But as it is, he is a chickenhawk, spouting off about the morality of inflicting tortures on others that he is too much of a coward to face himself and then pontificating to men like Joe Carter about their gross ignorance. I have no respect for the guy.