Walking Away From Torture
by Advocate Staff
Benjamin Franklin’s oft quoted statement “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” has become a kind of rallying cry for civil rights groups in the post 9 – 11 world. Although there is scholarly disagreement about whether or not Franklin was the original author of the phrase, it was, even in its own time, widely referenced and reprinted in various forms throughout the colonies. For Franklin and the early Patriots, the phrase summed up their resistance to the pernicious and frequent abuses of power by their colonial rulers and touched upon a universal desire to live unfettered by the constant interventions of authority. Decades later Franklin’s critique would become, in a sense, reified in the fourth amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure and which was written largely in response to the forced quartering of British soldiers and the abuses of warrants and writs of assistance by colonial powers. But the fourth amendment from its very inception has been continually challenged, abused, and sometimes simply ignored, especially in times of war, when it is needed most.
Perhaps one of the less egregious but, but nonetheless openly contentious abuses of the fourth amendment continues to take place today in our own backyards. Since the attacks on the London subways in July of 2005 raised the spectre of an attack on our own system, New Yorkers have been regularly subject to supposedly random searches of their bags and belongings before entering the platform. Although numerous civil rights organizations have protested the searches, most New Yorkers have had few complaints, and, even though these searches – which cover only a small portion of the thousands of entrances to the MTA system – have absolutely no practical value for stopping a potential terrorist attack, most New Yorkers see it as a reasonable deterrent and an acceptable, if trivial inconvenience. This general complacency and sheep-like obedience gets to the heart of Franklin’s argument; for Franklin’s problem is not with those who would seek to be safe, but with the cowardly masses who allow themselves to be so easily duped and cowed into submission by their own petty fears.
Sadly, though, subway searches, as annoying as they may be, are the least of our problems, and Franklin’s pithy analysis fails in the face of the larger civil liberty dilemmas that plague our society today. For Franklin, it is cowardly to give up our liberties for safety, but what about the liberties of others? What about the liberties of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who have been illegally kidnapped, detained, extradited, and tortured by the American government in the name of the war on terror? What about the families imprisoned in the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility in Taylor, Texas, whose only crime was to be on the wrong airplane at the wrong time? To better understand this ever persistent threat it might be useful to turn to another great American thinker, who, although less well known than Franklin, was arguably more virulently opposed to imperialism and imperial power. In 1891 the pragmatist philosopher William James, perhaps inspired by Dostoevsky, conceived of a strange little thought experiment:
What if, James Wrote
the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier’s and Bellamy’s and Morris’s utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?
For James, unlike Franklin, the question was not – in the vulgarly pragmatic sense – whether or not we might possibly wind up one of the extradited, one of the tortured or the permanently imprisoned; it was not whether we would be able to express ourselves and our convictions with impunity from violence. The question was rather, how do we live, safe in our quiet apartments, amid our happy families, with the thought that our continued happiness is increasingly used as an excuse for the ill treatment of others. Whether it’s the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay abroad, the rendition of Khaled El-Masri and Maher Arar, or the imprisonment of Sami Al Arian here in the United States, our safety and comfort is increasingly being purchased at the expense of those unlucky few who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with increasing frequency, those citizens on the fringes of our own culture and society, whose ideas have made them the potential scapegoats for the new American dream.
In 1973, Ursula LeGuin wrote a short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in which she took up the problem as presented by James. In LeGuin’s story, the people of Omelas live perfectly free, happy, fulfilling, comfortable, and satisfying lives, while beneath them, “in a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar,” and in that room a young child sits in its own excrement, condemned to spend its entire life in abject misery. In LeGuin’s story, like our own, most of the people of Omelas understand quite reasonably that there is nothing to be done, that their happiness and the happiness of all of those that they care for depends on this trade-off. But then there are those, who like the title describes, choose to leave, to walk away from the city. According to LeGuin the world they walk toward is even more unimaginable than the utopian vision of Omelas.
Torture, extradition, murder; none of these things brings us any closer to a safer and more comfortable existence. We do not profit from our vengeance. Perhaps it’s time, as a nation, that we stopped worrying so much about our own happiness, that we stopped obsessing about the ticking time bomb, and started to focus instead on the consequences of our actions. Perhaps it is time that we started to think about our responsibility to the world rather than our safety from it.
