Praying To Al Gore

Am I the only one who finds this whole "Earth Hour" thing -- where everyone was supposed to turn off their electricity between 8 and 9 tonight -- basically silly? This is more than my usual attitude of "your protest is stupid because it has no immediate concrete results you can point to." I'm too tired right now to put my finger on exactly why, but Earth Hour seems to reinforce the conceptualization of environmentalism as a spiritual practice rather than a movement for socio-political change, a closer cousin to observing Lent or Ramadan than to making fun of Sheriff Joe or taking pictures of people who stare at your disability. The "spiritual practice" trap seems to be an especially big pitfall for environmentalism and animal rights, more so than it is (in my admittedly idiosyncratic and incomplete experience) for other foci of agitation for social change.

Is It More Important That Torture Is Wrong, Or That It's Ineffective?

Batya makes the case* for focusing on "ineffective":

Here's the thing: Torture doesn't work. Not as a means of extracting reliable information. This is known. Is it wrong that I think this practical question completely invalidates any ethical question on the subject? That I'm not interested in even addressing the moral issue of whether it is ever defensible to hurt people in order to achieve something good or necessary, because I'm convinced that hurting people is not in fact going to achieve it?

I found this statement of the issue interesting, because I almost always hear it the other way around: Torture is clearly morally wrong, so there's no point in debating its effectiveness, because we wouldn't be morally allowed to do it even if it did work. Discussing the effectiveness of torture concedes the pro-torture side's moral claim that torture would be OK if it gets important enough information."

An important consideration here is that the effectiveness-first argument assumes that "extracting reliable information" is the sole goal of torture proponents. Certainly their arguments are structured around the (alleged) information-gathering benefits of torture. But I suspect that important functions and motivations of torture lie elsewhere. I would suggest at least three other purposes that torture is used for: acquiescence, revenge, and entertainment.

By acquiescence, I mean that the torturer's real demand is not "where's the bomb?" but "who's your daddy?" By forcing the torturee to give in, the torturer is establishing his position as top dog, so powerful that he can forcibly extract from others a recognition of his top-dog-ness. In this context, the truthfulness of the information supplied by the torturee is beside the point -- indeed, a compliant lie is positively beneficial, because it shows that the torturer can get others to agree with his worldview. (Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish has a good discussion of how the acquiescence rationale works and how it differs from information-gathering, though he goes too far in placing them in different historical periods.)

Revenge should be pretty straightforward. We torture those who we blame (as individuals or through group guilt) for harming us in some way, building up our damaged sense of self and security by exerting power over someone else. The rhetoric surrounding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay -- "why do you care what happens to them, they're all terrorists" -- strongly suggests that revenge, not information-gathering, is a primary motivation for condoning harsh treatment. And it explains why torture proponents seem unwilling to consider less painful techniques even if they get better information out of the prisoner -- after all, the prisoner is a bad guy, so he deserves pain.

Entertainment is also straightforward. The guards at Abu Ghraib were torturing their prisoners to have a good time. Most humans have a sadistic streak, and so given the opportunity to exercise power over another being -- particularly one they can easily de-sentientize** -- they'll be tempted to exercise it just for the sake of exercising it.

The thing about acquiescence, revenge, and entertainment is that torture is in fact an effective way to pursue them. The very lies that foil attempts to extract truthful information are just what acquiescence-motivated torturers are looking for. And for torture to provide revenge or entertainment, all the prisoner has to do is feel pain.

Few people will admit (even to themselves) to having acquiescence, revenge, or entertainment motivations in supporting torture, so they'll hide behind information-gathering as the rationale for torture. But if there are those additional motivations, then a factual rebuttal of the information-gathering effectiveness of torture will fail to change their mind.

*I'm "acsumama" in her comment section.

**The vegan equivalent of "de-humanize."

Pat Buchanan Is Wrong About Africa, Too

There have been a lot of responses (e.g. here) to Pat Buchanan's recent claim that black Americans should be thanking white Americans for slavery, because it meant that they got to live here in America where the standard of living is better than in Africa.

The key points of the rebuttals are: 1) slavery was really, really bad, 2) post-emancipation racism was -- and continues to be -- pretty bad too, and 3) the idea that blacks are currently recieving some sort of net subsidy from whites is detached from reality. These are all good points. However, they are America-centric -- that is, they focus on rebutting Buchanan's argument by challenging his claims about the conditions of black life in America. But I think the appeal of his way of thinking comes not just from a "lucky duckies" view of black American life, but on the contrast between the quality of life of black Americans and black Africans. The implied question is, "if life in America is so rotten, why don't I see you immigrating back to Africa?" (I'll take as given here the simplification that the standard of living of the average black African is worse than that of the average black American, though the reality is far more complex.)

Buchanan's views of Africa can be challenged just as much as his views of America. The punchline is: If the ancestors of black Americans hadn't been carted away by white slave traders, Africa would be a much nicer place to live.

Buchanan's contrast between American and African standards of living assumes an endogenous developmental model. That is, regardless of what whites did to blacks, America was always going to be one of the richest countries and Africa home to many of the poorest. Slavery just shuffled some people (and their descendants) from one location to a (eventually) better one.

The endogenous model is false. Nations' economic makeup is as much a product of interaction with other nations as it is internal developmental processes. That is, economic development is not a 10,000 m race, in which each runner chugs along in his or her own lane. It's more like roller derby, in which players can grab each other and throw elbows and variously impede each other's progress. Africa lags behind because white-ruled nations held it back. Europe directly and brutally colonized Africa just at the moment that capitalism was taking off around the north Atlantic, forcibly integrating Africa into the world economy as a subordinate player. Even after official independence was achieved in the mid-20th century, white-majority-nation corporations used their power to set up shop in Africa in ways that prioritized benefits to American and European stockholders over benefits to Africans.

But the point is made most clearly if we push back to just before the era of official European colonialism in Africa, to the time of the slave trade -- Pat Buchanan's inadvertantly humanitarian rescue operation. The slave trade didn't just remove some black people from nations that whites would later visit economic ruin upon. The very slave trade that brought blacks to eventually-prosperous America also undermined Africa's chances at prosperity. The demographic shift alone greatly upset African economic systems, spiriting away masses of workers and consumers who were not yet interchangeable cogs. The influx of new goods from the slave trade distorted and imbalanced economic incentives. And the demands and threats made by slave traders skewed Africans' abilities to maintain their own political system. The end result was to make America richer and Africa poorer.

This is not to say that Africans bear no responsibility for the condition of their continent. But it is to say that the conditions that made the perfidy of various African strongmen and swindlers possible and so damaging were, to a great degree, the fault of Europeans and white Americans. So the contemporary African poverty that Buchanan uses as his foil is a long-term ripple effect of the very slave trade that he thinks rescued black Americans.