Positive Liberty

Here’s why I read Jim Henley. It’s from his recent post “Ticking Bombast,” which dissects the ticking time bomb torture scenario in a way I hadn’t seen before:

You could construct a hundred hypotheticals involving utilitarian tradeoffs and terrorism before breakfast, none less (im)plausible than the first. You only hear about the one because only one serves the purpose of validating the State’s desire for more power.

Bingo. I can only add one thing here, which now that I think about it, I’ve noted in the past: Aside from its implications for government, a further problem with torture is that it is epistemologically bankrupt. Torture makes pain the standard for evaluating truth. Pain, and not evidence. As I wrote some time ago:

in what other activity is truth so obvious when it appears? In torture, the answers to the hardest questions of all become far too easy: When does one begin to apply the torture? When one has not yet heard the expected reply. And when does one cease to apply the torture? When one has heard exactly what he expected to hear. How does one know that one has heard the truth? It takes a certain combination of pain, and prejudice, and wishful thinking.

Mind substitutes for reality, and expectation takes the place of truth. To torture another human being does not require coldness or callousness; on the contrary, it takes a hot conviction that the tortured man is guilty, and that he will soon give up his secrets. This conviction alone makes torture seem reasonable; without it, the act becomes mere pointless cruelty, even lower than sadism.

The very act of torturing produces the apparent evidence of the victim’s guilt within the one who tortures — Why would any sane person do such a thing, if it were not to redress the very greatest of crimes? Surely the one being tortured must be guilty, because I, the torturer, am a decent person, and decent people do not do this to the innocent. If he has not yet talked, the fault must be my own; it can only be that I have not tortured him sufficiently. I will torture, then, because he is guilty, and continue to demand information.

But enough about me; back to Jim. This is almost exactly how I’ve thought for quite some time now, though I had a hard time putting it into words:

I suppose I owe everyone an explanation for why, believing that the country I was born into has become today something other and insupportable, I will vote for Democrats and keep living where I am, working every day, coming home at night and blogging about my favorite TV shows. The main reason is a profound and possibly inappropriate sense of inertia. But an important subsidiary reason is that these things are absurd, ridiculous. And in unfree polities absurd things are valuable in themselves.

Absurdity isn’t my style, but I see where he’s coming from. I’m much more the bookish type, and thus Positive Liberty will continue to feature notes on history, philosophical musings, and reviews of the latest literature until the show’s over and the guy in the coveralls comes to scoop up after the elephants and turn the lights out.

As the Roman Empire fell, I’d be the one hiding out in a monastery, myopic, his Latin degenerating by the day, as he copied and re-copied ancient manuscripts (which in those days weren’t all that ancient, and which on cold January mornings the novices sometimes used as kindling). Or I’d be glossing Saint Jerome commenting on a now-lost book of Aristotle — a gloss which, in the passage of time, will in turn be lost as well. Things would be fine indeed until the Visigoths showed up. They’re not on the horizon yet, but no, my philosophy will not be enough to stop them.

I remain cheerful, however, even as the self-appointed successors to Rome seem to be tottering toward collapse: It is the curse and the blindness of libertarians to think that we are always on the verge of collapse. (It feels good, like, somewhere deep in here. But doesn’t play well to the electorate.) It’s also the curse and the blindness of libertarians to think that, while previous generations of libertarians were mistaken, our generation really is on the verge of collapse.

Worried? Oh hell yes. But I’m not holding my breath.

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