Modernity, torture

My Blogger Dashboard is littered with half-written posts about what I'm about to talk about--it's just very hard to express clearly, and I'm still finding my way--but I'll just go ahead and try to blurt out something short that hopefully is not complete gibberish.

I've been trying to figure out what lies at the very, very center of modernity and Western thought and so forth, and I think it's something like this: that the whole thing rests on a single foundational insight about truth, namely, that no one is infallible. Or, put another way: it is always possible that you could be wrong.

Everything seems to derive from this one bedrock principle. The moment you acknowledge that any view uttered could be false, any position held could be wrong, it becomes clear that you must assume a position of doubt--one that always leaves open the possibility that you are wrong and that some dissenter is right. And the next thing that springs to mind is a model--the "marketplace of ideas"--where no viewpoint is prohibited (because it is possible that this viewpoint is correct), and where the correct and good viewpoints rise to the top. And in this model, the more that is contributed--the larger the marketplace--the better, because it increases the chances of a good viewpoint emerging. And besides the marketplace being larger, we also want it to be more diverse, because this too will increase the chances of finding a good viewpoint. And suddenly, we begin to structure our ontology around this epistemological need: we view society as consisting of "individuals", rather than the less granular unit of society that is centered on the family or clan, which has the effect of increasing the number of nodes in the marketplace. We encourage "individualism", which increases the diversity of the marketplace. We encourage "equality", so as to maximize the interactions between nodes, which generates more possibilities. Every facet of liberalism, and the general direction of liberal progress over the centuries, seems to be in the direction of increasing the magnitude, the kinetic energy, and the combinatorial explosiveness of this abstract marketplace, which is ever-ratcheting upward to higher and better truths. And it will never stop, because we will always think: well, it is possible that we are not now at the highest and best truth, because it is always possible that one is wrong.

And so the whole liberal project, it seems to me, has this epistemological obsession--a core skepticism that we can ever be certain of the Truth--leading it forward by the nose. (A lot of this, it's interesting to note, is intensely Cartesian: not just the fact that it is founded on a non-negotiable kernal of doubt, but also this very dualistic relationship between the material world and the mental world of the marketplace of ideas. This dualism is really brought out, I think, by the liberal conception of punishment as physical confinement. Crime--doing harm to others--is bad, because it inhibits or destroys other nodes in the marketplace. So by physically confining the criminal node, you prevent this harm from taking place--while also maintaining, to the greatest possible extent, the effectiveness of the criminal node. Note that we do not prohibit criminals from reading or staying connected to the world, nor do we limit their free speech rights. In typical dualistic Cartesian fasion, we jail their bodies but not their souls.)

Anyway, getting back to torture: torture seems to be the precise antithesis of this model and this way of thinking, because it leverages the body against the soul, imposing the will of the torturer node onto the torturee node. Nodes are only valuable in the marketplace so long as they are independent of each other and actually contributing original material; coercing a node to think and express certain thoughts removes the independence of that node--reducing it to a mere extension of some other node's will. When the node is tortured, it is, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Worse than destroyed, even: enslaved. Converted into a puppet that is wholly controlled by some other individual, and yet nominally still a node-in-good-standing in the marketplace, it submits ideas and thoughts as if they sprung ex nihilo from an independent will but in fact they are the utterances of the zombified empty hulk of an individual. The torturer--the puppeteer--is thus in a position to illegitimately reap all the epistemological benefits of an "independent" voice that just so happens to say exactly what it wants to hear.

Now, some clarification here. What I'm laying out here occupies kind of a weird space. It's not the actual moral argument against torture; rather, it's sort of the--I don't know--anthropology of reasoning out of which the moral argument arises? I don't know. That might be nonsense, but as I said at the outset, I'm still feeling my way on all this.

EDIT: By the way, I notice that the little image I used for the post says something interesting--that modernity is the "yearning for the infinite". I would say this has it backwards: we're not yearning for the infinite, but rather, due to our axiomatic commitment to doubt, we condemn ourselves to infinite yearning--a state of affairs that I think is problematic in a lot of ways, and that I plan on talking about in a future post.