On Torture and Trump

Whether or not torture works is an incomplete question. The rest of it is, "works to do what?"

If the question is if torture works to get the truth out of people, the answer has been known for a long time and can be found in this addition to "The Pretty Complete Shakespeare Guide to Donald Trump": from The Merchant of Venice (1597), the protagonist Portia's response to a series of claims from a suitor to "live upon the rack" — an instrument of torture — until he has a chance to win her hand: "Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack, / Where men enforced do speak anything" (3.2.25-33). Both more generally and more specifically, tortured men, women, and children will say what that they think will get the pain to stop, which may or not be true.

Torture, however, is effective in breaking people. The literary reference for that, as with torture producing all sorts of lies, is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And if it seems extreme to talk here of the rack and the horrors of The Ministry of Love, note that Donald Trump has called for worse than waterboarding for prisoners who might have information on terrorism, so check out pretty much any annual report of Amnesty International for what worse than waterboarding includes. It includes for one regime I wrote for AI, the torturing of children in front of their parents in order to break the parents.

Note also that Mr. Trump threatened North Korea with "fire and fury like the world has never seen," and he made that threat on 8 August 2017, sandwiched between the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Someone willing to contemplate ordering destruction worse than atomic bombings of cities — or the "conventional" fire-bombings of Tokyo or Dresden — should be taken seriously and literally on evils so much less extreme as crippling joint-by-joint a few dozen people on racks or killing off children by the ones and twos rather than by hundreds and thousands, as is inevitable with "fire and fury" exceeding that of the fairly recent past.

Slavery and the Continuum and Continuity of Cruelty

THIS IS A ST. PATRICK'S DAY REPRINT (so to speak) AND UPDATING OF AN ESSAY FROM NOVEMBER 2011.

I'll start with a disclaimer of sorts.

            The word "presentism" apparently has technical uses in philosophy and for literary and historical analysis, but I found an almost colloquial usage more immediately useful. In this sense, "presentism" is the dumb-ass cousin of a belief in progress and is shown when people too literally think, "In every day / In every way," people have grown "better and better and better," and believe the way we live today is, across-the-board, the norm. If that's the case, then — given where we are today — our ancestors must have been pretty damn stupid and unsophisticated.

            I ran into this attitude when some of my 18-20-something students made clear they thought pretty ignorant and unsophisticated such folk as noble and royal politicians in the courts of Richard II and Elizabeth I, or London theater fans ca. 1600. There are a lot of things you can say about rulers and courtiers in the late medieval and early modern periods —words like "criminal" and "immoral" are frequently apt — but, as a rule, unsophisticated they were not. King Richard II had some weird weaknesses of character, but he wasn't stupid, and when it came to running the family business (England and such), the Tudor Queen Elizabeth was very, very, very bright, sophisticated, and good at her job. And, of course, London audiences ca. 1600 supported a good deal of crap, but they also saw, heard, and apparently appreciated some of the best drama ever produced.

            It is useful to avoid "presentism" in this sense when doing literary criticism so you don't find yourself thinking that the writing of Chaucer and Shakespeare and such couldn't be as sophisticated as your instructors have suggested because Chaucer and Shakespeare and their audiences couldn't have been that sophisticated. Now one or more of your instructors may have been overly ingenious or, well, even just full of shit with a reading or two  — but not because an idea we can have was necessarily too clever for the likes of our ancestors.

            If useful to avoid presentism in this sense in LitCrit, it is actually important to avoid it when doing politics — nothing in LitCrit is truly important — it is important to avoid presentism in talking politics since we shouldn't often change current practices on the assumption that our ancestors were idiots when they came up with them. (For example, after the 2008 financial crises, the "Glass-Steagall" Banking Act of 1933 looks like a really good idea after all.)

            Sometimes our ancestors were stupid, of course; see above on professors sometimes being stupid and apply the rule broadly: even bright humans, even bright humans acting where we're experts say dumb things and do even dumber. But not all that often: Usually our predecessors knew what they were doing, thank you, and the conservatives are correct in the traditional conservative belief that we shouldn't muck around changing things unless we have strong reasons to change things.

            So, our ancestors weren't stupid, or incompetent.

            Having said that, however, I want get to what is, as I write and update, a newly-released movie I have not seen (and may not) and to the serious implications of the idea a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness summed up in his reference to his "criminal ancestors": i.e., us and those predecessors I've been defending.

            The movie I want to take off from is 12 Years a Slave (2013) and the inevitable viewer reactions to the cruelty of nineteenth-century Black slavery in the southern United States. The reactions are better nowadays than with Roots in 1977, when I heard and read from some of my fellow Americans — adults, and people who could read — "Why didn't they tell us?!" i.e., why weren't we told that slavery was so bad. Well, indeed they didn't tell us as much as they should have, but the basic information was there. People are told more nowadays and at least quieter about being shocked ("Shocked!") that cruelty was going on, but I want now to point out that in many ways, important ways, things were worse in the past than most of us assume.

            Sorry gang, but you need to know this — and the upshot will be rather hopeful.

            In Origin of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt makes clear that people won't understand the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews if they think of it as the Holocaust and don't put the Shoah in its historical context, including a tradition of massacres. Furthermore, those of us who talk of the eleven million victims of the Hitlerian Holocaust, and not just the five to six million murdered Jews, sometimes have the prudent political motivation of reminding people who are not Jews that they have more at stake here than sentimental sympathy for victims. The "First they came for …" litany has become a cliché, but it remains one of the most practical bits of wisdom that history can teach. "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was central to the Nazis systematic slaughter, but the machinery of exterminations found a variety of victims and had roots in soils in addition to anti-Semitism.

            And even as you have to have some feeling for the history of massacres to understand the Hitlerian Holocaust, even so you need to know the continuity of the cruelty of slavery, and you need to know that slavery was at the extreme end and a logical extension of a continuum of cruelty that lasted into modern times, and came back for a season of hell in the 20^th century.

            Since my form in these blogs is the meditation or personal essay, I'll start with a personal observation from my PhD candidacy in the late 1960s, when, in theory, I learned to read Latin.

            I was using for homework The New Collegiate Latin & English Dictionary (1966) and one day noticed how often on the way to looking up something else — we were mostly reading Aesop's Fables, for God's sake! — how often I saw Latin words referring to things military, violent, and/or violent in relationship to managing slaves. Slavery was woven into the fabric of the Latin language, as was the idea that slaves had to be kept in line, fairly often through terror: beatings, blindings (altero oculo captus 'to blind in one eye'), breaking bones, branding, … well, a series of horrors up to and including crucifixion. Educated and valuable slaves might be treated well; however "Unskilled slaves, or those condemned to slavery as punishment, worked on farms, in mines, and at mills. Their living conditions were brutal, and their lives short." Legal testimony from slaves was admissible only after slaves had been tortured.

            Roman slaves gained rights as time went on, but there was continuity, with some slavery in the European Middle Ages, moving more toward serfdom, which got into full gear in parts of Russia in the 17^th century and lasted until fairly recently: 1861. Literal slavery in Russia got a significant boost from the medieval Mongol and Tatar invasions and lasted until 1723.

            There was also continuity of slavery in areas in more constant contact with western Europe than most of Russia: The Mideast slave trade lasted from the 7^th century C.E. through the 19^th, and it ranks #8 on Matthew White's list of "The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in human history, accounting for some 18.5 million deaths, to say nothing of families torn apart and lives reduced (by definition) to slavery.

            So slavery was known in Europe from their neighbors, and when the Reformation and Renaissance got into full swing, such knowledge was increased by reminders that slavery had been regulated but accepted in the now much-translated and much-read Bible and had been accepted and defended by the now born again, so to speak, classics: the revitalized and revitalizing admiration of ancient Greece and Rome and their cultures (renaissance). If the Hebrews practiced, and the noble Greeks and Romans accepted, practiced, and, as we used to say in academe, theorized slavery — how bad could it be?

            In his "General Introduction" to The Norton Shakespeare (2000), Stephen Greenblatt has a beautiful little quotation attributed to Elizabeth I referring to Her Majesty's Loyal Pirate, John Hawkins and his first slaving voyage, where he transported "some three hundred blacks from the Guinea coast to Hispaniola." She "is reported to have said of this venture that it was 'detestable and would call down the Vengeance of Heaven upon the Undertakers.'" As I said, Elizabeth was bright and sophisticated, and as Head of the Church of England she knew a wicked act when she learned of one. However, Hawkins's venture grossed £10,000 — a huge sum during the period — and so "she invested in Hawkins's subsequent voyages and lent him ships" (23); business is business.

            And business for some was most excellent in the early part of early modern times as the voyages of exploration and discovery discovered silver mines in the New World and empires loaded with gold to plunder and new marketing opportunities with sugar and then tobacco and rum (making fortunes through drug-dealing is old news in the Americas).

            There was money to be made, and if some of the methods were "detestable," well …. Well, by the late 17^th century, racism would theorize why a little detestable slavery was OK for Black people, and there was the tradition of slavery from the Holy and semi-holy scripture of the Bible and the classics. Say what you will about the Romans, they were equal-opportunity oppressors. If they could enslave the two known races of White and Black, plus every ethnicity they could conquer, surely Europeans could enslave Africans, who could be presented, in a Christian variation on Aristotle, as by nature servile and, indeed, who could profit infinitely from contact with Europeans, and getting Christianized (although that Christianizing bit got problematic with conservative or proto-liberal Christians — depending on how you saw them — who disapproved of enslaving other Christians).

            There is one other item to add to the hell-broth as we moved into the slavery inherited in the New World colonies that became the United States. The detestable cruelty of slavery in itself, the terrorism required to maintain people in slavery, was less obvious in its time, including in the years of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from 1452-1807 (#10 on Matthew White's list, with 16 million dead), until the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. Slavery was indeed opposed by an abolitionist movement that over time moved from the political fringe to the mainstream; but that movement took a long time, in part precisely because Black chattel slavery was the extreme end of a continuum of cruelty but definitely part of a continuum.

            In 2011, Steven Pinker published an impressive book on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which required him to come up with some strong hypotheses on Why Violence Has Declined but more so required for him to demonstrate that, indeed, violence has, in fact, declined.

            He was able to perform that demonstration for a reason crucial here: Violence in our time is less than in earlier times, even acknowledging the horrors of the "hemoclysm" (blood deluge) of the two world wars of the 20^th century; but violence is less not because this generation is all that good but more because life for many people before quite recently was very, very bad. As Pinker summarizes much of his book: "Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals — all substantially down."

            Pinker has been critiqued, and figuratively attacked, for his conclusions, but they jibe with a Latin-English dictionary of decades earlier with no political agenda, and with such works as Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), and the fictional but very well researched BAROQUE CYCLE by Neal Stephenson (2003-4). They also go along with a side comment by the US Army colonel who taught my American military history course ca. 1961. In 1776, the Continental Congress increased the maximum number of lashes a court martial could order from the Biblical 39 to the decimal 100; as the colonel noted, it could have been worse, since the 100 limit "at least meant it was unlikely you'd be whipped to death," as could happen in the British tradition of having someone "whipped through the fleet" or receiving up to a deadly 200 lashes. And then there was reading Herman Melville's, White Jacket (1850), the book arguably most responsible for ending flogging in the US Navy. One memorable and undoubtedly effective — if problematic — sentence: "The chivalric Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, declared, in his place in Congress, that on board the American man-of-war that carried him out Ambassador to Russia he had witnessed more flogging than had taken place on his own plantation of five hundred African slaves in ten years."

            In the words of an old joke, as H. Rap Brown (of the Black Panther Party) might've said of the chivalric slave-owner John Randolph, "damn White of him." Still, the point remains that sailors and soldiers, servants and prisoners were often treated with great cruelty. As Pinker stresses, it was part of everyday life to encounter brutality toward non-human animals, children, wives, and others in positions of weakness, people in culturally-sanctioned and enforced inferiority. And one definition of "liberty" included the liberty to practice such brutality without interference by the state in family matters or labor management or doing what the social superior thought right to do with "my own."

            Books like Pinker's Better Angels and essays like mine here are — or should be — unpleasant to read, but there is that hopeful upshot. Things really have gotten better, and there is hope for getting them actually pretty good for increasing numbers of people.

            As part of that improvement, it's necessary to remember that sympathy for the oppressed is nice as a form of altruism, but politically more effective when aspects of good character are reinforced by insightful self-interest.

            It wasn't just Jews caught up in the Nazi exterminations, and it was not just Blacks who suffered: these atrocities happened in worlds that kept up traditions of cruelty and fitted them to newfangled ideologies of racism and very old-fashioned sins of pride and greed. Jews and Blacks are strong contenders for the "Grimmy Award" for some areas of worst suffering, but there are many out there to join us.

            Americans in the 21^st century are not particularly exceptional nor are we all that much smarter than our ancestors; and our current relative decency is a matter of culture, inheritance, and, in a sense, fashion. There was great continuity of slavery and other oppression, and bad old days can return. One way to prevent such a return is to be at least smart enough to do the arithmetic: slavery is a great way to live, for a rich slave-owner; an oppressive hierarchical society is great, if you're on the top. But that's not how the numbers work: If we return to worlds with a long continuum of cruelty, there's a good chance each of us will be receiving most of that cruelty, not dishing it out.

Hi, I'm Rich, and I'm a Simple-Minded Literalist

After their fashion, they were kind of cute: picture the Macbeths at age 18, or Claire and Frank Underwood of House of Cards as high-school sweethearts. Now reduce their evil by two-thirds and their cunning by half, and you have the two students in my career who took the time and exerted the effort to do some really nasty critiquing of my teaching.

Or one aspect of my teaching, personality, and way of being in the world.

What angered them was that I was a simple-minded "Literalist" and I had marked down the young woman of the pair for using words inexactly in her writing in a College Composition course (at Miami U, Oxford, Ohio, some time in the late 20th century).

This story would be totally irrelevant to anyone except to me and the couple if it weren't for "journalist Salena Zito’s analytical couplet on the surprise winner of [US Presidential] Campaign 2016 [... that] The press took Republican Donald Trump 'literally, but not seriously' [...], whereas Trump’s supporters took him 'seriously, but not literally.'"

The quotation above is from Charles Lane in an opinion piece published 16 November 2016 in The Washington Post, and Zito's differentiation between taking Trump "literally" and "seriously" has become a commonplace — and we're on our way to that degree of familiarity with Lane's advice that we should take Trump both literally and seriously.

I'd expand that advice and recommend taking every speaker with power both literally and seriously, while allowing, and allowing a lot, for the possibilities of such figurative language as hyperbole — and allowing for plain old bullshit and lying.

One example I gave was a coach demanding "one hundred and ten percent dedication to the team." I suggested pointing out to the coach that his demand was clearly figurative — there can only be 100% dedication to anything — but also excessive. He obviously wasn't demanding 110% dedication, but he was demanding a blank check, so to speak, and it would be well if team members got him to clarify by pointing out they had demands on their time — school, work, family — that were also legitimate and pressing and make a counter- offer of a very generous 30% dedication. 

There's a good chance that even star athletes would be thrown off the team — I once won a bet with some students that coachly authority would trump winning and that even a tennis coach would purge a disobedient player — ahem, there's a good chance any uppity high school or college players trying to negotiate dedication would be cut, but the point would be made.

If you can help it, it don't allow other people to make unlimited demands on your time, not unless you're a bonded pair and you really, really love and trust the other party. 

WORDS MEAN, goddamn it, and if "I want 110% dedication" doesn't mean "110% dedication," it does mean an open-ended demand that you should be very careful in allowing. 

Later in my career, I was going to learn the paradoxical Daoist teaching that no one lies. The paradox is resolved with the very sensible idea that if you listen carefully enough you can figure our what the person is really trying to say — but I'm pretty sure you have to be a Daoist sage to do that reliably.

Where we have trouble taking people literally or seriously is with pathological liars, of which I've met another couple. More exactly, I dealt with, let's say, a congenital liar in senior year of high school and was one among a number of people who had to deal with a pathological liar in college.

The congenital liar was a guy — we'll call him "Todd" — somewhat on the periphery of my life but still a friend and kind of classmate. (Chicago schools divided up by semesters, and he graduated the same year I did but a semester earlier.) Anyway, he was someone I was friendly with and had no reason to doubt him when he said he was taking ... let's call her Dolores to the prom. I did have reason to doubt him when Dolores asked me why I hadn't asked her to prom, and I told her because Todd said that she was going to the prom with him, and she said "Huh?!" and then some stronger things, and I went off looking for the first real fight since I was seven. Todd won, but I owe him this much: he was my introduction to the idea that some people would lie for the hell of it; that even when there was no reason to lie, some people might.

More powerful blows to my worldview came in college, when I learned that some people could behave with literal malice: i.e., that they would hurt someone not for any profit for themselves, not for revenge, but just to hurt someone they disliked. (In literature, I learned of people who just hurt other people — period; Shakespeare's Iago says he hates Othello, but maybe he doesn't; he may just despise everyone). More to the immediate point, I and the guys I lived with learned about pathological lying.

After his fashion, he was a cool guy: president of his pledge class, and, he said, working his way through school, including working at the job we offered him at the house, work beyond his chores as a pledge. And he was just cool, a smooth talker, personable — and an obsessive, compulsive, pathological liar who could make you think you'd gone crazy because he could assert obvious untruths with more assurance than most of us could talk about what was right in front of us.

After our experience with this guy, we had a new rule for our chapter: A pledge caught in lies was "depleged," and the burden of proof was on him to be repledged, and if he couldn't do that we'd pay whatever it cost for him to move out of the house and elsewhere. An honest, plain-speaking character in Shakespeare's King Lear describes the most contemptible of the villains in that play in terms of, "Such smiling rogues as these," who "Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain" that bind together people and society. Our cool, personable, pathological pledge wasn't that bad, but he was on the continuum.

When lies become constant, words no longer really mean, and that way lies social chaos.

So in good, simple-minded fashion, let us take seriously what people say, especially people with power — and start with the literal meaning of words and then work through the dangerous and wonderful complexities of language. 

And, while we're at it, let us hold the President of the United States to standards of exactness a competent teacher and pretty nice guy like me would hold college frosh to — and to standards of honesty a bunch of undergrads ca. 1962 could figure out they had to hold themselves to in order to live together even as a group of 50. If Mr. Trump says he'll torture prisoners and kill the families of terrorists, and we elect him president — which under the Electoral College system favoring small states and rural folk we did — then we've written that figurative blank check for actions up to the rack and more elegant means of torture, and the killing of children. This isn't "110%": torture and the murder of children (and the torture of children in front of their parents) are indeed possible: we can be sure of that since they have been done. And if someone recommends doing such things, and you empower him to do so, well that is exactly what almost half of the US electorate have done.

WORDS MEAN, damn it: often in complex ways, but they do indeed mean.

Trump, Toughness, and Torture

      If it got down to a choice, I'd rather see Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for President than Ted Cruz. About the last thing planet Earth needs nowadays is another "Party of God," especially one with a chance to control nuclear weapons. That is true in Pakistan, and that is true in the USA, and Ted Cruz could make the Republican Party the US Party of God in ways Donald Trump just can't.

     Still —

     Three or four decades back, I wrote letters for Amnesty International, including to one regime that tortured children in front of their parents in order to break the parents, a method that was probably effective. If Mr. Trump continues to say he'd use torture to protect the American people, he needs to be asked if he'd be willing to follow historical examples and, among other things, torture children if it would reduce their parents to a state where they could be manipulated into providing "actionable intelligence" that could save American lives — and maybe if he could quantify the question a bit and discuss how many American lives would have to be at stake before he'd torture children.

     The interrogation of Mr. Trump on the subject should also include questions on specifics from the rich history of torture and whether or not he'd use genital electroshock, the rack, holding people's feet to the fire — the expression comes from an actual torture — thumbscrews, or something more ingenious.

     It is the specifics that real journalists should be pressing Mr. Trump about — and "pressing" has its own nasty undertones — but there is also the more general ethical question of ends and means.

    One can assert "The end has justified the means" and argue that the results one has achieved has justified the means one has used. But to say, "The end will justify the means" is to make a statement of faith: it's a slippery short form for "Our goal, if and when we achieve it, will justify the means we have used." One can be far more certain of the means that one chooses to use than of any results.
         
     Other problems with "The end will justify the means" include that "end" means both "goal" and "results" and the results of one's actions can include a whole lot more than some straightforward goal: "unintended consequences," as the cliché has it. "End" also implies the end of something, when it's finished, and history doesn't work that way. History keeps rolling on, and the most significant consequences of an act may be not only unintended and unforeseen but unforeseeable, taking place in a distant future.

     Tough guys making tough pronouncements should be asked tough questions. If Mr. Trump thinks a reluctance to torture is part of the pussification of America, he should be asked how brave it is to torture a currently helpless person if it might reduce the risk to Americans. And that can be any person if I recall correctly and understood correctly: my recollection is that Justice Antonin Scalia said that the Eight Amendment to the US Bill of Rights forbids inflicting "cruel and unusual punishments" — but torture of someone convicted of nothing is clearly not a punishment, and, by implication, the more innocent of crime the less the torture would be a punishment.

      Which brings us back to regimes that torture children. Is Mr. Trump tough enough to order such torture — or just the fake killing of children as in a notable episode of the TV show 24 — if necessary to save American lives?

      More important, should Americans think ourselves tough and brave if we allow torture rather than risk terrorism? I wrote letters for Amnesty International and grew up on movies where "Ve haf vays of makink you talk" was the line of a particularly villainous Nazi, so for me the question is rhetorical. Brave people say, "Our means will justify our ends" and choose to do monstrous evil only when it is really, really, really necessary as the lesser of two or least of several evils. And brave and honest people never say that the evil they have chosen to do — however necessary — is something other than evil, and they never, ever praise their toughness for doing it.
 

Remembrance of Horrors Past (18 May 2013)

         I'm going to start sidling toward my topic with bragging about a relative of mine you probably have never heard of. My cousin (of some degree) Joy Erlichman Miller organized the Holocaust memorial in Peoria, Illinois, and tried to make the body-count more understandable by collecting buttons: eleven million of them. The strategy of collecting buttons is brilliant, and, more to the point I'm slowly moving toward, the number is correct. Humans aren't wired to understand deaths in even the thousands, but the sight of millions of buttons can aid our imaginations. More, having kids collect everyday items like buttons is a good way to get them to relate to the extraordinary human costs of slaughters such as the Nazi Holocaust.

         The number, though, may also be unfamiliar to you. The Peoria committee used the figure of approximately eleven million murders, and they were wise to do so: both truthful to the best estimates, and politically prudent. Some five to six millions Jews were murdered in the Nazi extermination programs, plus some five to six million Roma ("Gypsies"), Communists, homosexuals, unionists, and other "inferiors," or real or imagined enemies of the Reich. That adds up to eleven million people, approximately, not the more frequently heard figure of six millions. Some six million Jews died, and even if the actual figure is "only" five million, it is a number to remember in itself and is central to the exterminations: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the impetus for large-scale, systematic, routinized massacres. Still, if the Shoah is uniquely Jewish and unique in more than just the technical sense applicable to all historical events — if it's literally and absolutely unique, "sui generis," one of a kind — then the Shoah is of only limited usefulness for historical understanding: There aren't many lessons to be learned from a literally unique event. If it is "The Holocaust," and that is that, there is little to be learned beyond "Sh*t can really happen to the Jews." Using the eleven million figure teaches that once a program of genocide gets started, all sorts of people can be sucked in and destroyed. And that point is crucial; if the Shoah just happened to Jews, there's no reason non-Jews today should do much more than sympathize. Fitting the Hitlerian Holocaust into a larger pattern of massacres, as Hannah Arendt does in detail in Origin of Totalitarianism, makes it historically and politically relevant for many people, and aids building "Never Again" coalitions.

         Outside of the Peoria Holocaust Memorial and the reference to my cousin Joy, I expect most of what I've just said will be familiar and, with most folk who read a column by a Left-leaning Jew, unexceptional. It's also stuff I've said before (I did once teach a course titled "Massacres").

         What's been getting to me lately is watching the last few episodes of the first season of The Borgias, listening a couple times each to Neal Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE books and to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined — even going so far as to buy a Pinker's book in paperback — plus reading and consulting hard-cover hard copy of Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.

         As The Borgias first season moved toward a final tableaux celebrating traditional family values, Renaissance aristocratic Machiavellian style, we meet Paulo, a definitely non-aristocratic stable hand, who's a nice kid who gets involved with abused-wife Lucrezia Borgia, eventually aiding Lucrezia neutralize for a while her brutish warlord husband, and becoming Lucrezia's lover. Significantly here, even in the more innocent stages of Paolo's involvement with Lucrezia, he worries aloud about getting whipped, and by season's end we see and hear him whipped by his lord and get good indications that he was probably hanged shortly thereafter.

           [CORRECTION (and SPOILER): Paolo was spared as it turned out, to be hanged instructively in the following season.]

Servants ca. 1500 were whipped, and the servants of an ignoble nobleman might indeed find themselves hanged for offenses less serious than conspiracy to cripple and cuckold their masters.

         And not just servants had to fear the whip: soldier and (notoriously) sailors, and to a lesser degree wives and children and, moving toward but not very far into the Enlightenment, lunatics in places like London's Bedlam Hospital. One can argue that it's not entirely progress that we beat children and the insane much less nowadays and drug them more; one can argue that the "smother love" and constant surveillance and supervision of privileged children isn't 100% superior to benign neglect with occasional brutality — but, come on! As Steven Pinker insists, in these areas we've made serious progress.

         What such historical and history-based works as The Borgias and Better Angels make clear is that things have trended toward less violence over human recorded history. Reading them while thinking of what White calls the 20^th-c. "hemoclysm" — i.e., blood deluge, the warfare and atrocities 1914-1945 — one might conclude however, and fear, that the trend is indeed toward a decrease of violence but there can be perverse and sudden "regressions to the norm" (sic) — returns of barbarism — that can produce immense suffering.

         Two points from such cogitations and my occasional fearful twitchings.

         First, Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE covers, more or less, the period from the execution of Charles I of England in 1649 to the beginning of the Hanover dynasty in 1714. Stephenson is very clear that the worst of the human social pathologies he deals with was slavery, continuing in the East and, during this period, increasing in the Americas — and with increasing British involvement. White estimates the suffering in deaths alone of the slave trade alone at 18.5 million for the Mideast slave trade from the 7^th through the 19^th centuries, and some sixteen million for the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. (The two slave trades rank at #8 and #10 of White's ranking of our species' "One Hundred Deadliest Multicides," edging out, for instructive examples, the Conquest of the Americas and First World War, both coming in at 15 million deaths.)

         It is clear, however, that state-sanctioned and enforced slavery was the extreme of a continuum of cruelty, or, changing the image, an extreme area on a web of cruelty that permeated everyday life. Even as Jews should put the Shoah into it a larger context of massacres, African-Americans should put American chattel slavery onto that continuum, or at the center of a figurative web of oppression, exploitation, and cruelty.

         People can argue, and I do so, that racism developed in part to allow continued cruelty to Black people (and, later, Jews and Slavs and Roma) after it became increasingly unfashionable — war excepted — for Moderns to be cruel to people seen as people and even bad form to brutalize sympathetic nonhuman animals.

         Pinker talks of "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4) that slowly came in with the Modern Era and the Enlightenment, increasing humanitarianism that included, eventually, the elimination of slavery. While slavery continued and was profitable, however, it needed justification, and it is no coincidence that racism came along to provide that justification: it was becoming increasingly "unacceptable," as we so weakly say — Not Done — to grossly abuse people (again, war-time enemies excluded); a theory was necessary that made Blacks less than people, and that theory was racism.

         We need to be clear on "racism": that's an "-ism," an ideology, a theory, and one with a history. Bigotry is more or less natural to humans: a subset of the nastier parts of the "amity/enmity complex" to use Robert Ardrey's formulation; or "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Sev-enty-six!" in the formulation of Mel Brook's 2000-Year-Old Man. For seeing the difference between bigotry and racism, and for dating racism in England, note Thomas Rymer's argument against "Othello: A Bloody Farce" in his Short View of Tragedy (1693, ch. VII; reprinted in Frank Kermode's Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism [1974: 461-69]). In Othello, Shakespeare shows ample bigotry against the Moor: that "old black ram," "the thick lips." The bigotry, however, is within the world of the play. Rymer laments that the play remained highly popular with English audiences into his time in the late 17^th century — popular in spite what Rymer saw as its gross errors and absurdities. To start, Othello is not a properly Neoclassic play, but along with that error — Rymer was a militant neoclassicist — and relating to it, it's hero just isn't, well, appropriate. In Othello, Othello is a general of the armies of Venice and, apparently, one of the great military leaders of Christian Europe. Rymer allows that the Venetian Republic hired foreign mercenaries for their armies,

But shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab [= a whore], or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor [Othello' elopes with the daughter of a senator]: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match. […] Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye [=lie]; And, certainly, never was any Play fraught, like this of Othello, with improbabilities. (Kermode volume, page 462).

There was bigotry aplenty in Shakespeare's real-world England, from prejudice against to loathing of foreigners and others, but not enough animosity against Blacks to keep English audiences from sympathizing with "black Othello"; by the time we get to Rymer, something has changed.

         That "Humanitarian Revolution" was getting started, and for screamingly obvious commercial reasons Blacks from Africa, for the consciences of many people, had to be excluded for the circle of humanity. There was a great deal of money to be made from the slave trade and from the stolen labor of slaves to produce high-profit commodities like tobacco, sugar, and rum. If we allow sugar as a "food-drug" — and no less an authority than Sidney W. Mintz says we should do so — then the institution of Black chattel slavery in the New World came about in large part because there was a lot of money to be made then, as now, pushing drugs (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985).

         And, of course, before the more northern European competition got into the tobacco, sugar, and rum rackets, New World enslavement of Indians and, later, Blacks had served a lust for lucre more directly in Spanish America in the mining of gold and silver.

         Most of our European ancestors most of the time dealt with horrors like the slave trade the way we Americans today deal with exploited labor in, say, the manufacturing of our clothing: they ignored it. I don't ask about how I can order on line sweatpants for six bucks a pair; if you had high-flown English ancestors ca. 1692, they didn't ask too many questions about the sugar in their coffee or hot chocolate (or, for that matter, ask inconvenient questions about the coffee or chocolate).

         More important, though — and, finally, my point here — is the one stressed by Steven Pinker: how much cruelty for how long was not actively ignored but seen casually and just accepted as part of the "warp and woof," deeply woven into, the web of everyday life.

         "The wogs begin at Callus," as the stereotypical racist Colonel Blimp's of Great Britain used to say: i.e., the range of the inferior peoples of the Earth began as soon as one crossed the English (by God!) Channel and disembarked at the carefully mispronounced French port of Calais. That attitude, however — hell, racism for some of them! — was progress: for most high-born English for most of their history, inferiors started a whole lot closer to home than France, including in one's home with one's servants or (if male) wife and (for both parents) children. One could feel downright righteous birching one's kids bloody, to beat hell and the devil out of them; and, of course, even the lower orders could watch for entertainment the torture of animals — bear-baiting, bull baiting, ratting — or condemned criminals (if you couldn't afford to pay off the hangman for a longish drop, "hang by the neck until dead" could take a long time).

         So Black African slavery was horrific, but its horrors were tolerated as long as they were not only because of racism but also because of a general casualness about cruelty.

         If we are to be serious and effective about "Never Again," Jews should remind all and sundry that the Hitlerian Holocaust was emphatically not limited to Jews and fits into a larger tradition of massacres: far from unique, the Shoah is an instructive extreme on a continuum of atrocities. American Blacks and Africans should remind people that the Atlantic slave trade was part of a long tradition of murderous exploitation of Africans and others: including at one time the enslavement of just about anyone who could be taken prisoner in war or stolen.

         Americans who hear of atrocities and say, "It can't happen here" forget that chattel slavery, for one very big thing, did happen here, until 1865, as did the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan into my lifetime. And this is not frightening so much because we Americans are particularly evil but because we are well within the normal range of humanity. As Stephenson, Pinker, White, and the makers of The Borgias make clear, routine, banal, horrible cruelty is part of the repertoire of human behavior.
         So is the capacity for good, those "Better Angels of Our Nature." If Pinker is right, those Better Angels, our inclinations to the good, have been trending upward since the Bronze Age; as the reintroduction of slavery in the Early Modern period indicates and the 20^th-c. hemoclysm drives home; the tendency is far from inevitable. Indeed, often it's just "Sh*t happens"; but far too often "sh*t" is done to all sorts of people, and emphatically not just Jews and Blacks. So, to repeat a useful cliché, following Pinker: Let us be hopeful, but also ready to aid the exploited, oppressed, and abused not just out of decency, but because, always, any of us can be on the list — and for most of human history, most people were.

No Immunity for Those Who Torture (a Quick Note)

The logic is really quite simple.

      If the threat to the American people (or whomever) is sufficiently great to justify my torturing someone, it should be sufficiently great that I'd be willing to die or go to prison to meet that threat.

      If I am not willing to face a death penalty — or far more probably some government agent isn't willing even to do serious jail time — then the situation isn't serious enough to warrant torture.

In any event, torture should be treated as a crime as serious as murder, and punished as severely. If there are mitigating circumstances, such as actually finding the ticking hydrogen bomb (so to speak) and saving Dallas from annihilation, let the relevant Executive commute the sentence after a few years of imprisonment, and perhaps give the criminal a medal.

If torture is not treated as a major felony, it can become routine, and far too often, it does.


If patriotic cops and CIA agents are unwilling to risk execution or even just a few years of hard time to prevent some disaster, they don't find the threat existential — and they're probably correct.