“Ever play “Twenty Questions?” Maybe the torture kerfuffle in America—and therefore western civilization—presents an interesting subject.

Serious ethical matters are often gnarly, but honest and thoughtful people should (sometimes must) come to conclusions about them even if admittedly tentative. Chesterton said that the reason for opening the mind is approximately the same as opening one’s mouth—to close it on something solid once in a while. (He also said it was good to have an open mind, but one should be careful not to open it too wide or too long lest the brain fall out.)

The questions that come to mind are for all of us, but particularly for the sudden swarm of neo-moralists opining about torture.

The tortuous human-torture questions:

1. Is shooting an enemy combatant’s brains out in battle sufficiently morally “clean” to escape the label of “torture?”

2. Who is it, what committee is it, and how chosen, who can draw the precise line between a proper and improper punishment response to one’s truly morally demented—and very capable—would-be murderer? In real life, not in the safe confines of a sophomore ethics class or a recording studio!

3. Can droning enemy targets—which in every single case has killed civilians and sometimes only civilians—be properly cited as torture events?

4. Totally apart from ethics (for the moment), which is it that the death-dealing jihadist fears most, an IED killing him instantaneously or serious and lengthy torture? The ethical question is: If wounding him (as happened recently) and he dies weeks later from the wounds, would that amount to torturing him?  Right becoming wrong because of poor aim. (The question of those wounded in drone strikes—both combatants and civilians—fits here.)

5. Again, apart from ethical considerations in any specific situation, it is at least a pertinent tangential question: which nation in the entire history of mankind has not used methods which some percentage of the population would say (maybe properly so) were excessive? Meaning we might do well to moralize a little less arrogantly and with a tad less of a chest-thumping tone of moral superiority. 

6. In light of the new-found easy moral outrage on the part of some about military torture situations, should one expect the new moralists to broaden their perspective on the subject of torture?  What about politicians blatantly lying, as a matter of course, so persistently that thoughtful people wouldn’t believe them if they reported the time of day or their middle name? The question then becomes: does such insistent and deliberate “terminological inexactitude” (Churchill) ever rise to the level of torture? 

7. What about dropping two atom bombs, killing in the range of two hundred thousand mostly innocent Japanese civilians? And producing other hundreds of thousands of deformed Japanese infants for several generations. And hastening the day (causing the day?) when at least nine other nations—that we are sure about!— to possess nuclear weapons. Estimates are that an invasion of Japan would have cost a million lives and immeasurable other losses. Should the neo-moralists argue that sustaining such losses would have been a less tortuous way to end the war, allowing America to maintain its putative “high moral ground?” (See footnote “a”)

8. Do IRS, NSA, VFW (!),“Fast and Furious” connote any sort of torture? (If one is looking for torture material, that question is a serious mother lode.) 

9. Is saddling future generations of Americans with an eighteen trillion dollar debt, and a reported 50 trillion (yes, that’s the figure) of “unfunded liabilities” torture? 

10. Is abortion torture?  

11. Does a public education system which abysmally fails a nation’s children, both mentally, morally, and psychologically comprise nationalized torture?

12. Do unprotected national borders, without which no nation can continue to survive in any real sense, torture that nation? (Ditto about the provable lies that the borders are secure.)

13.  The proud boast of the American press is that its duty is “TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER!” Well, yes, of course, but which power? Is it in any sense torture when the citizenry hears from the major press an eerie and sustained silence about all sorts of collective power? One thinks immediately of the very lucrative and rapidly growing abortion industry, of Islamic jihadism, and of blatant race-baiting. 

14. You are a father of four. Islamic jihadists have broken into your home. You are forced to watch as your children and their mother are beheaded.  Suddenly you have complete power over the jihadists. You have five minutes to deal with them before they leave to kill your neighbors. Can you be certain your response to them would not rise to the level of torture? (Fanciful? Doesn’t that scene look a lot like current western civilization writ small?)

16. Is long-term solitary confinement, say twenty years, torture?

17. Where is the outrage against the Taliban killing 145 civilians, 132 of them school children, in Pakistan? Why not an out-cry from the UN and all nations—beginning with the American neo-moralists— calling for war-crimes trials? We in the west tend to yawn at such events, having come to expect it. The question then becomes: is it torture not to hold bestial torturers accountable? Or not even to passionately call for it!

18. Would a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program either by Israel or America (certain to kill many civilians) be an act of torture remembering Iran’s long-standing promise to wipe Israel off the face of the map once they are able to do so? 

19. Is it national torture to turn Americans against its entire law-enforcement establishment because of the sins of perhaps 1.657% of officers who are “bad cops?”

20. Are you certain about your answer about abortion? 

The teapot’s boiling.  American legal justice, always difficult (like all judicial systems on the planet) has become the focal point, well, of just about everybody, including foreign oglers, with the outbreak of a triumvirate of ebola-like cases—Travon Martin, James Brown, and Eric Garner.   (One could cite a hundred other cases which don’t, for some reason, ascend to the attention level of the aforementioned trinity.)

Legal justice is not difficult to adjudicate.  Ideal legal justice is impossible to adjudicate.  In point of fact, it has never, once, in all of human history, ever occurred!  How could it be otherwise?  Is the guilt-non-guilt ratio in a trial 46% to 54%, 16% to 84%, 1% to 99%, etc., ad infinitum?  And if guilt is assumed, what defines equitable punishment among judges and juries with infinite variations of perceptions of what is best, even acceptable?  (A proven child rapist got off recently without, literally, a slap on the hand, and another man—surely there is one—who is innocent awaits his final injection.)

Our system, at its best, is the best in the world.  That doesn’t prevent it from being horrific at times.  After all, in a trial, you have sinners judging another sinner, a sinner defending a sinner and a sinner (or sinners) condemning him, with yet another sinner in a black robe who can express immense power over all the other sinners.  Plus a courtroom full of sinners protected by sinners with guns.  And still other sinners reporting on the event.   And finally, there are all those other sinners—by the hundreds of millions in the three aforementioned cases—hearing about the trial and pontificating about what “true justice” would look like.

What to do?  Surely, we must not give up seeking justice!  Any other response is imbecilic, anarchy (produced by either apathy or activism) being the most lethal disease in the governance pharmacopeia.  We have to keep on doggedly trying even when “heart and nerve and sinew” (Kipling) are exhausted from the struggle.

It is little comfort to realize that none of this is new.  Three thousand years ago the reputed wisest man who ever lived, Solomon, said “…I saw under the sun (meaning everywhere) in the place of judgment, wickedness was there; and in the place of righteousness iniquity was there.” (Ecclesiastes 3:16)  Do all we can to ameliorate that fact, the fact is as inviolable—-and as universal—as the law of gravity.

Two other facts (real ones with sharp edges!) will sober us if not fully satisfy us in this boiling-kettle moment:  (a) Each and every one of us, for our good and for the good of all others, must not let the kettle fire-stokers overwhelm us; we must keep everlastingly at the pursuit of the dream of our forefathers to seek, as a people, justice for all.  That pregnant phrase must persistently animate and energize us.   Such a pursuit demands unflinching and unwavering and unrelieved tenacity.  We really have no other choices, do we?  (b) Second, we must live out the significance, in the narrow confines of our own individual hearts, the most consequential judicial reality for each of us, that judgment which our forefathers called “The Final Assize.”  It is the one in which each of us will sit in heaven’s dock in judgment before God who “will render to every man according to his deeds.”(Romans 2:6)  It will be a day when “God will judge the secrets of men” as well! (Romans 2:16)  Our focus then will not be on our frustrating and often fraudulent justice systems, but on that setting in which, for eternal weal or woe, (as Lincoln famously reminded us), “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” (Psalm 19:9).  No side-bars, no copping pleas, no bought juries or judges, no manufactured evidence, no appeals (to whom!), no forensics (the Judge knows it all!).  And miscarriages of justice, being, by definition, impossible.  Until then Travon Martin and James Brown and Eric Garner and their judicial progeny must absorb our minds and hearts and wills, but on that inevitable occasion our concern, one may be assured, will not be about them, but ourselves.  Existentiality will overwhelm metaphysics!

We must not be less vigilant about earth’s justice for others now, but are well advised to be more vigilant about heaven’s judgment on ourselves on a day to come.  One of the many salutary effects of so doing would be a greater motivation to seek, now, justice for others.  Why?  Because those two trial settings—theirs now and ours later—are substantively connected morally; I do myself a favor then to be more consistently energized about justice for others now.

Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas