Crowding out a lot of news (and rightly so) is the report that the CIA has now been found to have destroyed not "just" 2 but 92 interrogation tapes. As Steve Benen says, destroying 2 tapes could be seen as obstruction of justice. But destroying 92 is evidence of systematic and widespread law-breaking. Sadly, it doesn't come as a big surprise to many of us.
So now what? Truth-and-justice seekers will be up against some major barriers if they try to get real justice done in response to the actions of the CIA -- torture, "harsh interrogation", lying, and obstruction of justice. One is simply the economic facts of life. Everyone wants our government to make its first concern the plummeting economy. The Obama administration is likely to give a thought or two to coming down hard on the CIA. And then there's the prevailing contemporary ethos that "sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do."
That last excuse for lawlessness keeps coming up in our culture. The New York Times ran a piece last week with the headline "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth" which brought the Times a spate of letters, some from humanities professors boosting the worth of history, Greek, and a moral education. It's the latter which seems most relevant at the moment. Getting a "good grounding" in the humanities hardly turns us into saints, but it does tend to stick with us as a permanent reminder of who we are and who we're supposed to be as moral creatures.
Torture isn't just about getting necessary information by dehumanizing the victim. As with capital punishment and a number of other morally dubious actions condoned by our society, torture also dehumanizes the perpetrator himself, even though often retains the reputation as a hero or something close to it. "Thank you for your service," we say, though we hardly know what that service really consisted of. That dehumanization process (and the mayhem it can cause within our society) is seen by many as a necessary evil, one we can put up with, work through. So go ahead, torture away. No holds barred. The Marine "can be forgiven" for firing wildly at civilians and then forgiven again for wounding his wife and children during a psychotic episode. The CIA agent was shown a letter "on white notepaper" from the White House saying torture is okay. So he's okay with it. His kids play with our kids. We timeshare a condo at the shore.
The humanities (and some religions) teach us otherwise. They give us the context in which we live a civilized life and pass it on to those coming up. The humanities also probably give us the courage to stand up -- often at enormous personal risk -- to the outrages in our own cultural and political history. They stop us from firing even though the result could, conceivably, be fatal to ourselves. We do this because we don't want to lose what we are proud of being, not just as individuals but a society.
During the past half century or so, there have been three memorable moments when the US was in some real danger of losing itself. The McCarthy era stands out, for a start. A hell-bent-for-leather nut with dreams of great power came damn close to destroying our society. Among those who stood up to McCarthy -- at great personal risk -- were those whose education and experience told them the country was worth more than their individual well-being. I hate to think what the outcome might have been had they not stood up, had McCarthy's tactics, ambitions, ignorance and cruelty prevailed.
The next moment was the deepening of the Vietnam war in the mid to late '60's. Not surprisingly, it was the universities which became rallying points for opposition of teacher and student to a plainly insane and destructive invasion and war pursued by several administrations. Those who stood against the war often put themselves at serious physical risk. Some were killed. Many did permanent damage to reputation, job, home, and career.
The most recent moment has been the "election" and the two terms of George W. Bush. We're paying for much of the damage done right now and it's painful, but it's also startling to realize that very few people put themselves at serious risk in a coordinated effort to put a brake on what our government was doing. I don't think a country in which a deep and wide-ranging education were a commonplace could produce the kind of shallowness and anomie we've seen over the past decade.
The question now becomes: what will we do, as a nation, in response to what's bound to become a series of revelations of our most recent moral failures? With the economy tanking and with the world no less than our country at the edge of an abyss, what do we do? Do we say, "Not now. There's too much else to be done; there's too much at stake." If so, at what point in this risky and fragile time do we say, "True. But we can't let this pass."
