We Are Not the Same

The United States of America has participated in torture. The President and high level administrators have explicitly discussed and authorized torture. This is objective truth. Some people are shocked by this, some outraged, and others ... aren't. Most everyone I regularly read online has written, more then once, on the implications of these actions, has written about the horror of it and decried the lack of outrage in the public. The media is blamed for the lack of outrage. Lack of information is blamed.

Lately, I've been realizing something much worse is at play.

The majority of Americans simply don't think torture is immoral.

People, politicians, bloggers, we the people, talk about morals, about morality all the time. The problem is we almost never bother to define what we mean.

It is conventional to pretend that we all share the same morals.

We don't.

We don't. It's hard to understand this. Hard to believe it. When I speak with an acquaintance that I like, whose intelligence I admire, who I am inclined to think of as a good person, a nice person and realize that he doesn't think there is anything wrong with the government torturing people for information and that it isn't because he's unaware of what that means, not that he hasn't thought about this, but simply genuinely doesn't share my morals it's a shock.

Reality has to be faced and dealt with. We don't have the American public we wish we did, we have the public that is. Any strategy for change has to take that into account. If it makes me sick to know that people around me, that the people of my country don't have a problem with torture, that's my problem.

We can't do anything by assuming people have morals they don't have.

Yes, there are international norms against torture. Other countries have these morals. Yes, in theory our cultural revulsion towards the Nazis, towards terrorists, towards the Spanish Inquisition, are theoretically based on their actions, genocide, torture, civilian deaths. In practice that revulsion is based on a cultural norm that says those people are 'evil'. In practice the American people are willing to accept torture and civilian deaths. I'll concede that genocide is considered by the public to be immoral. Never mind that actual genocide, both historical (Native Americans) and current (in the Congo) gets almost no attention (there is at least the excuse of distance and non interest, hard to buy that with current actions that involve our government, our responsibility in a democracy).

It's worth appealing to people's morality still. We can try to convince people. We can try to shame people. We have to appeal to people's other sensiblities. But it has to be done with intelligence. Those of us who think torture is wrong, immoral, unethical and destructive to the victim, the torturer, and the institutions behind the torturer are in the minority. We better figure out a way to live with that.