Bybee blues

Argentina's La Nación newspaper has as its US correspondent a brilliant man named Mario Diament, who writes a fascinating column about American happenings for his Latinamerican audience. Most recently, this article looked at the much-pondered question of why people do cruel things like exterminating Jews or, in this case, waterboarding terror suspects. His piece focuses on one man in particular, a certain Jay Scott Bybee, a Mormon priest and US judge who was one of the many who appended his signature to the document which gave the CIA executive permission to continue with their practises of extracting information through torture. Diament understands why people such as Bush or Cheney might have done such a thing for reasons of politics/evilness/not-knowing-what's-going-on, but he asks how Bybee, a man known for being humble, intelligent and generally pleasant and normal, could join their ranks. Below are the final paragraph's of Diament's article, followed by my rough translation:

Pero el misterio sigue siendo Bybee, quien corrió a ayudar a sus hijos con sus deberes y a lavar los platos el día de su confirmación, un experto en derecho constitucional y procedimiento civil, padre de 4 hijos, ex boy scout y misionero de la Iglesia mormona. En el panegírico publicado por la revista Meridian , se afirma: "Bybee cree que la sociedad funcionaría mejor si la gente demostrase una actitud de reconciliación en lugar de venganza".

En 1961, durante el proceso a Adolf Eichmann en Jerusalén, Hannah Arendt acuñó el concepto de "banalidad del mal" para sintetizar su percepción del acusado. Su tesis era que quienes cometen crímenes atroces, como Eichmann, responsable de gerenciar la "solución final" del problema judío en la Alemania nazi, no son habitualmente fanáticos enloquecidos, sino, más bien, individuos ordinarios, quienes simplemente aceptan las premisas del Estado y las cumplen con extrema eficiencia.

Al elaborar su memorándum, Bybee debe haber pensando, seguramente, que lo que se esperaba de él no era otra cosa que una interpretación legal, un ejercicio intelectual divorciado de su contenido y del efecto sobre sus posibles víctimas, en el que la tortura se vuelve una abstracción.
***
But the mystery of Bybee remains, who went to help his children with their homework and wash the dishes the day of his confirmation [to high office], an expert in constitutional rights and civil procedures, father of four children, ex-boyscout and missionary of the mormon church. In an appraisal published in the Meridian magazine, it is stated that "Bybee believes that society functions better if people show an attitude of reconciliation rather than revenge."

In 1961, during the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt coined the concept of the "banality of the evil" to create her portrate of the accused. Her theory was that those who committ atrocious crimes, like Eichmann, who was responsible for carrying out the "final solucion" of the Jewish problem in Nazi Germany, are not by nature mouth-frothing fanatics, but rather, normal people, who simply accept the edicts of the State and carry them out very efficiently.

To write his memorandum [justifying torture], Bybee must have thought, surely, that what was required of him was nothing more than a legal interpretation, an intellectual exercise divorced from its contents and the effect on its potential victims, in which torture becomes an abstraction.

***

Diament, the master journalist that he is, finishes his article here, and refrains from penning a concrete conclusion to be taken from these musings. The conclusion is, like those famous "rights", self-evident. Evil can happen when people do not feel directly responsible.

A famous psychological experiment was conducted in which volunteers were told to ask questions to actors who the volunteers thoughts were only other volunteers. For each question that was answered incorrectly, the volunteers had to electrocute the actor. Although no current was actually applied to the "subject", they nevertheless acted the symptoms of electrocution. To begin, a small current was "applied", and the actor gave a twitch. The current gradually got larger and larger, and the actor would manifest signs of extreme pain. The volunteer would ask not to continue, but the scientists monitoring the experiment would tell them that it was OK, they [the volunteers] were not responsible for anything that happened, all possible blame would be laid at the feet of the scientists. Most volunteers continued electrocuting their "subjects" until they appeared dead.

This phenomenon, this tucked-away, sinister little part of human nature only becomes real or dangerous when political and social systems contrive to create a situation in which the evil designs of a tiny number of high-ranking individuals need to be carried out by many hundreds of ordinary people in order to occur. Unfortunately, almost every social system in the world is formed in this way. As any sociologist will tell you, the phenomenon of people obeying orders is a direct product of society and the near-total control that it can exert over its members. Social forces are, in this way, often the undoing of the individual.

Of course, it is also self-evident that without society, the individual would be nothing. And if society did not demand fealty from the individual, then it would cease to be: each person would only act for himself, and nothing would join people in the common purpose that is the very essence of society, and the essence of what makes humankind prosperous. But this fealty need not bee unthinking. Just as it is important to feel a common bond with those around you, it is equally important that this bond does not overthrow the rational workings of your consciousness. You should not shirk your share in constructing a great civilisation, but if this construction involves doing harm to others, it makes much more sense to abandon your social ties.

This is why it is dangerous when people talk about (for example) feeling pride in their country. Love for one's countrymen is fine, but a such a pride is utterly irrational, and in my view the first step in the more harmful, but equally large-scale irrationality of, say, condoning torture for national security.