On his book Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition
Cover Interview of April 17, 2019
Lastly
I intended the book to be a call for vigilance. America’s
leaders, or those who act on our behalf, possess no innate moral or ethical
lodestar that predisposes them to respect human dignity or rights. To the
contrary, the American political system rests on the recognition that
Americans, like all other human beings, have the capacity, even the inclination,
to abuse power. The oft-repeated claim that the United States is a “nation of
laws” is a concise expression of the Founders’ aspiration to channel and temper
the exercise of power with rules, procedures, and constraints. Yet despite the
Founders’ fear of an oppressive government, the nation’s democratic
institutions and traditions have proved far more hospitable to torture than
many Americans assume.
Bedrock elements of American democracy have arguably both
fostered torture and hindered efforts to curtail it. Dispersed authority across
multiple layers of local, state, and federal government along with the tradition
of popular democracy and localism may have protected citizens from the tyranny
of the national government. But that same decentralized power gave license to
countless legal and self-declared agents of the state to wield the power of
petty despots. Consequently, Americans should be vigilant against abuses of
power in all severely hierarchical state institutions or wherever extreme inequality
have been tolerated, even defended, in the name of the public good, tradition,
or a consequence of human nature.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
I intended the book to be a call for vigilance. America’s leaders, or those who act on our behalf, possess no innate moral or ethical lodestar that predisposes them to respect human dignity or rights. To the contrary, the American political system rests on the recognition that Americans, like all other human beings, have the capacity, even the inclination, to abuse power. The oft-repeated claim that the United States is a “nation of laws” is a concise expression of the Founders’ aspiration to channel and temper the exercise of power with rules, procedures, and constraints. Yet despite the Founders’ fear of an oppressive government, the nation’s democratic institutions and traditions have proved far more hospitable to torture than many Americans assume.
Bedrock elements of American democracy have arguably both fostered torture and hindered efforts to curtail it. Dispersed authority across multiple layers of local, state, and federal government along with the tradition of popular democracy and localism may have protected citizens from the tyranny of the national government. But that same decentralized power gave license to countless legal and self-declared agents of the state to wield the power of petty despots. Consequently, Americans should be vigilant against abuses of power in all severely hierarchical state institutions or wherever extreme inequality have been tolerated, even defended, in the name of the public good, tradition, or a consequence of human nature.