Political philosopher and author JOHN GRAY praises the mental agility of a legal scholar and puts forth some ideas of his own in ‘A Modest Proposal’, published in The New Statesman on 17 February 2003. That scholar is law professor ALAN DERSHOWITZ and Gray’s prompt is the professor’s proposed adoption of ‘torture warrants’ in the War on Terror. Preempting concerns over lack of constitutionality, Dershowitz explains that ‘nothing in the US Constitution forbids the use of torture’: the Eighth Amendment’s proscription of ‘“cruel and unusual punishments”’ applies after conviction; the Fifth Amendment forbids self-incrimination, that is, the use of statements obtained through torture as evidence against the suspect, rather than ‘torture itself’. What is truly problematic is that torture is currently conducted extra-judicially by Third-World contractors: US federal agents are forced to farm out work of such vital importance, for results that are devoid of legal standing. Torture warrants would make it possible to repatriate the procedure and to operate within the rule of law. So, what at first glance appears to be a breach of law and morality, as well as a contravention of the founding principles of the United States, is actually a simple way to align values and practices. Gray takes it upon himself to dispel the lingering doubts. The first order of business is the reeducation of those who find torture incompatible with liberal principles. What they fail to grasp, Gray writes, is that liberal philosophers of the past, such as VOLTAIRE, opposed torture because it was an instrument of illiberal, obscurantist regimes. In the mature liberal democracies of today, torture can instead be used to defend the rights and liberties of the citizenry — from the assaults of terrorists, for instance. Some are worried about the contradiction of protecting the rights of one party by trampling on the rights of another; only in extreme circumstances — a ticking bomb, say — would they consider the use of torture in the interrogation of suspects, and even then they would struggle to reconcile it with their liberalism. They need not fret any longer; JOHN RAWLS, the Harvard philosopher of A Theory of Justice fame, has the answer. One of his ‘insights’ is ‘basic liberties cannot conflict’. Which implies, Gray explains, that if one’s liberty clashes with another’s, the thing to do is redefine one of them in terms that preclude mutual exclusiveness. In this way, hard choices and intractable dilemmas of the ticking-bomb variety become things of the past. Once it is incorporated into a liberal democracy’s legal machinery, and suspects are ‘afforded the full dignity of due legal process’, torture becomes morally cleansed — by definition. In addition to putting philosophical meat on the bones of Dershowitz’s reasoning, Gray offers some suggestions on the governance front. The legal and educational systems in the US and elsewhere will obviously require some tweaks: lawyers not prone to squeamishness will have to be selected, groomed and (re)trained and university curricula will have to be updated. The services of medical and psychiatric professionals will be required during interrogations, while social workers must be on hand to support the family members of those being interrogated. Perhaps most of all, no trace of the old stain on the torturers’ profession must remain. They must be duly recognised as workers in the cause of liberty and progress. Since truly liberal principles are universal, an energetic campaign will be necessary to proselytise the rest of the world to this new human rights regime, behind which the United States will have to put its considerable weight. International treaties informed by outdated notions of human rights, such as the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will have to be edited. Recalcitrant countries will have to be brought in line — somehow — as universalism is incompatible with notions like ‘sovereignty’.
In case Gray is being too subtle, he is in fact attempting satire. Having made a career of exposing liberal and progressive folly, here he gives a Swiftian1 rendering to one of his recurring themes: people’s endless capacity for self-deception through euphemism-laden casuistry and other mental contortions. It is an art in which liberals and progressives excel, according to Gray; Dershowitz’s bid to sanitise torture is but one example. The abolition of slavery is rightly celebrated as a great liberal achievement, but in order for the collective self-satisfaction to persist, post-abolition instances of slavery are referred to as ‘forced labour’. In the wake of September 11, Western liberal democracies erased one of the great moral victories of the modern age by reinstating torture; calling it ‘enhanced interrogation’ presumably made it palatable enough to minimise objection among card-carrying liberals. It certainly does not help matters, Gray has stated elsewhere, that many Western liberals and progressives stubbornly regard their worldview as derived from first principles when it is actually rooted in Christian theology. Universalism is a direct import from Christianity, and (ironically) can make Western liberals hopelessly parochial and politically and culturally tone-deaf. Progress, meanwhile, is a mutation of divine providence. Having relinquished faith in God, Gray’s thinking goes, liberal humanists still refuse to grapple with the full, terrifying implications of a chaotic, godless universe. So they pin their hopes on the one contemporary institution that produces verities — science — and convince themselves that moral advance is achieved in parallel with the compounding of knowledge.2 There is in fact nothing in science that suggests the legitimacy of such an idea. It is only a way for liberal humanists to maintain a sense of providentialism in the absence of a heavenly Father figure — a have-your-cake-and-eat-it device. If it is difficult to confront all this, it is probably doubly so when delivered satirically; those at the receiving end of a sardonic jab are rather more likely to be enraged or baffled than disabused. One has to assume that Gray’s priorities in this case do not include persuasion.
JONATHAN SWIFT, the Dublin-born satirist and cleric, author of Gulliver’s Travels, in a 1729 satirical essay also titled ‘A Modest Proposal’ advocates the eating of the children of the poor as a solution to poverty.
STEVEN PINKER is perhaps the most prominent contemporary thinker of this sort, and an occasional target of Gray’s. See post no. 36, ‘All You Need Is Modernity’.