Author Archives: Peter Levine

guest blogger: Lt. Brandon del Pozo

I’ve been corresponding with a reader who is a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department as well as a doctoral candidate at CUNY. Brandon del Pozo also holds an MPA from Harvard and an MA from John Jay. The following is a guest post by him concerning torture and combat:

The principal, recurring, line of argument against torture is that it is different from acts of harm and killing in combat and law enforcement in a way that makes the very framework of justification for these acts inadequate for justifying torture as well. This inadequacy is not meant to be one of degree; the argument is not that torture is too extreme a form of injuring and killing to be permitted. It is instead that torture is crucially different in a way that makes the conceptual extension of these justifications inappropriate in the first place. Given what torture is, justifications for how we act in war and self-defense cannot be invoked to do the work of describing the morality of torture. People who wish to talk about the torture must therefore do so without invoking justifications for combat injuring and killing, which are already thought to be arguments that define the outer limits of how we are permitted to treat other people. Unless a person can talk about the justification for torture in a different way that accurately accounts for its special nature, it must be placed beyond the pale.

This approach fails because it does not appreciate just what we seek to do when we make war against people. Henry Shue, and more recently David Sussman, describe at length the way torture violates the person in an extremely sinister way. They talk about the way torture makes a person feel, the vulnerabilities it exploits, and the way in which it turns the very substance of personhood against itself. It uses a person?s extension in the physical world to enslave her consciousness, devolving her personhood to a state where it is no more endowed with dignity and rational agency than the most primitive sentient being, all the while subjected to the most severe forms of distress, fear and agony that sentience permits. Sussman argues that ?through the combination of captivity, restraint, and pain, the physical and social bases of rational agency are actively turned against such agency itself… [a] perversion of the most basic human relations.? Making clear that in his view this cannot be justified by our present understanding of when and how we may cause harm, he concludes that ?whether such objections could ever be overcome by legitimate military or punitive interests is a question that waits upon more comprehensive understandings of the morality of punishment, warfare, and self-defense.?

The description of torture above is accurate. The problem, however, is that in both the case of Shue and Sussman it is simply presumed that this description alone, when done well, is enough to make the case that torture is different from combat not by degree but by nature. In order to make the best argument possible, it would be necessary to do at least two things. The first would be to accurately describe what torture is. The second would be to affirmatively show that combat is not the same in nature as what has been described as torture, and that it does not differ only by degree. Prior work has done a good job of the former, but seems to have ignored the latter, as if describing torture has made the prima facie case that it is different from combat by its nature.

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the new INS citizenship exam

(Dayton, OH) Today the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued a new citizenship exam. This is the test that immigrants must pass to become US citizens. The revision is being reported as a big improvement. The Washington Post says,

Want to become a citizen? Get a copy of the Bill of Rights. The U.S. government is revising the new citizenship exam so that it emphasizes applicants’ grasp of American democracy over their knowledge of trivia — such as the name of the president’s house or the colors of the flag.

The old exam was problematic. Instead of asking questions that tested people’s capacity to be active and responsible members of the political community–“citizens”–it posed nitty-gritty factual questions that you could memorize without any understanding. For instance, you had to be able to state the date on which the Constitution was written, without knowing what the Constitution said.

On a memorable evening in 2001, I helped a Hmong immigrant in St. Paul to memorize answers from the INS’s practice book. He had no idea what the answers meant, nor could he ever use the information he had memorized in his own interest or to help the United States.

Also in the Twin Cities, immigrant students from the Jane Addams School made a video about this problem. They asked shoppers in the Mall of America (i.e., “Middle America”) to answer questions from the citizenship exam. The rate of correct answers was low.

We should probably congratulate the INS for rewriting the test, but I’m not sure how much progress has been achieved. Sample questions from the pilot version are online. I like these: “Name one right or freedom from the First Amendment.” “Name two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy.” And “What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves?” However, I’m not sure it’s useful to ask: “The House of Representatives has how many voting members?” Or “How old must a President be?”

We know that people who know this kind of fact are also more engaged in politics and civic life. However, I suspect that’s because they have gleaned knowledge from discussions, meetings, and using the news media. It’s not clear that making people memorize such facts would increase their engagement.

We also know, from CIRCLE’s recent survey, that younger American adults would mostly fail the new exam if they had to take it.

classrooms never change

(en route to Dayton, OH) According to a fascinating article by Nicholas Orme in Oxford Today, medieval and renaissance English schoolboys spent most of their time translating passages into Latin. Latin was a practical, living language, and medieval teachers must have seen the research about motivating students by assigning culturally appropriate materials. They made up lists of highly topical sentences for their pupils to render into Latin.

In 1506, a teacher who was also Master of Oxford’s Magdalen College published a translation textbook that included such useful schoolroom phrases as: “Thou stinkest,” “Turd in thy teeth!” “I am almost beshitten,” and “He is the veriest coward that ever pissed.” A different text provided opportunities to translate the phrases, “Sit away, or I shall give you a blow” and “He hath taken my book from me.”

Another teacher expected his students to translate his complaint about their behavior:

As soon as I am come into the school, this fellow goeth to make water, and he goeth out into the common draft [toilet]. Soon after another asketh license that he may go drink. Another calleth on me that he may have license to go home. These and such other layeth my scholars for excuse oftentimes, that they may be out of the way.

In 1346, the Oxford schoolmaster John Cornwall asked his pupils to translate the warning: “If I go to Carfax, I may be met by misdoers.” That remains reasonable advice 660 years later, for Carfax is still a street in Oxford with a somewhat scruffy clientele.

the state of play

Until recently, I would have summarized the partisan debate in the United States as follows.

On domestic policy, the Democratic coalition encompassed many factions, but the dominant one was led by Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Their priorities were: balancing the budget (as a means of supporting aggregate economic growth), followed by spending on education, welfare, and health, followed by tax cuts for lower-income families. The public recognized these priorities: Democrats were trusted on fiscal policy, overall economic policy, and health and welfare. Whether or not “Rubinomics” was adequate or desirable, it coincided with prosperity and it matched majority preferences. Once the Democrats settled on it as their dominant position after 1994, they made at least incremental progress in most elections that emphasized economic issues.

In contrast, the Republicans officially stood for tax cuts, followed by spending cuts to balance budgets. But they had decreasing credibility on these issues. In any case, the public did not put tax cuts first.

On social issues, the country had moved far in the direction of libertarianism, so that the live issues of the day (such as gay marriage) would have seemed very radical a generation before. However, on those live issues, the Republican position was more popular than the Democratic one. Hence, in elections that emphasized “values,” Republicans usually prevailed.

On foreign policy, the Republicans stood for putting America first. They appeared more willing to use military force, but only in America’s economic or security interests. This was a clear position–not one that I favor, but one that had pretty strong popular support. In contrast, the Democrats seemed highly conflicted, unable to resolve debates left over from the Vietnam era that pitted elements of isolationism, nationalism, human-rights idealism, pacifism, and Realpolitik. The public did not know where the Party stood, and that hurt Democrats when foreign affairs rose on the national agenda after 9/11. Kerry?s statement that he had voted for the war before voting against it epitomized the Democrats? reputation on foreign policy. To be fair, many individual Democrats held consistent positions, but the Party had not worked out its debates, which is partly why Kerry emerged as the nominee.

The last two years have changed much of this. Republicans are now associated with foolish unilateral adventurism and a careless disregard for American national interests. Internal debates have erupted on their side. That is clearly one reason that the Democrats won the 2006 election. But they still lack a coherent philosophy in foreign affairs.

We could now enter a creative period in which new alternatives are developed, some enjoying bipartisan or “strange-bedfellow” support. Serious alternatives would combine broad philosophical positions with specific policy proposals.

However, we could also enter a period in which Democrats expect to coast while Republicans continue to suffer (deservedly) from the Iraq debacle. That period would last two years at the most, by which time the Republicans would find new leadership and the Democrats would be expected to hold persuasive positions on foreign affairs. Thus the Party should begin a robust and divisive internal debate right now, so that a winning faction may prevail before 2008.

states and markets (the case of India)

I could write a long post criticizing “neoliberalism” for widening gaps between rich and poor, undermining local cultures, damaging the biosphere, and restricting the sovereignty of democratic governments. I’d vote for the democratic left if, for example, I lived in Latin America. Yet I’m haunted by the example of India, where people who shared my values set the nation’s course from 1949 until the mid-1980s. Nehru and his fellow leaders of the Congress Party were democratic, civil libertarian, secular, nonviolent, pluralist, deliberative, and egalitarian. Opposing “globalization” before that word was coined, they tried to make India self-reliant and to help the least advantaged of their compatriots. It is at least possible that their well-intentioned policies caused hundreds of millions of people to live shorter, harsher, and narrower lives than they might have otherwise.

The following passage from Shashi Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to the Millennium (pp. 166-8) has stuck with me for several years:

The government’s indifferent attitude [in the 1970s] was epitomized by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s communications minister, C.M. Stephen, who declared in Parliament, in response to questions decrying the rampant telephone breakdowns in the country, that telephones were a luxury, not a right, and that any Indian who was not satisfied with his telephone service could return his phone–since there was an eight-year waiting list of people seeking this supposedly inadequate product.

Mr. Stephen’s statement captured perfectly everything that was wrong about the government’s attitude. It was ignorant (he clearly had no idea of the colossal socioeconomic losses caused by poor communications), wrong-headed (he saw a practical problem only as an opportunity to score a political point), unconstructive (responding to complaints by seeking a solution apparently did not occur to him), self-righteous (the socialist cant about telephones being a luxury, not a right), complacent(taking pride in a waiting list the existence of which should have been a source of shame …), unresponsive (feeling no obligation to provide a service in return for the patience, and fees, of the country’s telephone subscribers), and insulting.

Although some blame for this unresponsiveness should be assigned directly to Mrs. Gandhi and her ministers, the example surely illustrates a more general problem. Centralized state bureaucracies that deny market preferences tend to become arrogant. Of course, mid-20th century state-socialism and neoliberalism are not our only alternatives. There are various Third Ways, including efforts to decentralize democratic governance. Nevertheless, it’s sobering to consider the enormous waste that good intentions can cause.