Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 16

This elevation of transgression itself into a moral injunction has a precise name: happiness as the supreme duty. No wonder that, over the last decade, the study of happiness emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now “professors of happiness” at universities, “quality of life” institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies. Ruut Veenhoven, its editor-in-chief, wrote:

We can now show which behaviors are risky as far as happiness goes, in the same way medical research has shown us what is bad for our health. We should eventually be able to show what kind of lifestyle suits what kind of person.⁴¹

This new discipline has two branches. On the one hand, there is a more sociological approach, based on data gathered from hundreds of surveys measuring happiness across different cultures, professions, religions, social and economic groups. One cannot reproach these researches for cultural bias: they are well aware of how the notion of what constitutes happiness depends on the cultural context (it is only in individualistic Western countries that happiness is seen as a reflection of personal achievement). One also cannot deny that the data collected are often interesting: happiness is not the same thing as satisfaction with one’s life (several nations that report low or average life satisfaction at the same time report high percentages of very happy people); the happiest nations—mostly Western and individualistic ones—tend to have the highest levels of suicide; and, of course, the key role of envy—what counts is not what you have so much as what others have (the middle classes are far less satisfied than the poor, for they take as their reference point the very wealthy, whose income and status they will be hard-pushed to match; the poor, meanwhile, take as their reference point the middle earners, who are more within their reach).

On the other hand, there is a more psychological (or, rather, brain-sciences) approach, combining cognitivist scientific research with occasional incursions into New Age meditation wisdom: the exact measuring of brain processes that accompany feelings of happiness and satisfaction, etc. The combination of cognitive science and Buddhism (which is not new—its last great proponent was Francisco Varela) is here given an ethical twist: what is offered in the guise of scientific research is a new morality that one is tempted to call biomorality—the true counterpart to today’s biopolitics. And indeed, was it not the Dalai Lama himself who wrote: “The purpose of life is to be happy”⁴²—this is not true for psychoanalysis, one should add. In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.⁴³

Consequently, if one sticks to the end to the “pleasure principle,” it is difficult to abandon a radical conclusion. The artificial-intelligence philosopher Thomas Metzinger considers artificial subjectivity possible, especially in the direction of hybrid biorobotics, and, consequently, an “empirical, not philosophical” issue.⁴⁴ He emphasizes its ethically problematic character: “it is not at all clear if the biological form of consciousness, as so far brought about by evolution on our planet, is a desirable form of experience, an actual good in itself.”⁴⁵ This problematic feature concerns conscious pain and suffering: evolution

has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none. As not only the simple number of individual conscious subjects but also the dimensionality of their phenomenal state spaces is continuously increasing, this ocean is also deepening.⁴⁶

And it is reasonable to expect that new artificially generated forms of awareness will create new “deeper” forms of suffering . . . One should be careful to note how this ethical thesis is not an idiosyncrasy of Metzinger as a private person, but is a consistent implication of his theoretical framework: the moment one endorses the full naturalization of human subjectivity, the avoidance of pain and suffering cannot but appear as the ultimate ethical point of reference. The only thing one should add to this is that, if one follows this line of reasoning to the end, drawing all the consequences from the fact that evolution “has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none,” then one should also renounce human subjectivity itself: we would have had much less suffering if we had remained animals . . . and, to push it yet further, if animals had remained plants, if plants had remained single cells, if cells had remained minerals.

One of the great ironies of our predicament is that this same biomorality, focused on happiness and on preventing suffering, is today invoked as the underlying principle for the justification of torture: we should torture—impose pain and suffering—in order to prevent more suffering. One is truly tempted to paraphrase De Quincey yet again: “How many people began with committing a little act of torture, and ended up embracing as their cause the fight against pain and suffering!” This definitely holds for Sam Harris whose defense of torture in The End of Faith is based on the distinction between our immediate state of being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others’ suffering: it is much more difficult for us to torture a single person than to drop a bomb from a great distance which would cause the more painful death of thousands. We are thus all caught in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that, although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional-ethical responses remain conditioned by millennia-old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly witnessed. This is why shooting someone point-blank is, for most of us, much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill a thousand absent persons:

Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. . . . It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.⁴⁷

No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Derschowitz and his legitimization of torture.⁴⁸ In order to suspend this evolutionary conditioned vulnerability to the physical display of others’ suffering, Harris imagines an ideal “truth pill,” an effective torture equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke:

a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end?⁴⁹

The very first lines—“a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment”—introduces the typically postmodern logic of the chocolate laxative: the torture imagined here is like decaf coffee—we get the result without having to suffer unpleasant side effects. At the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the already-mentioned psychiatric outlet of the KGB, they did invent just such a drug with which to torture dissidents: an injection into the prisoner’s heart zone which slowed down his heart beat and caused terrifying anxiety. Viewed from the outside, the prisoner seemed just to be dozing, while in fact he was living a nightmare.

There is, however, a much more disquieting prospect at work here: the proximity (of the tortured subject) which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not his mere physical proximity, but, at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbor, with all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term, the proximity of the Thing which, no matter how far away it is physically, is always by definition “too close.” What Harris is aiming at with his imagined “truth pill” is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain). What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. It is thus significant that the book which argues for torture is also a book entitled The End of Faith—not in the obvious sense of “You see, it is only our belief in God, the divine injunction to love your neighbor, that ultimately prevents us from torturing people!” but in a much more radical sense. Another subject (and, ultimately, the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a “presupposition,” something presumed, an object of belief—how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a biological machine lacking any depth?

There is, however, a popular and seemingly convincing reply to those who worry about the recent US practice of torturing suspected terrorist prisoners. It is: “What’s all the fuss about? The US are now only (half) openly admitting what not only they were doing all the time, but what all other states are and were doing all the time—if anything, we have less hypocrisy now . . .” To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: “If the senior representatives of the US mean only this, why, then, are they telling us this? Why don’t they just silently go on doing it, as they did up until now?” That is to say, what is proper to human speech is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation: “You say this, but why are you telling me it openly now?” Let us imagine a wife and husband who coexist with a tacit agreement that they can lead discreet extra-marital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reason to be in panic: “If it is just an affair, why are you telling me this? It must be something more!”⁵⁰ The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral, it affects the reported content itself.

And the same goes for the recent open admission of torture: in November 2005, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that defeating terrorists meant that “we also have to work . . . sort of the dark side . . . A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion”—was he not talking like a reborn Kurtz? So when we hear people like Dick Cheney making their obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask them: “If you just want to torture secretly some suspected terrorists, then why are you saying it publicly?” That is to say, the question to be raised is: what more is there hiding in this statement that made the speaker enunciate it?

We could note (more than) a hint of what there is when, in the middle of March 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession dominated the headlines of our media. Moral outrage at the extent of his crimes was mixed with doubts. Can his confession be trusted? What if he confessed even more than he did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist Mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop being subjected to water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”? What attracted much less attention was the simple fact that, for the first time, torture was normalized, presented as something acceptable. The ethical and legal consequences of it are something to think about.

With all the outcry about the horror of Mohammed’s crimes, very little was heard about the fate our societies reserve for the hardest criminals—to be judged and severely punished. It is as if, by the nature of his acts (and by the nature of the treatment to which he was submitted by the US authorities), Mohammed is not entitled to the same treatment as even the most depraved murderer of children, namely to be tried and punished accordingly. It is as if not only the terrorists themselves, but also fight against them has to proceed in a grey zone of legality, using illegal means. We thus de facto have “legal” and “illegal” criminals: those who are to be treated with legal procedures (using lawyers etc.), and those who are outside legality. Mohammed’s legal trial and punishment are now rendered meaningless—no court which operates within the frames of our legal system can deal with illegal detentions, confessions obtained by torture, and so on.

This fact says more than it intends. It puts Mohammed almost literally into the position of the living dead, occupying the place of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer: legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still alive—and the US authorities which treat them in this way are also of an in-between status which forms the counterpart to homo sacer: acting as a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty space that is sustained by the law, and yet not regulated by the rule of law.

So, back to the “realistic” counter-argument: the “War on Terror” is dirty, one is put in situations where the lives of thousands depend on information we can get from our prisoners. (Incidentally, the torturing of Mohammed was not a case of the “ticking-clock” situation evoked by the advocates of torture as the reason for its legitimization: Mohammed’s confession saved no lives.) Against this kind of “honesty,” one should stick to the apparent hypocrisy. I can well imagine that, in a very specific situation, I would resort to torture—however, in such a case, it is crucial that I do not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle. Following the unavoidable brutal urgency of the moment, I should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very impossibility of elevating what I had to do into a universal principle, do I retain the proper sense of the horror of what I did.

In a way, those who, without outrightly advocating torture, accept it as a legitimate topic of debate, are in a way more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it. Morality is never just a matter of individual conscience. It only thrives if it is sustained by what Hegel called “objective spirit,” the set of unwritten rules which form the background of every individual’s activity, telling us what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. For example, the sign of progress in our societies is that one does not need to argue against rape: it is “dogmatically” clear to everyone that rape is wrong, and we all feel that even arguing against it is too much. If someone were to advocate the legitimacy of rape, it would be a sad sign if one had to argue against him—he should simply appear ridiculous. And the same should hold for torture.

This is why the greatest victims of publicly admitted torture are all of us, the public that is informed about it. We should all be aware that some precious part of our collective identity has been irretrievably lost. We are in the middle of a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in a significant detail of Mohammed’s confession. It was reported that the agents torturing him submitted themselves to water-boarding and were able to endure it for only ten to fifteen seconds before being ready to confess anything and everything, while Mohammed gained their grudging admiration by enduring it for two and a half minutes, the longest time anyone could remember someone resisting. Are we aware that the last time such statements were part of public discourse was way back in the late Middle Ages when torture was still a public spectacle, an honorable way to test a captured worthy enemy who gained the admiration of the crowd if he bore the pain with dignity? Do we really need this kind of primitive warrior ethics?

Are we, then, aware of what is at the end of this road? When, in the fifth season of 24, it became clear that the mastermind behind the terrorist plot was none other than the President of the US himself, many of us were eagerly waiting to see if Jack Bauer would also apply to the President—“the most powerful man on earth”, “the leader of the free world” (and other Kim-Yong-Il-esque titles that he possesses)—his standard procedure for dealing with terrorists who do not want to divulge a secret that may save thousands of lives. Will he torture the President?

Unfortunately, the authors did not risk this redeeming step. But our imagination can go even further, making a modest proposal in Jonathan Swift style: what if part of the procedure to test the candidates for the US presidency were also the public torture of the candidate? Say, a water-boarding of the candidates on the White House lawn, transmitted live to millions? Those qualified for the post of the leader of the free world would be those who could last longer than Mohammed’s two and a half minutes.