Thinking about the statements I have lately drawn attention to by Alan Dershowitz and Mary Jo White, statements on the subject of waterboarding, has made me aware of a telling absence in left-liberal commentary in this country. It is a good absence, but a telling one all the same. Can an absence be telling? If it's an absence, how can it talk?
The absence to which I'm referring is to be found in the area precisely of torture (relatedly, rendition), and of the US government's unwillingness to renounce it clearly, unconditionally and once and for all. And the absence is an absence in the discourse of the British liberal-left of arguments of the following kind.
We don't defend or justify torture - but you have to understand that the willingness to contemplate or turn a blind eye to it doesn't come out of nowhere. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism create a sense of public insecurity, pushing some governments towards a less scrupulous concern for civil liberties and basic rights. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism understandably lead to anger and alienation, and therefore many people who otherwise might have protested don't protest when things are done that violate others and betray the values of a liberal society. It's regrettable, of course. We don't justify it. But we need to understand it, to understand that it has its root causes.
How to explain the fact that commentators of the liberal-left don't urge upon us a need for understanding in this connection? After all, all things have their causes, and it seems like a reasonable hypothesis that the political climate brought about by the threat of large-scale terrorism isn't likely to be helpful in strengthening public concern for civil liberties. This seems at least as plausible as the claim that Islamist terrorism is caused by Western misdemeanours of one kind and another.
One explanation for the absence I'm focusing on is that pleas for understanding are not only, and sometimes not at all, about telling a causal story. They can also be attempts to shift the blame from those directly responsible for morally criminal actions on to others and, what can amount to the same thing, to make excuses for those who are directly responsible. Seen in this light, the absence of pleas for understanding in the matter of torture is a good absence: it shows that there is not much of an inclination on the British liberal-left to make excuses for those Western leaders who, and/or state agencies which, would weaken the prohibition on torture or attempt to circumvent it, whether by prevaricating over the definition of torture, outsourcing it through the practice of extraordinary rendition, colluding with the latter, pretending not to see it.
Yet it is also a telling absence by comparison with what has so far lurked in the shadows here, and which I now bring out into the open: I mean the richly abundant presence over the last few years, constituted by a thousand voices in the liberal press and at every place where anti-war and anti-war-on-terror people are gathered, of the discourse of understanding the root causes of terror. Torture is an indefensible practice; but so is the random murder of innocents. The absence of pleas for understanding in the former case, set beside the rich presence of pleas for understanding in the latter case, tells either of a wildly imbalanced distribution of sociological curiosity with respect to the two or of a much greater predisposition on the British liberal-left to condone terrorism than to excuse torture.