By PLS
On Saturday, November 19th, the Iraq torture debacle was the lead story in the Santa Fe New Mexican, a family newspaper that generally focuses on local news. In fact, this was a local story. “Interrogator” Tony Lagouranis, a graduate of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, a bastian of liberal arts education, no less, has admitted to torturing detainees in Iraq. For a very rough equivalent you have to think back to World War II, when Germans who loved Mozart and Goethe became Nazis, and you know what they did.
I’ve been wondering how normal people get involved with torture. Our local boy says it was easy. He “just did what everyone else was doing,” as if he were, say, binge drinking with a bunch of fraternity brothers. When he was abusing Iraqis, he says, he didn’t have “a huge moral problem with it.”
St. John’s, with branches in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, specializes in a curriculum based on the Western classics. Lagouranis spent four years ingesting the best that Western civilization has to offer and it led to....torture.
This is very distressing, especially since the other pillar of our civilization also seems amenable to torturing people. Our President is ostentatiously Christian. He seeks faith-based organizations to carry out his policy. He made a photo op point of going to church this past Sunday, in Beijing, of all places. And yet he threatens to veto any piece of legislation that would categorically reject the cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees.
So nothing in our cultural history, nothing in our traditional moral and ethical formation, provides a secure stance against torture. Even so, some people do reject torture and abuse as instruments of national policy. If their “faith” is secular humanism, let’s have more of it.
Eventually remorse caught up with our hero. He got depressed and he began whistle blowing, even before he left the military. Hence, the article that caught my attention.
However, the New Mexican piece is confusing in places. Maybe Lagouranis knew all along that what he was doing was wrong, but he also says "you have to believe in the cause" to hurt people. He believed. He tortured. In any event, he claims an excuse. He now says that people can’t be expected to behave if they don’t know the rules, which were very amorphous while he was in Iraq. "Take away the rules," he declares, and people will torture, if so ordered.
The Geneva Conventions were devised to secure the humane treatment of prisoners of war. In this spirit Senators McCain, Graham and Warner wish to codify what is permissible and what is not when prisoners are in U.S. custody, so that young men like Lagouranis may be spared the stress of being thrust into morally reprehensible and legally ambiguous situations. The Bush Administration, which prefers arbitrary authority to the rule of law, is resisting. The Senators must persist.
Meanwhile, I hope that the incoming president of St. John’s College has read the New Mexican article and is pondering how this institution's noble curriculum may be reorganized to produce nobler results.
He has a lot of work to do. I sat next to a St. John's faculty member and a graduate student at lunch a few months ago. The grad student knew all the big names of Western philosophy and he could quote passages I only dimly remembered, but he also insisted that interpretation is taboo. His mentor agreed that the great thinkers of the past must be understood only in the context of their own lives. That's an essential starting point, I agreed. But surely, I suggested, we can go from there to consider how our predecessors' thinking might have the potential for evolution, for adaptation over time. No, said my luncheon companions. That is not possible. It is not permitted.
And therein lies the problem. Why bother to study Plato if his thought is not allowed to spark ideas for our own time, if those newly sparked ideas can't be discussed in the same breath (or class) as those of the master's? Why study Aristotelian logic if we can't use it to discipline our own discourse? At a certain point pure learning becomes pure irrelevance.
This puts me in mind of those who believe that the U.S. Constitution can be reduced to some procrustean bed of "original intention" and retain its relevancy, as if any of us really wants to live in some unadulterated version of the 17th century, however much we may admire our political ancestors.
As a woman, I certainly don't want to live in any earlier age. The more I learn about the past, the more certain I am of this, goddess theory notwithstanding. The Greeks devalued women, even as they experimented with democratic ideas. American Constitution writers, admirers all of the Greeks and Romans, opened governance to wider participation, but excluded women from the body politic. To move forward we must understand the past accurately, yes, but we must also judge it and shape our own actions accordingly.
I hope the new President of St. John's will think about Mr. Lagouranis, his faculty member (who shall be nameless) and the graduate student. Perhaps they got it all wrong. Perhaps they misrepresented the curricular intentions of St. John's, though I fear not.
I also hope that the Americans who condemn "activist judges" will reexamine that shibbolith and appreciate the fact that Constitutions die if they are denied a tradition of interpretation and modification. It's precisely that capacity to grow and change within a constant framework that has made the U.S. Constitution the oldest in the world.
Meanwhile, Lagouranis assures us that, having seen the light, he has apologized personally to those he tortured. I bet that made his victims feel real good.