Reading the Senate Torture Report, there's plenty to be incensed about. This is a document of evil and there should be no bones made about that. But what strikes me most is the way that supposedly Very Serious People working In The Real World and For Our Safety were so happy to ignore the objections and criticisms coming from the people carrying out the programme. Concerns being completely being overridden, never discussed again and being forbidden from being put into any documentary evidence is distressingly reminiscent of the practices of Nazi Germany in its darker dealings. In fact, the similarity is not limited to the repugnance of the actions but also in the general incompetence of what was being done. Supposedly Serious People dealing with The Real World should be the ones telling you that any organisation regularly ignoring expert objections from below is a broken organisation. Yet here we are with the CIA looking precisely as useless as right-wingers might tell us a big government organisation should be.
Anyone who looks at the history of large authoritarian states would hardly be surprised to discover security services becoming states within states, unaccountable and therefore prone to both morally awful and operationally disastrous courses of action (these two aspects of unaccountable government action being utterly conjoined). It is ever America's failing that it believes that having escaped history it is no longer subject to the patterns of other states. In rejecting totalitarianism and the Old World as part of the founding creed of the country, it paradoxically makes it far harder for Americans to see the seeds of those same sins in their own institutions; to do so would be to admit that America, despite the very special circumstances of its founding, is not inherently special. This has allowed putative Caesars like MacArthur and crypto-fascists like J Edgar Hoover to ride unchecked far further than would be hoped for a nation with such high ideals: to see what is in front of one's nose is, of course, a constant struggle.
The CIA is an organisation with what could be charitably called a tarnished record - the overthrow of legitimate foreign governments, warrantless surveillance, assassination, torture - this is not the record befitting a country of America's moral stature. Nor is it surprising. Give a group of men a huge budget, tell them they are Very Serious and entrusted with the Safety Of The Nation, show them the extent of the very real threats out there and you end up with a vaster version of the police violence that has animated protests this year - you have a very big, very scared man with a lot of adrenaline and a very big gun. And like Captain Renault discovering gambling in Rick's Cafe, Americans are shocked, shocked when it turns out these people overstep boundaries. Of course they do. They have immediate security concerns and can plausibly count on the continued secrecy of their actions if they are ever called out on them.
This has happened in just about every powerful security apparatus ever. The states within states that appeared in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Mubarak's Egypt, South American dictatorships and god knows where else were all originally powered not just by corruption but by many men who thought they were doing the best for their country. The CIA may work for a morally better government than these, but remove them from the cut-and-thrust of civic life, tell them they have different priorities than the pen-pushers in D.C, cast their critics as tree-hugging hippies and who is surprised that they end up torturing people? Moreover, who is surprised that they end up not terribly good at their basic job when doing so?
Here is a modest proposal, then. Given that we need intelligence services, and given that they are by their nature organised such that they will become states within states (welcome though the Senate report is, I won't hold my breath for the criminal convictions that would be required to show that America has a genuinely functioning check on executive power), we may as well write this acknowledgement into the constitutions of liberal states. In the expectation that our intelligence community will become over-mighty and contemptuous of civilian control due to the very real and respectable ever-increasing pressure of their duties, they should be subject to regular dissolution. The entire security apparatus should be closed down and reorganised every 20 years with new personnel. To prevent the loss of institutional knowledge and keep techniques refreshed, we could instigate a swap system with our allies, loaning our veteran intelligence community abroad until the locals were ready to take over again.
In doing so we could refresh the Enlightenment values of the organisations by hiring the kind of young turks who want to make a fresh start with a new, more idealistic and leaner security services. No more Hoovers or Brennans with their careers lived entirely in secrecy and fear and endless contempt of those who try to restrain them. If Obama, a constitutional law professor whose constitutional imagination I thoroughly respect, is not going to cut Brennan down to size then the threat of the CIA is simply too great. The CIA should fear the president, not the other way round. And if Obama fears them, I have little hope for his Republican successor, and certainly not for Clinton. That leaves only the forest fire approach - a burning and refertilising every few years to prevent the death of the forest. As the potential power of a security state increases in the digital age, we must be prepared for constitutional checks on our fear of terrorist attacks - if popular opinion is incapable of castigating the CIA for torture (and why would it in this terrifying ISIS ridden world) then the job falls to our constitutions. If we cannot be brave, our laws must.
In the wake of Staten Island and Ferguson, there has been the expected round of soul-searching and counter-soul-searching that has come to mark racial incidents in the age of the think-piece. Even here in Britain, protests in solidarity with the black community of America have proved quite the draw, which might seem surprising given the extremely specific nature of these two events: these are not massacres of crowds or imprisonment of journalists but rather an overstepping of the line we expect police officers to toe in the discharging of their duties. After all, no-one disputes that if justice were done both Michael Brown and Eric Garner would be tried for their petty crimes and pay their penalties.
The murkiness of at least the former case goes only to prove that the rich seam of fury that these months have unearthed, a seam that extends to these shores, has very little to do with those specifics. That police officers will overstep the violence sanctioned them on occasion is accepted by all reasonable people, that they will then find the law obsequiously flexible in punishing them is an injustice, true, but one that would have been wearily expected by populations from here to the dawn of the city-state. But it touches a civil nerve when injustice is so obviously meted out overwhelmingly to one race. This is a protest about systemic racism - which is to say, history wasn't solved in 1964 and people who live with that history's legacy every day need flashpoints to notify demographics who are comfortable pretending that it was.
The idea that this whole mess is not actually about the police at all is dispiriting in a way that I'm not sure progressive forces know how to handle. Social progress has always been best achieved by ruthless pragmatism and the swiping of low-hanging fruit, such that it could well be argued that the end of slavery in America was more a morally fortuitous by-product of Lincoln's war measures and on a larger scale the incompatibility of federal republicanism and sharply divided agricultural/industrial regional economies than anything abolitionists achieved. Votes for women resulted from war, social health insurance from Bismarck's anti-socialist machinations, and so on.
Absent a useful war or political crisis, the lowest-hanging fruit are the laws or lack thereof that entrench oppression. To call these low-hanging is perhaps to stretch to the term to insulting lengths - the struggle to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act took quantities of grit, blood and tears so wrenching that it will remain a byword for unambiguously heroic social change for many generations yet unborn. And yet such changes in law are still the easiest thing that can be done to combat oppression. Once they are done, and with the fall of unequal marriage there are vanishingly few such laws left to target, progressives must cast about for ways to tackle the mass of human horror left to shift. They usually come up with "changing attitudes".
That phrase always strikes me as a weak one even when I use it myself. The task set is nothing less than reaching inside millions of people's thoraxes and resetting their hearts from the settings society has ingrained in them, an undertaking so ambitious as to be near-meaningless. I previously described today's progressives as "swiping at midges", which may be a tad unkind but I feel reflects a little of the frustration involved. In a case like Ferguson, where exactly is the law we can change to stop white cops being afraid of black kids? James Baldwin in 1968 was similarly despairing in his diagnosis:
"Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that's how black boys die, because the police are scared. And it's not the policemen's fault; it's the country's fault."
That the country is on trial as opposed to the police or even Darren Wilson is a notion of which the sage of modern racial conversation, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is similarly convinced. It is the case of Coates, who I think of as one of the finest writers at work today, that fascinates me at this point, because he is capable of being every bit as eloquent with what he leaves unsaid as with what he says. For though his tweeting, writing and media appearances have made clear that structural racism is the cancer that must be healed for these incidents to stop, he is silent on what actions we might take to effect this healing.
Many commentators including Coates were quick to point out that the case which appeared to make the best argument for body cameras, in Ferguson, was immediately pursued by the case that refuted that argument, in Staten Island where the whole incident was clearly caught on camera and still failed to elicit an indictment. Oversimplifying this may be, but it is emblematic of the despair many feel on racial issues that there are simply no concrete proposals left to make. In the clip below, Coates argues that the justice system is actually only doing what the population wants it to do, so holding it out for special attention is wrong, and by extension we might suppose wholesale retraining of cops is useless.
In retraining America, too, it is difficult to see where we go from here. Laws that needed changing were easy to point out to the moderate middle, but systemic racism is harder to explain to people with no experience of it. This is the swiping at midges I refer to, trying to explain to people who think they live in an egalitarian society just how hard it is to move the remnants of centuries. And with conservative media organisations able to shout louder in their denial, the conversation is almost impossible to make progress in, just another front of the endless cold civil war. With only 16% of whites thinking race played a factor in the Ferguson decision, it is clear that the talking past each other will continue, and many will simply switch off to the he-said-she-said of it all.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is notable amongst contemporary commentators for his grasp of and obsession with history. I can think of no other American journalist for whom the past is as alive, as present as for this writer; indeed it was at Coates's recommendation that I read The Battle Cry of Freedom, and the heaviness of the Civil War era and before hangs on his writing like a construction crane's counterweight. His Atlantic piece The Case For Reparations, which has perhaps done more than any other to vault him to national attention, has another telling silence at its heart. Despite the title, no concrete case for practical reparations for slavery is made, only the suggestion that we investigate it further. I don't think reparations are practical, nor do most white people, but perhaps that misses the point - that if you look at the history of the United States, steeped in the blood of slavery as it is, then we might ask with TS Eliot: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"
The "reckoning with compounding moral debts" is his concern, and as someone who understands just how long it took to accumulate those debts, and someone mindful of how stubbornly they resist being paid, Coates is so thunderously silent on how we might find that forgiveness because there may be no solution but waiting until we are all long dead. Perhaps the balm of time is the only one appropriate. History has never cared much for the pushings and pullings of human action, but has always swept them up in its tide, and if the current state of race relations took hundreds of years to establish it will take yet more hundreds to wash away.
This is the grim undercurrent of much of Coates' writing, a gloom which stands in stark contrast to his fellow black intellectuals. Telling a crowd of progressives that they are grappling with the dread might of the ages and are probably doomed to fail is hardly going to be rabble-rousing stuff, but it is probably true, and if there is one thing that is missed in contemporary discussions of oppression, both left and right, it is just how heavy the monkey of history sits on our back. "Why is it not offensive for black people to wear whiteface?" Because history. "Why can't we expect more from our justice system?" Because history.
There have been those who have detected a blue period in Coates' writing, one that Coates is happy to acknowledge. It has waxed this year, without doubt, following Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and god knows who else. This profound gloom has concerned his former colleague Andrew Sullivan as well as his sparring partner Jonathan Chait, who think it profoundly "out of place" with the times. But I think Coates, in his eloquent silence, is far more in tune with the times than either. Because his writing is the cri-de-coeur of the scholar who is able to diagnose a structural problem without any of the tools to fix it.
Between his lines we read the reason why no-one is discussing what to do about systemic racism: because no-one has a clue. In his reparations article he lays out in forensic detail just why black America is like it is today, just how stacked against them the odds have been for blacks - but the edifice of society is so vast and so complex that there seems nowhere to start in the task of changing the fundamentals of people's hearts. The only appropriate instrument would be a time machine.
I fear this moment of despondency for Coates is just the prescient vanguard for a glum period for progressives generally, as in the coming years they increasingly bump up against their own impotence. I hope I am wrong. It is worth noting that for Coates himself, even in the depths of his funk, pessimism is not a position worth consciously adopting. Far from it. In the same video above he says this:
"In terms of avoiding fatalism, listen: I’m the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could have been born in 1820, if you were black, and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619, looked forward another 50 or 60 years and seen nothing but slaves. There was no reason to believe, at that time, that emancipation was 40 or 50 years off. And yet, folks resisted and folks fought on. So, fatalism isn’t really an option. Even if you think you won’t necessarily win the fight today, in your lifetime, in your child’s lifetime, you still have to fight. It’s kind of selfish to say you will only fight for a victory that you will live to see. As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes."
As for Aquinas, so for Coates, despair is the only unforgivable sin. The greatest consolation of history is that the same discipline telling us why justice will be so long in coming also tells us why that shouldn't concern us. A citizen of Persia in 1215 would have had every right to think his civilisation would remain supreme in culture, wealth and military strength; a decade and a Mongol invasion later everyone that citizen ever knew would be dead and Iran would be so devastated as to not return to its former population for seven hundred years. And this is the rule, not the exception, of history. What can pessimism possibly mean in a world like that?
There is a social contract signed between those dead, those living and those yet to be born. One's place is not to try to rationalise one's own struggle in and of itself - to do so would drive you mad. You must simply fight on, with whatever tools remain, however Sisyphean the task appears, to fulfil the terms set by the dead for the unborn. As Coates later tweeted, "The challenge is for those of us who believe to keep fighting while at the same time understanding it's kinda not about us".
There's a horrible sensation, one I can only liken to having someone reach inside your abdomen and gently but firmly grasp your kidney, in reading a writer you dislike make a point you suspect might be totally valid. Reading Brendan O'Neill in the Spectator harp on about the groupthink of the modern student left angered me because I am perfectly aware that the intended audience is meant to snigger at the very premise that all the student causes are worthwhile in the first place. O'Neill is in fact just talking about a generational divide here - one man's groupthink is another man's zeitgeist, and clearly the shock is not so much that students all think the same (they do not) but that the range of acceptable opinions continues to change as it always has. Social Justice movements may well be safer than they used to be in the days when the Cold War presented a dangerous alternative, but they are also more palatable to more people, I think, and so have greater gravitational pull on youth opinion. That is an argument for another day, though.
Because this is more than just another case of Guardian reader and Spectator writer talking past each other. I have been wondering a lot about whether the Left, or rather my Left, is intellectually inferior to the movements that preceded it, and this picture of people demanding the right to be comfortable, to feel safe, to not feel offended, above all to be in the Right and have the Right opinion - all of this strikes me as distressingly familiar from my own thoughts. I'm meant to be in solidarity with everyone, of course, because that's how the Left works. But I hate feeling like a traitor just because I read through the evidence presented in the Ferguson shooting. In doing so, the ghostly ranks of Twitterjustice soldiers call over my shoulder, telling me I am denying the minority voice, ignoring my privilege, playing into the mainstream narrative. That crowd has long decided that Michael Brown's hands were up when he was shot. To say otherwise is to rhetorically kneecap all the protesters who turned the gesture into such an affecting symbol.
Perhaps it is a gauche contrarianism on my part, but I am habitually suspicious of people who think they are Right. Even when I agree with them. My suspicion is that thinking you are Right betrays a lack of fluidity in thinking, such that even a forensic and tireless mind like a Glenn Greenwald can appear a flabby intellect because it singularly focusses on winning the ideological war it has set itself, such that jihadism is never, ever a threat and American power has never, ever done good in the world. My fear that the left-wingers of my day are inferior to superior ones of the past is of course not new. It turns out it has always been the case.
I turn to the writing of George Orwell for a reminder that scorn for the "pansy left", as he so charmingly calls them, is traditional for other leftwingers. And a modern critic of the Left like Freddie DeBoer hits the same points again. By simply declaring that some writers and thinkers and channels and opinions are just Wrong, and like kryptonite sear and burn all that is pure just by their very presence, the Left is shutting itself out of a dialogue with the world, and more than that is putting its younger adherents into a constant state of fear, so that all are watching everyone else for a break from orthodoxy, and watching their own mouths for saying something Not OK, resulting in all the intellectual curiosity of Stalinist Russia or Puritan Salem.
The S stands for Socialjustice
The ghost of Orwell hangs over so much of contemporary political discussion because he is determinedly non-intellectual, and he will appeal as long as there is a toothless and obfuscating Left drowning in long words and sanctimony, which is likely to be a while. I have been put in mind recently of his essay on Rudyard Kipling. Kipling is what would in the modern tumblr-verse be labelled "problematic". An unreconstructed racist, imperialist and advocate of continued white hegemony, he represents most of what I hate about my country's history. Orwell, who as a man who had seen first hand what Empire meant had more reason to hate Kipling than I, nevertheless takes him seriously as a poet. He is quite capable of seeing the guilty pleasure in Kipling's verse, and coins the term "good bad poetry" to explain the way that such poems "are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them."
About the horrid views of Kipling Orwell is clear-eyed. "Morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" as well as a sadist, the man nevertheless is capable of producing lines of poetry we cannot help but enjoy.
"Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as: For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’"
At least it rhymes
I don't mean to go deeply into Kipling's merits as a poet here. I find him trite myself, whatever Orwell says. But the ability to see what is good in your political opposition is sorely missing from the inheritors of Orwell. The problem of "problematic", a catch-all word that has come to mean nothing but a surrender to intellectual laziness among certain segments, is that it places cultural items and figures into a box in which you never again have to think of them. The infamous yourfaveisproblematic.tumblr exemplifies this trend, in which if a celebrity expresses an insensitive opinion (some of which are genuinely awful) they are beyond the pale.
I recognise precisely why web-based activists employ this method. Powerful cultural forces require a strong response. Benedict Cumberbatch complaining about being discriminated against for being posh must be placed straight in the problematic pile precisely because he has so much cultural power already. The ability to fight so actively and strongly against opinions that control the dialogue so often is no doubt intoxicating. The feminist societies of today's universities, for example, have an understandable defensiveness about their hard-won gains, so the urge to lash out against the forces of privilege is strong. Yet it leads all too often to the logical extreme of the kind Laci Green had to deal with.
My travels in America have made me certain that if there is a threat to civil society in the coming decades, it is not either the clamping down on freedom of speech that Mr O'Neill seems to think the PC brigade wants, nor its repressive state-sanctioned counterpart, nor even the ever present threats of racism, sexism, homophobia and the supremacy of the wealthy. Rather, it is that as people increasingly choose who they speak to, the websites they visit, the channels they watch, the reality they live in, the willingness to regard opposition as even remotely legitimate decreases. Anti-abortion activists are threatening to the mental health of women and cannot be heard. The Democratic Party are a fifth column and must be fought with eradicationist tactics lest the USA be destroyed. and so on.
There is a certain type of fortitude required to be young today that is too easily sneered at. Being endlessly surrounded by a sensory bombardment of that which can stress you out with very few quiet places to which you can retreat has doubtless contributed to a mental health timebomb. I don't doubt that the reason trigger warnings have become ubiquitous is because there are a whole bunch of people out there who are very easily triggered. It takes bravery to live in a society constantly telling you are worthless, to deal with the endless wearing away of your psyche that are widespread ignorance and prejudice and idiocy. Conservatives have sneered at this as mere cowardice, oversensitivity, and they are wrong about that. But neither should we be happy to retreat to our safe spaces, because we have to live in the nation of our oppressors, too. We must have the fortitude to share it with them, or eventually watch our society crumble.
To love your enemies is hardly going to be welcome advice today in the black communities mourning the Ferguson outcome this month. But we may not have a choice. In the Twentieth century Auden amended Jesus' commandment to "love one another or die". In the Twenty-First, the necessity of that commandment may be realised. Today's progressive forces are swiping at indistinct midges of oppression far harder to squash than the concrete laws of yesteryear, and the frustration is increasingly hard to communicate to the communities that have long benefited from those oppressions.
Yet they will need to sit on that frustration and see good in their opponents and their cultural products not because of the "politics of respectability" but because the alternative is a paralysing cold civil war from which western society may find it hard to escape. A start to this process would be the embrace of the "good bad" over the flinch of "problematic" - to accept that these cultural items exist and have merits as well as demerits. This means not being afraid of them, above all. It means being brave.
George Orwell once said that when reading any writer, you had an impression of a face somewhere behind the page. For Orwell himself the face I see is that of a man sitting across a table from a number of horrors themselves given face. There sits Kipling, the envoy of Empire and its attendant miseries. Over there sits Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich and behind them the brownshirted lackeys of fascism. At other seats still sit a gimlet-eyed Lenin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and Joseph Stalin, crowded behind by an indistinct crowd of the useful leftwing idiots murmuring affirmative nothings while not noticing they are ankle deep in blood. And Orwell sits there, smiles grimly, and says what he thinks of them to all of their faces, each in turn. And he treats them as humans.
