Poor Michael Ignatieff. See what happens when you buck the trend toward the cretinization of political thought?
Last year Ignatieff annoyed and confused the Liberal convention by not adhering carefully to Liberal orthodoxy in his speech. His own observations and experience led him to conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that American military intervention overseas was, in some cases, desirable. If you’ve read “Empire Lite”, you understand how painfully he got to that conclusion: but he was compelled to it by his own intellectual honesty. I disagreed with his views, but there was no doubt in my mind that he reached them through rigorous thought, not through adherence to anyone else’s ideology.
Now he’s done it again - published an essay in which he discusses the use of state-sanctioned torture.
His conclusion is crystal clear:
So I end up supporting an absolute and unconditional ban on both torture and those forms of coercive interrogation that involve stress and duress, and I believe that enforcement of such a ban should be up to the military justice system plus the federal courts. I also believe that the training of interrogators can be improved by executive order and that the training must rigorously exclude stress and duress methods.
But en route to that conclusion, he discusses some of the reasons that others have used torture, the negative implications of NOT using torture, and the difficulties he himself has had in justifying a complete ban.
And because of that, he’s been taken to task by a number of thoughtful bloggers, many on the left. His crime seems to have been that he openly admits the moral complexity of his position, and discusses some of the negatives inherent in his belief. And because of that, his essay is being criticized as being too “nuanced”.
I’m no Liberal, and have rarely voted Liberal, and I personally don’t think Ignatieff would be a very good Liberal Party leader (wrong skill set and experience). But I think his essay was thoughtful, articulate, and clear. The merits of his argument are for another discussion . But what disturbed me was the notion that there was something wrong in the notion of a argument being “nuanced”.
“Nuance” is one of those words successfully poisoned by American conservatives, like “liberal” or “feminist”. Originally a term of praise, suggesting an intelligent consideration of the many sides and shades of a complex issue, it’s now a term of mockery. Dick Cheney sneers it really well, makes it sound like a construction worker mocking a gay Parisian.
The problem is, some issues ARE nuanced. Some ethical and moral decisions are nuanced. Life is nuanced, unless you’re very young, very stupid, or an irredeemable idealogue of some persuasion. (Those qualities are not mutually exclusive.)
That’s why ideology, be it neoconservatism, Maoism, fundamentalist Christianity or Taliban-style Islam, is such a useful thing. Ideologues simplify things. They refuse to acknowledge those nasty nuances. There’s a simple for answer for everything: you just have to consult the revealed text (be it the Koran, Das Kapital, or Fukuyama’s “End Of History”), and there’s the answer. As long as it’s derived from or consistent with your chosen revelation, no further thought is required. Nuances don’t exist.
And best of all, you don’t don’t actually have to engage with any ideas that challenge your stance. If they are not in consistent with your truth, then they are self evidently wrong, because they’re - well, they’re not consistent with the Bible, the Koran, the Little Red Book or the Thoughts of Chairman Tom Flanagan. So they’re wrong. End of story.
Unfortunately that has increasingly become the tone of public discourse. We talk less and less about the merits or flaws of an idea idea: we simply parse it for compatibility with our respective dogmas, and spit out our reaction based on its compliance to spec. The simpler the better.
The problem is, that doesn’t lead to very robust moral conclusions: it leaves us dependent on external authority for our judgements. A neoconservative president or a radical Imam can declare that X is “evil”, and the followers have only to agree. Neither the president nor the Imam want you to do what Ignatieff does; start from first principles, examine their assertion on its own merits in the light of your own wit and experience, and reach your own conclusions. In fact, they count on you NOT doing that. And too many of us oblige them.
That’s why we need writers who remind us that those pronouncements from on high, or even our own unexamined moral assumptions, need to be hauled into the light and scrutinized. We need to value those “nuances”, and those who are honest enough to identify them and explore them with us. One very astute commentator at Sinister thoughts observed that Ignatieff’s essay and position, while academically admirable, was politically unwise. Excellent. So be it. I have nothing but admiration for a writer who puts honesty, with all its attendant nuances, ahead of politics. We’ve all seen what happens when those priorities get reversed.
You can have all the nuance you want in Highbrowdonia. Academics usually aren’t that good at politics or policy.