Seeing Democracy as a Defense against Torture and Unnecessary War Is Naive — A Comment about Henry Giroux’s “Radical Democracy”

19 December 2014

What follows identifies me as conservative

In the long forgotten Edmund Burke sense.

Which means that I have nothing in common with most of the fools, who claim the label today.

Two premises — human beings are not perfectible and democracy is not an antidote to evil

The United States’ too frequently morally contemptible actions demonstrate both principles. Walt Kelly’s — “We have met the enemy and he is us” — is an apt summation.

When the archetypal adversary is indeed “us” — the road to societal improvement is unlikely

For example, what is just as disturbing as the details covered by the Senate’s torture report is the public’s majority approval of the methods. In the United States, vicious leaders are supported by an equally brutal and cowardly public.

This is why I disagree with Henry A. Giroux, who partly presumes that a functioning democratic process would improve America’s ethical orientation

In my view, Giroux’s premise is neither obvious nor achievable, even it were. Mildly resequenced to make Mr. Giroux’s point clearer:

Torture is not just a matter of policy; it is an addiction . . . deadening mindset . . . moral paralysis . . . war crime . . . element of the spectacle of violence . . . and it must be challenged . . . .

Foreign and domestic violence now mediate everyday relations and the United States' connection to the larger world. . . . [P]eople not only become numb to the horror of torture but begin to live in a state of moral stupor . . . .

How else to explain recent polls indicating that 58 percent of the US public believe that torture under certain circumstances can be justified, and that 59 percent think that the CIA's brutal torture methods produced crucial information that helped prevent future attacks?

There is . . . a dangerous escape from justice, morality and the most basic principles central to a democratic society.

Not only has the United States lost its moral compass, but it has degenerated into a state of political darkness reminiscent of older dictatorships that maimed human bodies and inflicted unspeakable acts of violence on the innocent, while embracing a mad war-like utility and pragmatism in order to remove themselves from any sense of justice, compassion and reason.

A radical democracy demands a notion of educated hope capable of energizing a generation of young people . . . who connect the torture state to the violence and criminality of an economic system that celebrates its own depravities.

I recommend reading Giroux’s essay

Its presented evidence is overwhelming. Its passion, eloquent.

In sum, unregulated narcissistically-based capitalism, combined with government totalitarianism, deadens the public’s ethics. Which (Giroux thinks) might be remedied by reinstituting a functioning democracy, led by what I loosely call “citizen angels” to guide it.

I am not making fun of Mr. Giroux

The problem of how to keep society and government from decaying into reprehensible moral depths has been an insoluble philosophical problem for millennia. And I know no better solution than Mr. Giroux’s.

But it does appear to me that all of human history has proven that morally aware and courageous people never dominate society. That is why America’s founders struggled so much with properly balancing institutionalized checks and balances. That their contrivance failed is obvious now.

The other major problem with Mr. Giroux’s ameliorative thinking, insofar as I have put it together from reading many thousands of his words, is that nowhere does he prescribe how we throw off the shackles of plutocratically purchased institutions, so as to let our citizen-angels take over.

Two core practical problems

One, our democratic institutions have been seized by America’s oligarchs.

Two, we citizens let them get away with it because we are perpetually afraid of anything that moves or casts shadows.

Stephan Richter is correct, Americans are easy to scare. When we are scared, we appear to be willing to commit any atrocity and give up any liberty, so as to assure themselves that we will be safe.

It is going to be difficult to find enough courageously and selflessly decent people in our pot to lead us anywhere. Which proves the Burkean social point — human beings are not perfectible, and that is why governance is so challenging.

The moral? — It is not just our leaders’ fault that we act in rotten ways

For example, the racism that underlies American culture causes not only the brutal repression of African-Americans at home, it is the unspoken principle that justifies maltreating the people we tortured and continue to drone murder. Virtually all of them are not white. Consider in support of this statement:

(i) why the United States intervened in Bosnia, but not Rwanda (an especially telling comparison)

(ii) why we thought it was acceptable to kill hundreds of thousands in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

(iii) why dealing years of death in Iraq and Afghanistan was considered appropriate

and

(iv) why the still continuing West African ebola epidemic was allowed to escalate out of control for as long as it did.

Democracy is not an antidote to acting reprehensibly human.

PeteFree.com

Seeing Democracy as a Defense against Torture and Unnecessary War Is Naive — A Comment about Henry Giroux’s “Radical Democracy”