issue.44 He emphasizes its ethically problematic character: “it is not at all clear if the biological form of consciousness, as so far brought about by evolution on our planet, is a desirable form of experience, an actual good in itself.”45 This problematic feature concerns conscious pain and suffering: evolution
has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none. As not only the simple number of individual conscious subjects but also the dimensionality of their phenomenal state spaces is continuously increasing, this ocean is also deepening.46
And it is reasonable to expect that new artificially generated forms of awareness will create new “deeper” forms of suffering . . . One should be careful to note how this ethical thesis is not an idiosyncrasy of Metzinger as a private person, but is a consistent implication of his theoretical framework: the moment one endorses the full naturalization of human subjectivity, the avoidance of pain and suffering cannot but appear as the ultimate ethical point of reference. The only thing one should add to this is that, if one follows this line of reasoning to the end, drawing all the consequences from the fact that evolution “has created an expanding ocean of suffering and confusion where there previously was none,” then one should also renounce human subjectivity itself: we would have had much less suffering if we had remained animals . . . and, to push it yet further, if animals had remained plants, if plants had remained single cells, if cells had remained minerals.
One of the great ironies of our predicament is that this same biomorality, focused on happiness and on preventing suffering, is today invoked as the underlying principle for the justification of torture: we should torture—impose pain and suffering—in order to prevent more suffering. One is truly tempted to paraphrase De Quincey yet again: “How many people began with committing a little act of torture, and ended up embracing as their cause the fight against pain and suffering!” This definitely holds for Sam Harris whose defense of torture in The End of Faith is based on the distinction between our immediate state of being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract notion of others’ suffering: it is much more difficult for us to torture a single person than to drop a bomb from a great distance which would cause the more painful death of thousands. We are thus all caught in a kind of ethical illusion, parallel to perceptual illusions. The ultimate cause of these illusions is that, although our power of abstract reasoning has developed immensely, our emotional-ethical responses remain conditioned by millennia-old instinctual reactions of sympathy to suffering and pain that is directly witnessed. This is why shooting someone point-blank is, for most of us, much more repulsive than pressing a button that will kill a thousand absent persons:
Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture, in certain circumstances, would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable, in ethical terms, than it did before. The reasons for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. . . . It may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky.47
No wonder that Harris refers to Alan Derschowitz and his legitimization of torture.48 In order to suspend this evolutionary conditioned vulnerability to the physical display of others’ suffering, Harris imagines an ideal “truth pill,” an effective torture equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke:
a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end?49
The very first lines—“a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment”—introduces the typically postmodern logic of the chocolate laxative: the torture imagined here is like decaf coffee—we get the result without having to suffer unpleasant side effects. At the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the already-mentioned psychiatric outlet of the KGB, they did invent just such a drug with which to torture dissidents: an injection into the prisoner’s heart zone which slowed down his heart beat and caused terrifying anxiety. Viewed from the outside, the prisoner seemed just to be dozing, while in fact he was living a nightmare.
There is, however, a much more disquieting prospect at work here: the proximity (of the tortured subject) which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not his mere physical proximity, but, at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbor, with all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term, the proximity of the Thing which, no matter how far away it is physically, is always by definition “too close.” What Harris is aiming at with his imagined “truth pill” is nothing less than the abolition of the dimension of the Neighbor. The tortured subject is no longer a Neighbor, but an object whose pain is neutralized, reduced to a property that has to be dealt with in a rational utilitarian calculus (so much pain is tolerable if it prevents a much greater amount of pain). What disappears here is the abyss of the infinity that pertains to a subject. It is thus significant that the book which argues for torture is also a book entitled The End of Faith—not in the obvious sense of “You see, it is only our belief in God, the divine injunction to love your neighbor, that ultimately prevents us from torturing people!” but in a much more radical sense. Another subject (and, ultimately, the subject as such) is for Lacan not something directly given, but a “presupposition,” something presumed, an object of belief—how can I ever be sure that what I see in front of me is another subject, not a biological machine lacking any depth?
There is, however, a popular and seemingly convincing reply to those who worry about the recent US practice of torturing suspected terrorist prisoners. It is: “What’s all the fuss about? The US are now only (half) openly admitting what not only they were doing all the time, but what all other states are and were doing all the time—if anything, we have less hypocrisy now . . .” To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: “If the senior representatives of the US mean only this, why, then, are they telling us this? Why don’t they just silently go on doing it, as they did up until now?” That is to say, what is proper to human speech is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation: “You say this, but why are you telling me it openly now?” Let us imagine a wife and husband who coexist with a tacit agreement that they can lead discreet extra-marital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband openly tells his wife about an ongoing affair, she will have good reason to be in panic: “If it is just an affair, why are you telling me this? It must be something more!”50 The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral, it affects the reported content itself.
And the same goes for the recent open admission of torture: in November 2005, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that defeating terrorists meant that “we also have to work . . . sort of the dark side . . . A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion”—was he not talking like a reborn Kurtz? So when we hear people like Dick Cheney making their obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask them: “If you just want to torture secretly some suspected terrorists, then why are you saying it publicly?” That is to say, the question to be raised is: what more is there hiding in this statement that made the speaker enunciate it?
We could note (more than) a hint of what there is when, in the middle of March 2007, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession dominated the headlines of our media. Moral outrage at the extent of his crimes was mixed with doubts. Can his confession be trusted? What if he confessed even more than he did, either because of a vain desire to be remembered as the big terrorist Mastermind, or because he was ready to confess anything in order to stop being subjected to water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”? What attracted much less attention
