30 June 2004
Newton Garver
The Politics of Humiliation
Revelation of the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib caught the world off guard, and expressions of outrage have been clamorous. Such treatment of fellow human beings is an outrage and deserves to be condemned. But I confess to being surprised and a little puzzled by the clamor and surprise. Except for the details and the photos, Abu Ghraib was, after all, a natural consequence of the politics of humiliation combined with the iron curtain of secrecy. The magnitude of the public reaction suggests that most people lack an understanding of the politics of humiliation.
Politics
Part of the politics of humiliation is politics that is both hard-headed and hard hearted. Such politics is about power, not about welfare. In one of the most powerful essays of the twentieth century, Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political, 1932), Carl Schmitt insisted that politics is grounded in an arbitrary distinction between friends and foes. Friends are people or states prepared to fight (or campaign) with you: a coalition of the willing. Foes are those who go onto something like Nixon’s famous "enemies list": they are those against whom you are prepared to fight (or campaign). Politics in this sense cannot exist without enemies; there must be at least two opposed parties or nation-states.
Schmitt argued that the division between friends and foes is arbitrary and ultimate. It is arbitrary in that it is not based on any issue or rational criterion. If there is an issue, it can in principle be resolved by some combination of lawyers, bankers, scientists, and diplomats, and then politics has no role to play. What happened at Pugwash is that the agreement of Hans Bethe and Andrei Sakharov about the detectability of nuclear tests made the politicians irrelevant: the Cold War went into temporary eclipse. The division is absolute in that the parties are prepared to go to war. Schmitt quotes with approval the famous remark of Clausewitz that war is a continuation of politics by other means - which shows what kind of thing they think that politics is.
Schmitt was adamant that politics has nothing to do with morality, and that the distinction between friend and foe cannot be grounded in morality. It is a matter of us against them, not of good against evil. Both sides are human, so a politician who characterizes "them" as morally inferior risks not only the hubris of arrogance but also the blasphemy of denying God to be the creator of all.
Schmitt believed that politics properly belongs to nation-states, since they alone have the power to make war. This is a reasonable position. Nonetheless, partisan politics, particularly electoral politics in the USA today, involves a similar dichotomy between "us" and "them," with the proportions of rich and not-so-rich, as well as of virtue and cunning, roughly the same on both sides of the line. What is at stake is power, not righteousness - and not problem-solving.
Government, of course, requires paying some attention to problem-solving. There are alternative conceptions of politics - those of Aristotle and Rawls, for example - that regard politics as the art of government rather than the pursuit of power. Politicians often implement that conception when they act as legislators. But it is Schmitt’s conception that takes center stage when someone says, "The people are tired of politics; they want us to put politics aside and get down to the business of government." Or again, when we speak of the politics of humiliation.
Humiliation
Humiliation is not a proper part of politics in either Schmitt’s conception or in alternative conceptions. Humiliation is both a kind of action and a feeling the often accompanies the action and is always meant to accompany it. The action is one that deliberately treats a person as having a status inferior to the actual status of the person or to the status that the person deserves or previously enjoyed. The status being denied may be a common one that involved no ceremony, as when an adult is treated as a child, or it may be a special status, as when a soldier is given a dishonorable discharge or when a parishioner is excommunicated.
Schmitt mixed religion with his tough conception of politics. He was a right-wing Catholic, believing that the power of the Lord was over all, even over one’s enemies. From his perspective it would be blasphemy to treat one’s foes as less than human. We are all moral equals, on this view, even though politics sometimes makes it "necessary" to kill one’s enemies. Religion, however, often gets mixed with politics in a different—and to my mind less honorable—way, whereby "we" become identified as the Lord’s agents on this beleaguered earth, and "they" are identified as evil. Such sanctimonious arrogance is widespread; and though it is particularly virulent among the neocons and their supporters in the Bible Belt, it also lives in the opening lines of one of Rilke’s sonnets:
What will you do, God, when I die,
When I, your pitcher, broken lie?
The Rest of the Iceberg
Abu Ghraib is horrible and disgusting, but it is not the main thing. The popular adage might be that Abu Ghraib is just the tip of the iceberg. And the VP uttering an obscenity at Senator Leahy was another, smaller, part of the tip. That is not a bad beginning at getting things in proper proportion. Beneath these newsworthy incidents lies a whole culture that disdains its opponents and critics and is quick to belittle them at any turn. The iceberg includes the Rush Limbaughs and Charles Krauthammers, and even the NY Times, when it editorializes that the peasants who threw out Bolivian President Gonzales Sanchez need to overcome their "nationalism and economic ignorance." We are plagued with a politics of humiliation that begins with disdain and verbal put-downs.
Arrogance, whether based on religion or ideology, has little use for knowledge and experience. What need is there for the accumulated wisdom of civilization when one is directly inspired and guided by God or by abstract theory? So the Bush administration has cast aside with disdain both experts and expertise —Hans Blix, Paul O.Neill, Richard Clarke, a whole cadre of diplomats, another cadre of generals, the French experience in Algeria, Arab scholars such as Walid and Rashid Khaladi, and so on. In each case there is a pooh-poohing that attempts to lower their status. In other words, disdain and humiliation. In this way the politics of humiliation is a very real threat to civilization, which depends not so much on "security" as on the continued utilization and enrichment of the accumulated wisdom of science, law, history, and diplomacy.
Humiliation of enemies is an ancient practice. It involves not only belittlement and ridicule but also demonization. Both are forms of dehumanization, for they imply that these persons are unfit for genuinely human society, and for genuine dialogue. Both forms of dehumanization were employed against Saddam, first portrayed as a paragon of evil and then pictured having lice removed from his disheveled hair. But this administration humiliates even allies and citizens—not only when they dare to criticize Pentagon policy, but even if they are only potential threats.
We can glimpse how the politics of humiliation works by considering an Iraqi who resents having a foreign soldier, who does not even speak his language, force his way at gunpoint into his home and search his private possessions. We would consider any American who offered no protest or resistance to such intrusion a coward, a real yellow-belly. But if the Iraqi resists, or even protests, he is branded a "terrorist" and becomes subject to melting into a mere statistic. (Simone Weil said that violence turns humans into things, but we now turn them into statistics instead—except in the cases where we don’t even bother to count.)
The word "terrorist" is one of the tools of the politics of humiliation. All the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were "terrorists" or "potential terrorists." So they were not any longer "human."
This administration has vastly extended the ancient practice of humiliating enemies by vastly increasing the category of "enemy." It has done so in two ways. One is to include as an "enemy" any neutral person. In September of 2001 President Bush decreed that there could be no neutrals in the "war" against terror; so anyone who did not join with him was a friend of the terrorists, and hence an enemy. Germany and France were bad-mouthed as "old Europe," and the UN weapons inspectors were dismissed as a "failure." The other is to include as an "enemy" anyone who is a potential enemy, or a potential "terrorist." By that device the whole population of the world is subject to petty humiliations at every airport, at every US consulate, and at every port of entry. It is a humiliation to have one’s things pawed over by strangers, even when they smile and act "professionally," as the TSA inspectors now do. Dignity and autonomy, the backbone of old-fashioned American freedom, vanish, suppressed by Ashcroft paternalism.
Life is certainly impoverished by Ashcroft paternalism, as by Rumsfeldian arrogance, but I see no reason to believe that the petty humiliations make us more secure.
The Cure
The cure for a politics of humiliation is twofold: it requires both humility and respect—listening to critics and protesters instead of cursing dissident Iraqis and skeptical senators. For those of us who see every person as among "all God’s creatures," the demonization that underlies this politics of humiliation is a blasphemy, and part of the cure lies in an earnest search for that of God in each person, friend or foe. Jefferson’s secular version is that every person has a moral sense that is as much a human organ as an arm or a leg, and as much in need of exercise; so respect for others means calling on their moral sense and giving them space to exercise it.
We don’t know what is best for Iraq, On the other hand, it is obvious that what we are doing in Iraq is bad for the USA. The imperialist arrogance makes us foolish, the priority of military force over diplomacy makes us brutish, and using young Americans as instruments of the politics of humiliation corrupts our youth. It is time to end the whole ill-conceived adventure.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.