Almost two years ago I wrote a post, The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection, about a young woman in Psychoanalysis who persisted in dangerous, potentially suicidal, behavior in thrall to her angry feminist politics. She insisted on inhabiting a world that conformed to her wishes rather than the world as it actually exists and this placed her in significant danger. It is worth repeating here a brief description of part of the analytic work:
Many years ago a young woman entered Psychoanalysis for chronic problems she was having in maintaining her relationships. She announced at the start that she was an ardent feminist and that her feelings about this were not subjects for analytic review. Early in her treatment, her primary interest seemed to be to initiate arguments with me over male perfidy and oppression of women. It was not easy to maintain my neutral position in the face of near constant attack. (Her attacks felt like assaults, usually couched in terms of the patriarchal form and design of the analytic situation where I sat back like a typical male authority figure and made her suffer from my inane and stupid comments.) After several months of this I began to wonder if I would ever be able to actually start the process of exploring, as therapeutic allies, how her mind works, rather than remaining stuck in the "inherently oppressive" analysis, which was the only way she could experience my efforts. The breakthrough came when she casually mentioned toward the end of one session that her ankle was bothering her and she was annoyed (she was almost always annoyed about something, I might add) that she wouldn't be able to jog that night. Since I knew that she was living in a marginal area of Manhattan and this was at a time when crime was at high levels and much in the news, I had concerns that her jogging might be putting her at risk. When I asked her where she jogged, she confirmed that she jogged in a relatively dangerous area. Her response to my comment to that effect was that women should be allowed to jog wherever and whenever they wished without fear of men and that nothing and nobody, including me, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.
I was greatly relieved that it did not take long for her to recognize that her angry feminism (which had roots in long term feelings of disgust with her mother and envy of her brother's exalted position in her family) was inadvertently providing her with a rationalization for dangerous and self destructive behavior. I should point out that both of us agreed that she and every other woman should be free to jog wherever and whenever they wished, but reality required that until such time as this Utopian ideal could be arranged, prudence dictated that she jog at a different time and place as was her wont. When, as often was reported in the news in those days, a woman was assaulted and badly injured near the area she had been jogging, she responded with an anxiety attack; she was stricken with the thought that it could have been her and that there was an unconscious part of her mind that had been inviting just such an outcome. This was the true beginning of a very successful analytic treatment.
I used this case to illustrate the idealization of abstract ideology that can both express and hide more dangerous and destructive impulses. At the time, I focused on leaks in the press of details of intelligence operations directed against potential Islamic terrorists. Similar thoughts occur to me now in the wake of the arguments made against the confirmation of our new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey.
In the past I have been taken to task, not without some justification, for criticism of "the Left" rather than of specific people and situations. I thought, with the able assistance of Frank Rich, I would rectify that omission today.
Since Frank Rich has a prominent place on the Op-Ed pages of our pre-eminent newspaper of record, the New York Times, I do not think it is an exaggeration to consider him a mainstream liberal; I doubt he would dispute that characterization. In his piece on Sunday, amid the snark that seems to be de riguer for the Times these days, he attempts to draw a rather close parallel between the recent coup in Pakistan and the supposed coup that has already occurred here at home; he makes the analogy overt in the title of his piece:
AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
Rich apparently fails to notice the irony of his assertion. While Musharaf has arrested all sorts of political opponents and shut down the press (a point that Rich curiously omits), Frank Rich continues to write his courageous "truth to power" and is quite well paid for such; there is little evidence, and Rich does not assert it, that he is in any danger of being jailed or having the Times shut down, yet he still apparently needs to believe he is standing up to a tyrant. However, I am not concerned with Frank Rich's faux bravery. I am more concerned with his unfortunately typical idealization of the abstract. Frank Rich apparently cannot distinguish the thought from the deed (or the imagined, probably projected, wish from the deed) and holds the view that all flaws in one's moral standing are exactly equivalent. He does not give any evidence of awareness that he exercises hyperbole:
This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.
Eric Alterman, another intellectual liberal, quotes Tom Stoppard approvingly in his effort to demonize the "torturers of the Bush administration:
In his terrific new play "Rock 'n' Roll," Tom Stoppard has his character, Jan, a former Czech dissident, wonder aloud, "How did the propaganda paper and the capitalist press arrive at the same relation to the truth? Because all systems are blood brothers. Changing one system for another is not what the Velvet Revolution was for. We have to begin again with the ordinary meaning of words. Giving new meanings to words is how systems lie to themselves, beginning with the word for themselves—socialism, democracy. ... An invasion becomes fraternal assistance, and a parasite can be someone who is punished by unemployment and punished again for being unemployed."
Once having allowed "torture" (and I have no doubt that if I were water boarded I would consider it torture; at the same time I can still recognize that torment that leaves me intact is not the exact equivalent of torture that leaves me crippled or dead) all moral authority is considered null and void by those who hold themselves to the very highest of abstract standards. The doyens of a perfect morality feel quite well qualified to pass judgment on those who must deal with an imperfect reality ill suited to their perfect morality.
Waterboarding is a terrifying interrogation technique; it terrifies and horrifies. Yet to maintain that there can never be any circumstances in which such extreme measures are acceptable is to not only defy reality but to destroy complexity. Haskel Lookstein quotes Alan Dershowitz, an apostate liberal, in an article in the New York Sun today about Michael Mukasey:
"Michael Mukasey … is absolutely correct, as a matter of constitutional law, that the issue of 'waterboarding' cannot be decided in the abstract. Under prevailing precedents … the court must examine the nature of the governmental interest at stake, and the degree to which the government actions at issue shocked the conscience, and then decide on a case by case basis. In several cases involving actions at least as severe as waterboarding, courts have found no violations of due process."
Reality is messy, filled with situational ambiguities that can not be avoided merely by wishful fantasy.
In my orignial post on the topic linked above, I described how my patient had idealized her intellectual construct, her feminist ideology, above her own safety and an appreciation of reality. Because of this idealization of the abstract she was able to express her unconscious self-destructive impulses (though thankfully, reality never fully rewarded her masochism.) In the same way the civil liberties absolutists risk losing all in their quest for a perfectly moral nation. Eschewing wiretapping, even of foreign nationals, in the service of an absolutist civil liberties ideology risks disaster. So too does the absolutist insistence that no circumstances could ever justify making our enemies uncomfortable, a demand made explicit by those who insist we extend the full panoply of constitutional rights, including habeas corpus, to terrorists.
If we were to capture a "high value target" and eschew water boarding out of fear of legal liability or adherence to a higher purpose, and another 9/11 occurred, waterboarding our enemies would be the least of our civil liberties put at risk. The Frank Richs and Eric Altermans of the world who insist on impossible standards of behavior from those who attempt to protect us (and then are among the first to assail them when they fail) in their suicidal pursuit of perfection make our future even more perilous than it need be.
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