The Salesmanship of Fear

Impending fatherhood has rendered me emotionally sensitive to a host of new triggers. Babies, mostly. And pregnant women. And the birthing of babies by pregnant women. All of these things are, without warning, liable to shatter my steely shell and leave me a blubbery trembling mess. This can be dangerous for myself and others if I happen to be driving down the highway at 7o mph.

Therefore, I would kindly ask GM to deep-six their current radio campaign for On-Star.

The ad portrays an On-Star operator responding to a car crash involving a pregnant woman. The ad opens with the operator talking to the woman immediately after the crash. The woman is alright, but she is worried because she is pregnant. The operator contacts 911, and then connects the woman with her husband, and the add closes with his panicked concern for her and her tearful assurances that she's alright.

I had to scream at the radio--transmute all my fear and sadness and relief into anger--in order to keep some semblance of my wits about me.

Look, I know that advertising always plays on the passions. And usually the sad passions, at that. Getting people to feel a need for your product frequently involves activating anxieties and then offering the product as a balm for those anxieties. (Even thought this appeal to fear and anxiety is usually, and most effectively, subtle and mediated; the insurance commercial that directly says "You will die and then your family will be poor and helpless" is the exception, and recognized as such.) But this experience brought this home in a particularly forceful way. Rather than enabling us to confront our hopes and fears and live with them, advertising encourages our fear by offering up a savior. You should be afraid of losing your spouse or child in a car crash. You should buy a GM car with On-Star to allay that fear. The fear doesn't actually go anywhere when it is allayed in this way. Rather, it is preserved as a dark background behind your new attachment to your GM car. Should something happen now, should the On-Star fail to save your loved ones, you are left completely unprepared. This isn't what was supposed to happen.

Aristotle distinguishes optimism and courage. Optimism is the expectation that you will prevail, that things will turn out as you hope. Courage, on the other hand, is the ability to act beyond any hope of things turning out well. I know that I am congenitally prone to optimism, but, as the birth of my child nears, I am more and more aware that optimism is not what is called for. It is grossly insufficient to the moment. I'm no less ruled by fear just because I always tell myself everything will turn out alright.

But this just points up the falseness of any attempt to bring about "freedom from fear" by means of such optimism. Hope and optimism do not free you from fear. They silently preserve its dominion.

The Cunning of the Hypothetical

Via TPM:

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) said that he'd been getting the impression that Mukasey really thought about torture in relative terms, and wanted to know if that was so. Is it OK to waterboard someone if a nuclear weapon was hidden -- the Jack Bauer scenario -- but not OK to waterboard someone for more pedestrian information?

Mukasey responded that it was "not simply a relative issue," but there "is a statute where it is a relative issue," he added, citing the Detainee Treatment Act. That law engages the "shocks the conscience" standard, he explained, and you have to "balance the value of doing something against the cost of doing it.

"What does "cost" mean, Biden wanted to know.

Mukasey said that was the wrong word. "I mean the heinousness of doing it, the cruelty of doing it, balanced against the value.... balanced against the information you might get." Information "that couldn't be used to save lives," he explained, would be of less value.

I saw Gordon Hull give a great paper on precisely this issue at the last SPEP. For Hull, the central issue seems to be the way in which the outlandish Jack Bauer scenarios--with their built in fictions of total knowledge--serve to commensurate the incommensurable. We pretend that Jack Bauer knows:

1. that there will be a catastrophic attack,
2. that the detainee knows where, when, and how the attack will take place,
3. that torture will get this information out of the detainee in time, and
4. that this information will allow Bauer to stop the attack.

Only through this elaborate pretense are we able to get something on the other side of the scale, against which we might weigh the acts of torture. The value of information doesn't hang in mid-air, after all. Shocking the conscience is just a cost to be overridden by the value of the information. That we never know the "value" of information before we have it, and never know that the subject even has the information we imagine him or her to have doesn't need to slow us down, since the thought experiment short circuits our ignorance.

Call it the cunning of the hypothetical...

UPDATE: Digby:

If you don't know what they know, then you can't know in advance if what they know might save lives, right?

I honestly don't know why everybody's so hung up on waterboarding specifically at this point. If this is their legal understanding, then they can use the rack, they can break arms and legs and they can pull teeth out with a pair of pliers. There is no logical difference between any of that and waterboarding if the only moral and legal guideline is that "it might be used to save lives."

UPDATE II: Greenwald:

Mukasey can go and casually tell them to their faces that the President has the right to violate their laws, that activities which everyone knows is against the law are legal, and that Congress has no power to do anything about it. And nothing is going to happen. And everyone -- the Senators, Bush officials, the country -- knows that nothing is going to happen. There is nothing too extreme that Mukasey could say to those Senators that would prompt any consequences greater than some sighing and sorrowful expressions of disapproval.

UPDATE III: Michael "Faster, please" Ledeen:

...the absolutists are legalistic utopians, because they believe it is possible to draft laws, or regs, or guidelines, that will obviate the need for human decision. That is not possible, any more than the bureaucratic manuals or the military manuals on whatever subject will eliminate human error (although they do sometimes make creative enterprise more difficult). Some smart Frenchman once said that the key to good government was to know when to break the rules.

How does doing away with the rules constitute knowing when to break the rules? The absolutists have a far better understanding of decisions than does Herr Ledeen.

1. Cost/benefit analysis is not a decision procedure, but an avoidance of decision. It enshrines the hypothetical imagination as the seat of choice, and strives to reduce decision to a calculus (even if that calculus is wholly fictitious).
2. If breaking the rules is ever necessary, then the breaker ought to be self-possessed enough to admit he or she is breaking the rules, and responsible enough to face the prison sentence that follows with dignity.
3. The whole point of the argument about torture is about whether there ought to be rules or not, so Ledeen's whole post is just nonsense.