Several people have e-mailed me asking whether I’ll blog about the torture memo. The answer is probably “no,” and I thought I’d briefly explain why not — partly to forestall future e-mails, and partly because I think it’s interesting to think about how various writers decide what to ewrite about, and maybe this post might provide something of a data point.
First, while this is a very important controversy, it’s also one that’s outside my core area of expertise, and I’d have to do a good deal of reading to get competent on it. The memo is long enough, but I’d also have to get into the relevant international treaties and how they have been interpreted, and into the presidential power question (which is an aspect of constitutional law, but not one I usually do, since I generally focus on individual rights as such and not on structural questions). On other matters, such as free speech, law and religion, gun policy, cyberspace law, copyright law, and such, I can often whip off posts without investing a lot of time, since I can build on my substantial knowledge base in the field. Not so here.
Second, precisely because this is an important and controversial question, there are lots of other people commenting on it, and I’m likely to get lots of responses. I’d feel obligated to respond to some of them, especially if they contain important criticisms or point out errors on my part (not unlikely, given what I say above), especially because the topic is indeed so important. After two years of blogging, I can smell a time sink a mile away — and this is likely to be one.
Now of course there are times that I do invest a good deal of time into researching something that I want to blog about, and write it off to my General Education Time Account. That’s one way my knowledge base gets built up.
But, third, I just don’t like this topic. I find it not just difficult but also sickening. Torture is disgusting. Failing to stop the next terrorist attack that kills thousands is awful. Does the need to save people’s lives justify torturing suspects? How many lives? Would it take hundreds of thousands (as in the hidden nuclear bomb scenario)? Thousands? Dozens? A couple? I don’t know the answers, and while I have no doubt about the importance of the questions, I don’t enjoy thinking about them. The whole topic is sad and horrible, whatever the right answer is.
It’s not a rational reaction; it’s a visceral one. I’m not proud of my squeamishness, but there it is. I know that just because something is sickening doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Sometimes people need to do disgusting things to avoid greater harms. (And sometimes the disgusting thing is so disgusting that it is the greater harm, or at least doing it enough times will cause greater harms.) But if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.
And fortunately I do have a choice. If I had to think about torture, I would. If I were paid for it, or if I were given a position of official responsibility which requited me to think about it, or if I was teaching a class or writing an article that would be incomplete without it, then I’d buckle down and do it. But none of these applies here. (I do in some measure have to think about this as a citizen, but fortunately that can be a much shallower and briefer thought process than it would take to develop an opinion that I would be comfortable sharing with others, an opinion that will be as thoughtful and defensible as I hope the readers of the blog have generally come to expect from it.)
I’m fortunate to be in a position where I can choose the topics I focus on. The downside of being an amateur (in the best sense of the word, I hope) is that you don’t get the perks of a pro. The upside is that you can do what you love (the root “ama-” in “amateur”). I don’t love talking about torture, not one little bit.
I have on a very few occasions in the past touched on this topic, usually when I had a small and rather tangential comment that I felt confident in (usually because it did flow from one of my core areas of expertise). If you want to see the three moderately long comments I made on the matter when the issue wasn’t as hot, and posting didn’t require immersing myself in the subject), see here, here, and (in the most detail) here. (Note that all of these talk about the broad theoretical questions, and not the international treaty or separation of powers issues raised in the most recent debate.) The third of these posts culminates with “So where does that leave me? Sad, unsatisfied, and afraid.” That still about summarizes the matter. I might still post a little more in the future, or I might change my mind and indeed jump into the subject. But I don’t expect that I’ll be saying much about this.
In any case, I’m passing along this unusually meta comment because I do think that readers might find it interesting to figure out how some bloggers choose what to blog about and what to skip. I get enough messages saying “I’m surprised that I haven’t seen you blog on [fill in subject here]” — related to a bunch of subjects — that I know people have expectations about what we’re likely to focus on, sometimes accurate expectations and sometimes not. (Of course, perhaps “I’m surprised” is just a rhetorical trope meaning “I think you should blog on . . . .”) Perhaps people might therefore want a peek into how at least one blogger’s decisionmaking process operates here.
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