Cynicism and Morality

Alexander Cockburn’s brilliant dissection of a recent New York Times editorial is well worth reading, especially for anyone accustomed to the numbing combination of banality and detached finger-wagging that characterizes the editorial stance of that paper. But the real insight of Cockburn’s piece is his observation that the editorial form itself is utterly moribund as a genre. The classic image of the editorial as a polemic, rooted in a concrete political position and oriented toward a particular political end, has been so compromised and hollowed out that literally no one believes in it anymore. As Cockburn notes,

In the main, the editorial thunderbolt, hurled from on high with stately and effective violence is a thing of the past. Newspapers, as institutions, simply lack the credibility to be seen as tribunes of the people. The Eighties and nineties took their toll. What respect can be granted to newspaper publishers mostly preoccupied with monopolizing cities and ensuring themselves a 20 per cent rate of return?

Hence the rise of the finger wagging, hand-wringing exercise that has become so familiar to us, almost inevitably leading to a contradiction between the high moral stance of the editorialist, and the ultimately conformist (or at least quietist) conclusion of the editorial. These contradictions rarely appear as problems because the aim of the editorial has shifted from principled political argument to a moralistic denunciation that is detached from political outcomes.

This curiously contradictory form was exemplified in an editorial from a few weeks ago over Condoleezza Rice’s attempts to explain U.S. torture policy to Europeans. After what appeared as a principled denunciation of torture and “extraordinary renditions” as such, the tone shifted to worry over what European governments would think of us.

Certainly, some of Europe's shock at the news of the C.I.A. camps is political theater aimed at the widely anti-American European public. But that doesn't make it any less disturbing that the United States government seems to have lost its ability to distinguish between acts that may occur sub rosa in some exceptional, critical situations and the basic rules of proper international behavior.

So which is it? Should torture be rejected in principle, or should it be allowed in exceptional situations? If the latter, who gets to decide what is exceptional, and how is that scenario any different from what Rice was defending in the first place? Remarkably, the editorial position shifted from a moral rejection of torture, to a pragmatic rejection of upsetting our European allies, to an admission that torture may be practiced “sub rosa,” so long as it doesn’t disturb the international status quo. Although an extreme example, this slippage is not merely duplicity on the part of the Times. It also demonstrates how difficult it is to distinguish moral denunciations that are not rooted in a distinct political stance from a de facto support of the status quo. Moral denunciations alone are not opposed to the cynicism Cockburn discusses. They are a symptom of it, and it is not surprising that such denunciations cannot constitute a basis for an effective critique of the war on terror.