Post-Ethical Society: The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular

Douglas V. Porpora is professor of sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University. His books include How Holocausts Happen: The U.S. in Central America and Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life. Alexander Nikolaev is associate professor of communication at Drexel University. He is the author of International Negotiations: Theory, Practice, and the Connection with Domestic Politics and coeditor of Leading to the 2003 Iraq War: The Global Media Debate and Ethical Issues in International Communication. Julia Hagemann May and Alexander Jenkins are doctoral candidates at Drexel University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

22   21  20   19   18   17   16   15   14   13       1   2   3   4   5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06249-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06252-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/9780226062525

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Post-ethical society : the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the moral failure of the secular/Douglas V. Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, Julia Hagemann May, Alexander Jenkins.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-06249-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-226-06252-5 (e-book)   

1. Iraq War, 2003–2011—Moral and ethical aspects—Foreign public opinion, American.    2. Iraq War, 2003–2011—Atrocities—Foreign public opinion, American.    3. Iraq War, 2003–2011—Prisoners and prisons—Foreign public opinion, American.    4. Torture—Iraq—Foreign public opinion, American.    5. Abu Ghraib Prison—Foreign public opinion, American.    I. Porpora, Douglas V.    II. Nikolaev, Alexander G.    III. May, Julia Hagemann.    IV. Jenkins, Alexander.

DS79.767.M67P67 2013

956.7044′31—dc23

2012051425

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Post-Ethical Society:

The Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular

Douglas V. Porpora

Alexander Nikolaev

Julia Hagemann May

Alexander Jenkins

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Do We Need Religion?

1. Prudential and Moral Argumentation about the Iraq War

2. Setting the Context: President Bush’s Prewar Rhetoric on Iraq

3. The Multiply Muted Opposition of the Press

4. Abu Ghraib and Torture: Whither Dostoyevsky?

5. How Television Debated the Attack on Iraq

6. The Online Debate about Iraq and Abu Ghraib

7. Congress: Gone Fishing

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

As is usual with books, many people helped and supported us along the way. We want specifically to thank Diana Dang, who helped so much with formatting, especially of tables. More widely, we thank all the staff in our department who made our work possible every day: Dina Awerbuch, Caitlin Esmond, Caroline Chmielewski, David Corbin, Greg Lang, Mica Storer, and Sharon Wallace. Thanks also to our dear friend Ellen Rose, who continued with editing suggestions even while in hospice. Colin Jerolmack and Edward Walker commented on some early chapters, which we appreciate. We are grateful too for the helpful comments of Chicago’s anonymous referees and, indeed, for the comments of some journal reviewers along the way, all of whom helped make the eventual book much better. For the magnanimous encouragement and support of our editor, Douglas Mitchell, we offer the most heartfelt thanks. Thanks as well to the entire staff at the University of Chicago Press, including Joseph Brown, Joseph Claude, Sandra Hazel, Tim McGovern, Isaac Tobin, and Jeff Waxman. We also acknowledge the continued support of friends like Margaret Archer, Jack Barbalet, Kyriakos Kontopoulos, Magali Sarfatti Larson, and Anna Wierzbicka. And, of course, most special thanks to Lynne Kotranski, Melissa Jenkins, and Henry May, who lived with us while we undertook this project and who had to endure boxes of data stored in their homes. The boxes now have all been moved to archive!

In a different form, much of chapter 2 previously appeared in Alexander Nikolaev and Douglas V. Porpora, President Bush’s Pre-War Rhetoric on Iraq: Paranoid Style in Action, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 3, no. 4 (2006): 245–62. Some of the material in chapter 3 previously appeared in Alexander Nikolaev and Douglas V. Porpora, Talking War: How Elite U.S. Newspaper Editorials and Opinion Pieces Debated the Attack on Iraq, Sociological Focus 40, no. 1 (2007): 6–25; and some in Douglas V. Porpora and Alexander Nikolaev, Moral Muting in US Newspaper Op-Eds Debating the Attack on Iraq, Discourse and Communication 2, no. 2 (2008): 165–84. Some of the material in chapter 4 previously appeared in Douglas Porpora, Alexander Nikolaev, and Julia Hagemann, "Abuse, Torture, Frames, and the Washington Post," Journal of Communication 60, no. 2 (2010): 254–70. Some of the material in chapter 6 previously appeared in Alexander Jenkins, Alexander Nikolaev, and Douglas V. Porpora, Moral Reasoning and the Online Debate about Iraq, Political Communication 29, no. 1 (2012): 44–63. Some of the argument in chapter 7 previously appeared in Douglas V. Porpora, Inside the American State: Reconciling Political Economy and Discourse Analysis within a Critical Realist Framework, in Scientific Realism and International Relations, ed. Jonathan Joseph and Colin Wight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 88–100.

Introduction: Do We Need Religion?

Do we need religion? The question forms the title of a book by the German sociologist Hans Joas.¹ It may seem an odd question with which to begin a book on war.

The question at first may also seem especially odd for an American audience. Among advanced industrial countries, and certainly in comparison with Western Europe, the United States is exceptionally religious. That is, in contrast with other industrialized countries, and certainly in comparison with Western Europe, many more Americans believe in God and attend religious services. Americans have evidently decided they do need religion.

But not in the public or civil sphere—the forum or multiple forums in which Americans publicly debate matters of common concern. Despite how religious they may be in their private lives, Americans—or at least liberal Americans—have been at pains to preserve what has been called a religiously naked public square, a public square or forum without religious trappings.²

The ideal of a naked public square arises from a concern for mutual tolerance among a religiously plural polity. The idea is that, whatever our individual religious differences in private life, we leave religion behind when we come together to debate national action. Such practice leads to what has been called the privatization of religion, the withdrawal of religion from the public sphere to the private.

From this perspective, again mostly liberal in nature, Joas’s question might be delivered with a negative intonation: Why should we need religion? The negativity of the question becomes more pronounced as we experience a resurgence worldwide, not just in the United States, of religiously conservative movements intent on crossing the border separating private life from public discourse. To a liberal sensibility, the resulting mixture of religion and politics is illegitimate.³

Thus, in this context, whether framed positively or negatively, Joas’s question remains apt. Do we need religion? Joas himself answers carefully. It is not specifically religion we need, according to Joas, but experiences of self-transcendence that might be and often are considered religious.

We would go further. In general, religion plays an important role, affording us an orientation to and a vocabulary for articulating our place in the universe and the ultimate values that proceed from it. A belief in God is not necessary for such purposes, but, arguably, even without God, whenever we contemplate ultimate values, we tread religious ground.⁴ Thus, for example, whether or not its members believe in God, ethical humanism still considers itself a religious movement. Likewise, by the end of his career, the Frankfurt school’s neo-Marxist Max Horkheimer came to believe that any defensible social philosophy must ultimately embrace a theological moment.⁵

Still, the question remains: Why begin a book on war with a query about the need for religion? Admittedly, although its findings may well support the view that religion is something we need, it is not the main purpose of this book to establish that fact. It is, however, one important objective of it to examine, at least in a pair of significant and related cases, an effect that has been presumed to follow from the privatization of religion. The cases are already signaled by our subtitle: the public discussion of the attack on Iraq and the revelations of torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Between them, the cases involve war and the conduct of war. The effect we want to examine is what has been called the privatization of morality, the withdrawal from the public sphere not just of religion but also of morality. What the privatization of morality means specifically is that when we come to reason together publicly, especially about large-scale or macromoral matters, we tend not to reason in moral terms.⁶

Thus, in this book, we aim to document the privatization of morality in the secular discussion of the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, two eminently macromoral matters if ever there were ones. The first involved an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation and the second the adoption of means long thought beyond the moral pale.

It actually was not our original intention to make this particular case. Whatever Americans ultimately have come to think of US actions in these instances, there should have been considerable collective moral reasoning about them in the public sphere. What we set out to see was how that reasoning varied across the political spectrum. To our surprise, moral reasoning was hard to find, especially in the first case we examined, the run-up to the war. What we found instead—except at the religious margins of debate—was the studied avoidance of moral reasoning.

Was it just that the time period we examined left little room for moral consideration? Given that the war was framed as an attack on a key member of the Axis of Evil armed with weapons of mass destruction, what was there to debate? Was it not perhaps only later when the frame collapsed that moral arguments could be mounted about going to war on false pretenses?

Certainly, later, once the administration’s frame failed, there were new ethical and legal questions to consider. Yet, even in the earlier period we examined, there were plenty of ethical and legal considerations to debate. And they were debated—in the religious press. It was just the secular press that declined to debate in a moral register.

Would we find the same pattern if we looked at the scandal associated with Abu Ghraib sometime later? We researched this question too. Perhaps because the incident was perceived as even more morally egregious than unprovoked war, the torture debate did elicit moral commentary from the secular press. Still, in comparison with the commentary in the religious press, that in the secular press remained limited and was generally instrumentalized in such a way as to subordinate morality to prudence. Thus, even if not quite as strong, a tendency toward morality’s privatization remained in this case too, with the general public failing to entertain a thorough moral discussion of torture.

It is not hard to see a connection between the privatization of religion and the privatization of morality. People’s values and ethics do not come from nowhere. They are culturally founded in an encompassing view of the cosmos and who we humans are in it. Traditionally, that foundation has been religious. Thus it was that in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson famously founded human rights and human dignity in our common, ontological status before God.

If, today, religion ceases to be a resource for public reflection and nothing replaces it, our values and morals lose their foundation. That loss is clearly evident in the contemporary discourse about human rights. Across the globe, political leaders and political theorists all talk the talk of human rights. Everyone now agrees that human beings have such rights. In contrast, however, no one can say from whence these human rights derive or on what they are founded. At most, there are allusions to human dignity, but what does that phrase mean, and what is its basis?⁷ In the end, as the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor has observed, we seem to have entered what might be called a postmetaphysical age, where our morals are without foundation.⁸

It is not, however, simply that our morals lack foundation. There is also a sense that moral discourse itself is in retreat, a sense that, in addition to the age’s being postmetaphysical, it is post-ethical as well. In the well-known study Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues found that individual Americans seem to have lost all firm moral vocabulary.⁹

What about at the public level? Have we in public discussion of national matters entered an age that is post-ethical? Although in the final portion of this introduction we will present some reasons to think things once were different, we are not historians. What we seek to describe is only the present. Hence, instead of the term post-ethical, which implies a temporal dimension, we might have used the term amoral, which does not.¹⁰ That designation, however, seemed more abstract and less accessible. In any case, it is with the present that we are concerned. It is the larger point of this book to suggest a macromoral disconnect in this country, a contemporary inability or a reluctance among even engaged citizens to evaluate and discuss macromoral matters in a specifically moral way. The sociologist Michèle Lamont found evidence of such disconnect in her interviews with individual Americans.¹¹ In this book, we will document that effect in public discourse as well.

Where in public debate macromoral reasoning appears, we will see, it is mostly in the religious discourse of religious sources. Outside religious sources and religious discourse, not only is ethical reasoning avoided at the national level. We will even find signs that it is taboo. Even at the microlevel, the sociologist Robert Wuthnow found people individually framing their own ethical behavior in nonethical terms.¹² Stephen Hart found the same among secular social movement organizations. In striking contrast with faith-based organizations, secular organizations use modes of discourse that are cautious and constrained to the point of being anemic, ceding specifically moral language to the political Right.¹³ As we will proceed to show, the tendency to evade ethical framing is more general, pronounced also at the national level.¹⁴

Might the effect be different now with a new presidential administration? Did President Barack Obama intervene in the Libyan civil war not largely out of national self-interest but precisely on humanitarian grounds to save civilians?

As Hegel famously observed, The owl of Minerva flies at midnight. Part of what he meant is that it takes time to conduct the kind of reflection on events we undertake here. Thus, with current events, there is always a danger that things will have changed by the time the reflection is complete.

Of course, we could not even know whether the nature of public discussion has changed between the Bush and the Obama administrations without first establishing the kind of baseline we are establishing here. Yet, although it would take another study to determine definitively whether things have changed, our suspicion is that the condition remains the same.

Certainly, there has been a change in presidential style. The Obama administration has been much more sensitive to international law and international judgment than was the administration of George W. Bush. But our focus is not on administrations but on national dialogue, and, in the respect we are examining, that dialogue does not seem to have changed with administrations. Libya was in fact a case in point. Public and pundits both seem to have had more trouble with any long-term humanitarian intervention than did the president himself, and the discussion continually turned to national self-interest. Again, it will always take another study to comment on the immediate present, but we do not think another study will find things much changed from what we describe.¹⁵

It does seem as if, when it comes to deliberation of national matters, at least in elite, liberal quarters, the tendency is toward amorality. It is as if liberal thought has decided that morality—even secular morality—is so kindred to religion that it also, like religion, should generally be confined to the private sphere.¹⁶

With moral discourse on national matters sparse in the public sphere, the result is that those matters can come to seem altogether beyond morality. The further result is that ethical discourse about such matters comes to seem totally alien, something at best quaint, what might be associated with the Amish or other eccentrics. At worst, the very invocation of morality appears unseemly or suspicious, too much like an attempt to close down discussion in the name of one dogmatism or another. It is in this restricted sense, relating to broad national concerns, that we describe our societal discourse as post-ethical.

The designation may come as something of a shock. We generally tend to consider America ethical and good—or even, as conservatives put it, the greatest source of good in the world.¹⁷ The post-ethical designation suggests that we should think so no longer. If our national discourse does exhibit a macromoral disconnect, then we do not have much reason to expect our society to behave ethically. Instead, at the collective level at least, we ought to recognize ourselves as post-ethical—at least explicitly admit that, at the societal level, ethics will not generally enter our calculations. Ethics is something we collectively repress, as if we had entered a postaxial age.¹⁸

We may resist this self-recognition, deny that as a society we are amoral. Instead, we may reply that as a society we can still behave ethically even without specifically moral deliberation in the public sphere. How? We may reply that it is up to our leaders to ensure that the country as a whole behaves ethically. It is for that reason, we may say, that we scrutinize so closely the personal characters of our candidates.

Such an answer is rooted in a minimalist or, technically, liberal model of governance, although the word liberal in this context has little to do with the more popularly known conservative-liberal divide. At its extreme, the liberal model expects little of us as citizens but to awake politically every four years and vote.

The problem, as is increasingly apparent, is that the liberal model does not work. For one thing, we voters do not seem very accurate judges of our leaders’ characters. Our leaders, furthermore, increasingly look to public opinion to guide their actions. It is therefore incumbent on us as a democratic public to offer back our most considered judgment.

Considered political judgment is what is expected of citizens in a democracy by a rival tradition, called civic republicanism, which, again, has no connection to the current Republican Party—and actually embodies an opposing philosophy. According to civic republicanism, society is not some external encumbrance on our being that we begrudgingly assume only to administer such restricted functions as internal and external defense. On the contrary, it is only in the arena of togetherness that we fully develop our most intrinsic capacities as human beings.¹⁹

In Making Our Way through the World, the British sociologist Margaret Archer observes the different ways in which people reflect on themselves. Some, autonomous reflexives, do most of their self-reflection alone by way of internal conversation. Others, whom Archer calls communicatives, while ultimately making decisions themselves, prefer to talk things out first with others. In these terms, according to civic republicanism, it is incumbent on all of us to engage in some measure of communicative reflection. It is important, that is, for our own internal conversation to be connected with one that is broader and more social. Talking with others is especially important when it comes to what Archer calls metareflection, self-reflection not just about the best means to our chosen ends but also about what our proper ends ought to be in the first place.²⁰

According to civic republicanism, it is not only as individuals that we must make our way through the world but also together, as members of communities and societies that, likewise, must make their collective way through the world. Thus, it is part of our vocation, even as individual human beings, to help achieve moral and political clarity about the common direction of our lives. That clarity is achieved only when each one of us participates in the collective discussion of the public sphere. Even then, of course, any clarity achieved will be moral only if we do in fact deliberate together morally.

Thus, if true, the absence of macromoral discourse in the public sphere is, as we say, momentous. Without it, our country is morally rudderless and we ourselves individually rudderless about a key metareflexive dimension of our lives.

But is it true that macromoral discourse is weak in our public sphere? The charge is a powerful one. It needs therefore to be powerfully substantiated.

Substantiating such a claim is a huge endeavor, entailing an entire research agenda of its own. The argument needs to be made, as it were, case by case, the cases being different issues or topics or subjects of national concern. To do justice to each of these cases, the research needs to be expansive, encompassing the full range of opinion in the public sphere or as much of it as possible. Practicably, we cannot examine many such cases all at once. The undertaking is just too large, especially if we want to do due diligence to the nuances of the argumentation we find.

What is possible is to do as Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, did. When he wanted to show the need for sociology, he did not try to demonstrate that need in all possible cases at once. Instead, he chose to show the need for it in the case of suicide, reasoning that, if he could make his point in that unlikely case, then the point should carry over as well to more congenial cases.²¹

We are doing something similar in relation to the privatization of morality. We are beginning with some important cases where, because fundamental moral issues were at stake, any sparseness of public moral reasoning should be unexpected. Then, if we do in fact find moral deliberation lacking there, we have definite impetus to investigate further. Of course, it could turn out on further inspection that the cases we have chosen were peculiar in some way. Even then, if the cases are sufficiently significant, the lack of moral deliberation becomes noteworthy in its very exceptionality. Our bet, however, like Durkheim’s, is that, in examining cases that ought to be inhospitable to our thesis, what we observe is the norm rather than the exception, an apt window into our contemporary culture and national soul.

At one level, finally, it does not even matter whether the cases we have chosen are exceptional. At this opening stage of investigation, we need to develop how it is we go about studying moral reasoning in public. This vital aspect of our lives has, up until now, largely slipped between the disciplinary cracks. Although psychologists and now even sociologists have begun to take an interest in morality, generally the human sciences have tended to cede morality to the philosophers, who, for their part, not being empirical scientists, examine not how common people deliberate morally but only what is or is not philosophically compelling.²²

Rhetoricians, long underappreciated, actually offer us some help. Early on, Karl Wallace rallied contemporary rhetoricians with the claim that, just as rhetoric is about good public reasoning, good public reasoning is often about ethics.²³ There consequently has been a small but steady stream of rhetorical analysis that attends to moral matters. Overall, however, even rhetoricians have tended to neglect the study of ethical communication.²⁴ For the most part, therefore, we will be plowing new ground. The questions to be raised are both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, we want to know how frequently in the public sphere moral arguments of different types are raised and where. More qualitatively, when such arguments are raised, we want to know the specific forms they take. Basically, the approach adopted here will be what some have called public philosophy, the use of social science methods to explore how people in concrete situations reason about abstract issues, in this case, moral matters.

With regard to the attack on Iraq, the book examines a snapshot of the deliberation, specifically during the pivotal two months between August 15 and October 15, 2002. Mid-August 2002 was when the administration of President George W. Bush finally ended months of dark hints and more or less declared its intention to remove Saddam Hussein from power, by force if necessary. Mid-October was when the US Congress formally authorized the president to do so. Talk of war certainly continued after that point for another five months, but the congressional approval decisively set America’s course.

With regard to Abu Ghraib, the book covers the period between April 27, 2004, and June 1, 2006. This period marks the time from when Sixty Minutes II first broke the story until most attention to it died down.

Whereas with regard to the attack the book covers an important but narrow range of time, it conversely covers a very broad range of discursive opinion formation, encompassing key sectors of the public sphere. Captured therefore somewhat comprehensively is the deliberative consciousness of America on a significant issue at a single point in time. Specifically, the book brings together for comparison within the time period debates found in a wide range of forums:

• the US Senate and House of Representatives;

• television;

• the opinion pages of America’s newspapers and news magazines, from across the political spectrum and including both secular and religious publications; and

• online discussion from Internet newsgroups (i.e., the Usenet).

One forum of the public sphere apparently missing from the list is the blogosphere. Why? Quite simply because, during the time period in question, blogs hardly existed. Although they would shortly go on to become ubiquitous, they were then in their infancy. Consider the comparison. Between August and October 2002, we found fifty-seven thousand threads of conversation in the universe of newsgroup sites that contained the words Iraq and war. During the same period, the number of blogs we found containing those two words was only twenty-eight. Thus, as it stands, the list offered above reflects the major extent at the time of the public sphere as an institutional structure.

By the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal, blogs had become more extensive, but in the interests of time we decided to exclude them in this case too. Already, this book has been about ten years in the making. With regard to Abu Ghraib, then, we again examined just the commentary on newspaper opinion pages and in the online discussion groups.²⁵

An understanding of how the American public sphere debated or discussed these matters is important in itself. For the American people, Abu Ghraib constituted something of a defining moment, confronting them with a macromoral dilemma for a new age. The war with Iraq in turn marked the beginning and the end of what was intended to be the new American century, an era of unrivaled world hegemony for America. In fact, many of those around Bush and peopling his cabinet were members or affiliates of what was known as the Project for the New American Century.²⁶ This group was on record as being in favor of targeting Iraq as far back as 1992, long before the World Trade Towers had been struck.

The US attack on Iraq in 2003 was a far-reaching event. It was a weighty action morally and legally, taken in absence either of any imminent threat or of international authorization. Much of the world disapproved. How the world’s sole superpower came to act this way deserves attention from both laypersons and academics alike—both in the United States and the rest of the world.

It is now popular to blame the attack on Iraq entirely on President Bush and those