I would like to make two brief comments, one on the beginning of Patricia Williams’s essay and the other on the question of professional education and the humanities from the view of somebody who is more involved in the profession of urban design and planning than literature itself.
Williams’s essay is really remarkable. It is particularly striking to me because I was in Haiti a few months ago, and I will share something with you that amazed me. There are 13,000 aid organizations in Haiti at the moment, and they are getting very little accomplished. One of the reasons is that a lot of the aid depends on people being considered “worthy recipients” of the aid—that is, not being in any way prosecuted or identified as looters. So because this was a situation of mass need in which there was very little that people could get, especially in the first fourteen weeks after the earthquake, large numbers of people have been disempowered by this label.
What struck me about Williams’s presentation is that it raises a profound question about the act of naming images. What has happened with her students looking at these images—and with many of the Haitian aid agencies—is that the relation between word and image becomes one in which the word exerts power by naming the agent rather than the action. The labeling of who is in the image becomes the interpretation of what the image is about. That is a radical way of restricting the publicness of images and how we understand their public value by essentially assigning the value to who they are, rather than what they are doing. It shrinks the room for interpretation about why they are doing what they are doing because they are identified in terms of the agent acting. This is a phenomenon of public life in general, that when we reduce ambiguity by erasing the question of an unknown agent and replacing it with a known agent—and in this case a stigmatized one—the actual consideration of what they are doing diminishes. This is a profound diminution of the public realm.
When I look at the image of the box of rice in the air with all these hands stretched out, what strikes me is that there is just one box. The reason their hands are stretched out has to do with the near starvation conditions in Haiti. The fact that they are “looters” is irrelevant. So we want to focus on the box of rice as an emblem that creates a terrain for the discussion of what the situation is there, rather than on the question of agents, of who is doing what. By the way, I think the proper name for the action in the photo in Williams’ paper is “supplication.”
This is a huge discussion now, ironically, for people at Google, who are in the process of assembling an enormous library of photographic images. What has struck them is that the labeling technique they use—which is to identify who is in the photo—means that the public usage of the photos diminishes compared with when they try to categorize the activities in the photos. That is, the act of identifying the actors leads to less use of the images than if a more difficult categorization were used, having to do with naming action. So this problem raised in Williams’s paper has many dimensions.
I also want to say something about the humanities in the professional realm from the perspective of someone who has had more contact with architects and engineers, particularly in the work I do on cities, than with humanists proper. It is an observation about the use that the humanities have been put to in these kinds of technical realms.
What I have observed is founded on the notion that any good technical craftsman needs also to be imaginative. Technical craftwork that is just problem solving is a kind of low-level activity. In places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, there are reasons they have active music and literature departments—they are elements in the development of good craftsmanship. But those are elite institutions. When you get lower down the pecking order of institutional prestige, this kind of reaching out to the humanities on the part of people doing technical work diminishes. It has a very complex framing to it. In part, it is that at a state school of planning or engineering, people’s realistic assessment is that the jobs they are going to get depend purely on technical expertise, but it is more than that. In the United States, technical work is distributing itself such that people who come from high-status, high-prestige institutions are given more freedom to be fully creative, to be craftsmen, to imagine possibilities, to be problem finders rather than problem solvers. The atmosphere in this elite technical realm privileges the asking of interpretive questions.
So, to me, when I look at this issue about the humanities in technical education, what I see is an issue of inequality that has to do with professional life in the technical realm rather than the question of whether the humanities are valuable. It really has to do with the world of professional training becoming so unequal that only the people at the top believe there is some opportunity for them to be fully good craftspeople and engage in humanistic pursuits. I am told the same inequality exists at business schools. What I am suggesting in conclusion is that we may have this turned around a little: The problem is not whether the humanities are valuable, but to whom they are valuable. And that difference depends on a profound and growing inequality on the technical side of university life.
THE AVOIDANCE OF READING
I have given my response a title, “The Avoidance of Reading,” with a wink to the philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose essay on King Lear, “The Avoidance of Love,” has been so important to me ever since I was a student.
It is odd to be back at Princeton for this symposium. I came here in 1978 as a graduate student. At that time, many people were very interested in violent reading, playful reading, the pleasure of reading, disruptive reading, turning things inside out, and finding a good pun. Now we are interested in the ethics of reading, and I have been asking myself whether this is progress or something else.
When we turn to ethics, what are we trying to avoid? This panel is entitled “The Ethics of Reading and the Professions.” Its description says, “Professional education may be the most characteristic and powerful product of the modern American University.” I am the president of Wesleyan University, and we do not have any professional schools. In this regard, we are closer to Princeton than to the other Ivy League research universities. But even understanding the important economic and professional role of the professional schools at other American universities, I would not have supposed that this was our most distinctive national feature. In the past, the American university’s continued support for liberal education has been our most characteristic and powerful product. This has meant support for an education that leads only to more education: inquiry for the sake of inquiry.
But I realize professional education at universities is powerful. From where I sit, in a school that focuses on undergraduate education, I can still see professionalization in the humanities and the social sciences, and, of course, in the sciences. You do not need a medical school or a business school to have professionalization. Many on our faculty seem to hunger for professionalization, even as they mock it; and that mockery has become more and more esoteric (“professional”), only available to those in the guild. One of the worst features of even so-called interdisciplinary work in the humanities since the 1960s is professionalization. To speak baldly, professionalization at the university is driven by envy, money, and the fear of ambiguity. Pride in strong departments capable of luring people away from other strong departments is its most obvious but not most important symptom.
First, in response to Ralph Hexter’s essay, I do not believe there are noninstrumental administrative ways of reading. I always look for my wallet whenever I hear about noninstrumental administrative anything, because bureaucratic instrumentality can never be noninstrumental. I think the bureaucratization of the university, of which I am a part, is a horrible feature of university life. I can sleep at night (sometimes) because I think, being part of that bureaucratic instrumentality, I preserve the possibility for my colleagues to do the wonderful work that people are doing in conferences like this.
I do not think there is an epistemological problem for ethical understanding. I would borrow from Ian Hacking and Michel Foucault in saying that, in regard to ethical matters, deciding what counts as ethical substance is a process in which there is no truth of the matter. You decide what community you are going to have allegiance to, or you find yourself in one. Then you figure out how you participate in that community; you find ways of belonging, or of excluding yourself.
In regard to Patricia Williams’s paper, I was intrigued and stimulated by the project of interrogating what gets animated and what does not. Pointing out who gets to count for us, who gets to count for the law, and how it has come to be that way is an important task. Pointing out who gets excluded in this process is an urgent task. Williams’s final recounting of the Haitian woman’s story invites us to let more count for us. I do not know if that is ethical, but in my community it is a very good thing to do.
I have a few concluding comments. First, from violent reading to ethics, what are we afraid of, what are we trying to avoid? I think Jonathan Culler said it very well: We have been accused of nihilism for so long that many seemed to feel that we had to come up with some way of appealing to the instrumentalism around us. Ethics might be the least bad way of doing that, but I am not sure. However, in appealing to ethics—that is, in appealing not just to the ethics of reading but also to a kind of aesthetic experience that would make us ethical—I have a hard time understanding what to do with the potential ethical value of other imaginative activities. Take the ethics of watching television, for example. I do not know whether watching television is more or less ethical than reading, but I think all of us would find it odd to believe that we are becoming, as a culture, better people, more empathetic, or more capable of imagining others because of television or because of YouTube. Why would reading be ethically superior as a genre of experience?
Finally, what are we trying to do, or not do, when we move from playful or violent and disruptive reading to ethics? I sense a fear of reading here. Reading may lead nowhere; we may get lost in reading. For those of us in the humanities, feeling this loss, the pleasure of being lost, has been an important practice, sometimes even a goal—even an opiate, as Elaine Scarry has called it. In reading, we may feel ourselves exposed. We may feel the shame or the delight in our own ungroundedness. Whether one takes as one’s model of reading Jane Addams’s sympathetic interpretations or Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, through reading we apprehend that things could—that we could—be otherwise. I do not think that means that we will be (ethically) better, but it does mean that we can imagine being otherwise.
When we turn to ethics, what are we are trying to avoid? We are trying, I think, to avoid reading because reading, to recall the Torture Memos referred to in the invitation to this conference, makes nothing impossible. If we can agree that reading leads us to be lost, leads to ungroundedness, then we must admit that we do not find in reading as such any way of rejecting the Torture Memos. We can reject torture, but that is not an ethics of reading but politics—that is, a struggle for power.
Reading leaves us exposed, as Cavell has said, or it leaves us, as Derrida has said, in the undecidable. Those running from studies based in reading to studies based in numbers or systems are often running from ambiguity and its exposures. And an appeal to progress, whether historical or ethical, seems to me another effort to reduce that ambiguity. I would ask that we not join the rush from reading by trying to contain its ambiguity with a label like ethics.
This session presented two essays pertaining to the formulation “the ethics of reading and the professions.” What procedures or protocols would govern something as decisive and lofty as an “ethics of reading,” and what specific gravity attaches to the more earthborn “the ethics of reading and (ah, the copula) the professions”? Given our contributors and my distinguished fellow respondents, it seems most useful to me to ground my own participation in the experience of my first career, almost thirty years long, as an academic publisher, at Routledge and at Columbia, before I came to Cooper Union.
PROFESSIONS
Let me begin with the leading term “the professions.” The traditional concept of the professions is an old one, perhaps now too old to be useful. My inquiry to the Online Oxford English Dictionary concerning the word professions yielded the response “Try again,” which may be telling us something about the nature of professionalism at this moment.
A search for the singular term profession, on the other hand, generates a list of meanings reaching back to the early thirteenth century, where its sense of “declaration, promise, or vow” is directly related to entering religious orders. Professions are demonstrations of faith, and so bound in an originary sense to moral commitment. In his great essay “Nature” (1836), Emerson would describe ethics as “a system of human duties commencing from man,” rather than from God. Professions and ethics are already bound to one another. The sense of human duty is central to what we as professors do, and that thing that we do we do professionally.
As a college teacher, I train professionals. At Cooper Union, every student is in a four- or five-year undergraduate professional program in art, architecture, or engineering. We have no liberal arts majors. Each class is likely to be that student’s only undergraduate exposure to philosophy or musicology or economics or Shakespeare. What we think of here as ethical reading—patient, critical, attentive, and deeply humane—sounds like close reading meets Second Corinthians. It is a good platform, and not only for young, highly focused students already eager to pursue professional lives.
The commercial business of publishing is not a profession like law or medicine, much less clergy. But the practice of reading is so centrally dependent upon the work that publishing undertakes—the work of selection, development, and dissemination—that publishing is, it seems to me, inescapably written into the question of ethics. Selection, development, and dissemination are what universities do with the students in their charge, and what we as teachers are pledged to undertake.
There are many kinds and forms of publishing, each with its own ethical dilemmas and failures: from the idealistic (as in the debates over free and open access) to the particular (as in the delimitations of ownership and liability in relation to what seems increasingly to be called “academic work product”), on down to the sad and scandalous (as in the phone-hacking episode that brought down a British newspaper). Regarded somewhere between a “profession” and a “trade,” publishing is nevertheless central to reading and to the ethical questions that engage us at this symposium. I will return in a moment to the question of writing.
Whether we like it or not, the humanities are burdened with a dual charge and mixed messages. The first descends from the market and demands self-justification. Why the humanities at all? Why now? Yet there is still a second demand, a demand for answers arising from the ongoing curiosity concerning the human condition, a demand that we provide tools for understanding the human experience. It is the thing we guard, reinvent, and supply to each generation and to each class of persons. It is what makes ordinary adults want to turn on the news or browse Wikipedia or even read the Aeneid. And it is what turns otherwise reasonable young people into majors in humanistic disciplines.
Our dual charge contains contradictory postures, one resentful, one needy and curious. American society’s cultural response to the humanities, even at its most sympathetic, is odi et amo: I hate you, and I love you. In society’s least sympathetic mode, the humanities seem more like Philoctetes (to whom Ralph Hexter alludes briefly), repellent but essential to the social project. If we cannot easily answer this contradictory outcry, we can at least focus on what we do and why. For the question of an “ethics of reading”—and especially an “ethics of reading and the professions”—is finally a question of practice.
READING
Is reading a stage in Robert Darnton’s communication circuit? A means of delivering information? An interpretative act? The two essays in this section shape the discussion of the ethics of reading in very different ways. Despite the framing gesture toward Virgil in Ralph Hexter’s paper, neither he nor Patricia Williams addresses narrowly literary concerns, which is a good thing. Hexter’s paper counsels that in reading we should “skew deontological”; in his “challenges to ethical reading,” he wisely singles out what he calls “corporate reading,” though deploying the term, as he puts it, “in a neutral rather than nefarious sense” in order to define “shared interpretive labor.”
As administrators know, humanists are perhaps the least likely academics to see themselves as participants in shared interpretive labor. Most of us persist in sustaining the vision of single-author creation, even when we know that shared interpretive labor might yield a superior result. Professional reading in the humanities is attentive, suspicious, and frequently lonely; our systems of reward continue to valorize what is fundamentally a deformation of heroic individualism, long after the last Romantic poet was laid to rest among the daffodils. We think we want to do it (whatever it is) alone.
Given the humanist distrust of anything with the word “corporate” attached to it, I was particularly struck by Hexter’s repositioning of “corporate reading” within the campus community. The kinds of reading we all do, but especially those of us in administrative positions, are, it seems to me, inescapably examples of shared interpretive labor. But I would add that the mechanism of scholarly publishing is also always an example of both corporate reading (in a literal sense) and “shared intellectual labor.” University presses and scholarly journals have so internalized a set of collective reading practices that those involved sometimes forget how much sharing does, in fact, take place.
Williams’s essay, delivered in her signature writing voice, is a reminder of the agency of images and of their immense textual power. In calling our attention to the sentence structure of human events, she reminds us further that, for better or worse, we think about the world through language. “There is a lexical dimension to being a person in language and the law,” she writes. So an ethics of reading is needed to set the terms within which not just documents but persons and human events can be read right.
CONSEQUENTIAL INTERPRETATION
The work of ethical reading is supposed to be many things—conscious, critical, humane, patient, attentive. These are all good things, and we would like our engineers and doctors, our information technology specialists and waitstaff, our parents and children, our teachers and even our politicians to be able to decipher the world’s complex messages. But we also want—and deserve—more from one another than momentary, disposable attention. We want our ethical readers to be changed somehow, to experience an ethically interpretive reading as liberating or troubling so that reading becomes consequential—compelling and important in a dynamic sense, leaving the reader altered.
As both Williams’s and Hexter’s papers demonstrate, reading has consequences. No form of reading can or should escape the act of interpretation, and every act of interpretation has the potential to be generative. A provost’s memo (as in Hexter’s example) or a photo caption (as Williams demonstrates) will yield interpretation and further texts, in a process that can go on and on until the textual event is exhausted. In this sense, ethical reading is not only what we want to do all the time but a praxis collaborative with its subject. As Gerald Graff says of writing pedagogy, when we teach writing we ask bluntly of the student’s written work, “OK, so what?”1 When I work with professional writers—primarily professors—outside my institution, I ask the same question concerning their work in progress. To observe, to interpret, this is what professors do: We notice things. But if the gesture extends no further, the circuit remains incomplete. There have to be consequences of interpretation so that ethical reading—can we speak of any other kind?—does not congratulate itself on being pure. Reading and interpretation are the beginning of intellectual, social, and political work. Ethical reading is smart, clean, fair and square, but only if it produces consequential interpretation—not the deliverables against which Judith Butler cautions us, but an outcome with the potential to change the world, the text, and the reader.
I will conclude by joining the world of publishing to the professions, and ethical reading to the ethical responsibility of writing. The act of reading ethically, which is to say reading both the lexical construct and the social text, must remind us that ethical writing is a duty beyond questions of truth value, systematic method, and full citation. Ethical writing is propelled by a sense of obligation to unknowable readers. If all reading involves the act of interpretation, then writing must be cognizant of its own interpretability. To write with care—and with as much clarity as contentions will support—in turn enables readerly interpretation. The ability to write well is a developable skill, and to write with courage and clarity is to honor the reader, which is the beginning of ethical engagement in any field, any profession. The world is composed of stories true and untrue, as Williams reminds us, and those stories are doled out in the language of which we are the stewards. The ethics of that seems pretty clear to me: Write as if you mean it, and write as if what you write can change the reader. Because it will.
Discussion Session 2: The Ethics of Reading and the Professions
PETER BROOKS: I want to start us off with the point Bill Germano made, that some kinds of reading are by their nature consequential. For instance, people are tortured as a result. Jane Mayer has made the argument that the Bush administration began by perverting language, and that everything else came in the wake of that. I am not sure whether I agree, but it certainly is true that if you pervert language there is no longer any way to establish what is an ethical reading.
MICHAEL ROTH: I don’t think torture and murder are consequences of the perversion of language. Obviously, I think the fight against torture is important, but it is misguided to try to give the humanities importance by saying that a better trained, humanistically minded lawyer—that is, a lawyer who would agree with us and our political values—would have been less likely to defend torture. The problem was the desire to pursue a war strategy at any cost, not that the education of the lawyer was not humanistic enough. In other words, I think the problem is political, and I don’t see why some formal notion of a more ethical reading would save us in a political struggle against those people who want to use torture in order to enhance national security or their own power.
JUDITH BUTLER: Michael, I thought you were saying that a memo in itself does not act. What a text says is one thing, and then the actions that may or may not follow are another. But it does seem to me that certain kinds of memos are speech acts with perlocutionary consequences. If you are a law professor or government lawyer and you write this memo, and your standing will confer legitimacy on torture, then you are not just writing a text rather than doing a thing. The text is a speech act with consequences, and the consequences are amplified under certain conditions; that is, there is a government looking for legal justification for torture, and you are professionally qualified to pass judgment on how to read relevant legal texts and laws. I can’t see that we can say that torture is wrong but the memo authorizing it is not.
MR: I am not suggesting that the Torture Memos were not wrong. But the problem is the torture and the issue of the techniques of reading that led to those memos are less important than the political imperative to produce torture. I don’t think an education in the kind of reading we would approve of is the most important goal to strive for in trying to eliminate the possibilities of government-sanctioned torture.
JB: I don’t think the question is a technique of reading. I think a technique of reading could go either way or serve different purposes. I think the ethics of reading is a question of for whom and for what do we read, and in the service of what kind of world. Perhaps we do need to question where torture does begin and end. We can be positivist and say that it begins when the hand is raised to inflict it, but it does have an institutional and cultural history. We do have a role in either stoking or deflating that legitimacy effect.
MR: What if we just said it is a politics of reading instead of an ethics of reading? What if we said that the politics of reading in the Torture Memos is nefarious?
RICHARD SENNETT: It is the acceptance of the memos as legitimate that is the problem. We want to make readers more skeptical, and in order for them to be more skeptical they need to be more skilled in getting behind technical or abstract language. Surely the politics of reading lies in enabling readers to translate what is often hidden behind technical language. It is a skill that has to be learned. It is a question of whether you can empower people to read more critically, especially in this country where we are orientated to believe in professional expertise.
MR: I think that inflates the importance of what we do as teachers of reading.
JONATHAN LEAR: I want to offer an anecdote that relates to Judith’s comment. As a freshman at Yale, I was trying out for the Yale Daily News and my first assignment was to cover a story about alleged physical branding of initiates at a fraternity. I called up the president of this fraternity, whose name was George W. Bush. Obviously, I didn’t know then that I was interviewing the future president. In fact, I forgot all about this until George W. Bush was running for president and a reporter from the New Haven Register contacted me and asked if I had written this article. I got a copy of the article, and I found it to be uncanny in two ways. First, Bush said then what he said for the rest of his career, which was, basically, “It’s not as bad as you think.” But second, and this really stood out, I had gotten a quote from an associate dean who said, in effect, that boys will be boys, that Yale will let them settle it themselves. This is the kind of thoughtless sanctioning of the act we have been talking about. What if that dean had responded to this issue with indignation, requiring a public conversation about this kind of behavior? How might history have been different? What if Bush’s education had included such an intervention? By the way, the dean was also probably a man who appreciated reading and could give an excellent lecture about the value of the humanities.
JONATHAN ARAC: I am struck by this exchange on the question of politics and the practice of close or analytic reading, and want to offer an historical perspective. One of the motives for I. A. Richards’s work in the 1920s, which is foundational for this conversation, was the widely shared belief that the horrors of World War I were caused in part by the susceptibility of large populations to manipulation by propaganda. Richards’s work inspired the belief that the kind of reading that, on the one hand, allowed someone to overcome stock responses to a poem would also allow her to read and hear public speech critically. As that movement for critical reading developed in the 1930s, one of the motivations for the practice of American New Criticism was to defend the autonomy of literature against the manipulation of literature—at first by Communist-affiliated writers and critics, but shortly enough by the fascists, as in Kenneth Burke’s 1939 essay “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.’ ”1 In later decades, with regard to the Vietnam War, we continued to have the claim that real analytic close reading would allow you to see through the deception. So, in a way, deconstruction arises in response to the eighteen-minute blank space on the Nixon tapes. That is not quite a full historical view, but it is true that those who practice close analytic literary or humanistic reading have said, for nearly a century, that our work has something to do with the way public discourse works. Of course, these attitudes and insights did not stop World War II or other subsequent conflicts and injustices from happening. Do we still think, as I believe we do, that this is the right thread of argument to make? In our conversation now, is there something that distinguishes ethical reading from its antecedents?
DEREK ATTRIDGE: I don’t have an answer, just a thought that is not my own but from the pen of J. M. Coetzee in Diary of a Bad Year. The partly autobiographical character JC in that book asks himself how American politicians can use language in such a slippery, devious, and manipulative way, and JC concludes that it is perhaps because they were trained in the classrooms of deconstructionists and poststructuralists in the 1960s and 1970s who taught that language is slippery and that there’s no such thing as true meaning. I am not sure that either Coetzee or I buy that argument, but it is a different view. In asking now what an ethics of reading might be, it may be that we are thinking more rigorously about the political consequences of how we understand language and interpretation.
QUESTION FROM AUDIENCE: I want to suggest that we flip the terms, and instead of asking about the ethics of reading perhaps we should be asking about the readability of ethics. In looking at the question solely from this perspective of literary analysis, we are overlooking recent philosophers who, in order to do ethics, have turned precisely to literature. I am thinking of Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, and Robert Pippin, among others.
It seems to me that the point about reading is that ethics itself requires all the things we are associating with reading. So it is not as if we are importing ethics to reading all of a sudden to save the discipline or our relevancy, but in fact we are trying to make a point about how we should be doing ethics, and not necessarily about how we should be doing reading.
WILLIAM GERMANO: At Cooper Union, our students will take maybe one or two electives while studying, say, mechanical engineering or architecture, so that really ups the ante on how you are going to do your humanistic pedagogy. In this context, where literature is not your major and you only have exposure to one or two courses, I read literature with my students because these books present problems for analysis. Othello presents problems. I know it is corny, but I say to the students coming in that they will take courses in the humanities where we will not solve the problems posed, but we will learn how to think about them, and that I think the tools of learning how to think about problems posed in a text will stay with the students all their lives.
KIM LANE SCHEPPELE: I wanted to comment on this question of whether the problem of the Torture Memos was in the writing, reading, or doing. As Patricia Williams said in her essay, the legal framing of something has consequences. As soon as something is labeled as legal, as law, then the doing of it flows from that labeling.
Here are some sentences from one of the Torture Memos produced under the Bush administration. This memo specified what interrogators could do to Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi Arabian prisoner being held by the United States under suspicion of his connection with al Qaeda. The memo authorizes waterboarding, but also responds to a particular question posed by the interrogators who had learned that Abu Zubaydah was afraid of insects. The Department of Justice is asked for its legal opinion on whether the interrogators can put the prisoner in a box with insects. Here is what the lawyers say:
As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. If you do so, to ensure you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain. If, however, you were to place the insect in the box without informing him that you are doing so, then, in order to not commit a predicate act, you should not affirmatively lead him to believe that any insect is present which has a sting that could produce severe pain or suffering or even cause his death.
Then there is a redacted section, and the memo continues:
So long as you take either of the approaches we have described, the insect’s placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position.2
I want to say a couple of things about this. First, it is the specificity of the language here that produces its effect. The specificity of the language makes people believe the action is legal and that some lawyer thought about it, and it also eliminates the horror of the doing because you go through it first in the writing/reading. Second, anyone who can remember Winston and Room 101 and the rats of George Orwell’s 1984 would be able to understand what is wrong with this because the scenario is almost exactly the same. You wonder how anyone could have seen this memo and not think of 1984 once the interrogators in that book discovered that Winston Smith was afraid of rats. The failure to make that connection with one of the signature horrors in our recent literature is itself horrifying.
MR: Would if be more or less horrifying if you learned that the authors of the memo had been taught 1984? If they were better readers, would they be more or less likely to be torturers? I suppose I am expressing a lack of confidence that teaching reading would actually reduce torture.