Concluding comment
It is essential, I think, to consider how, by whom, and in what context the concept of agency is defined and used if one is to get a better understanding of the ways “the religious” and “the secular” are continuously made and remade.
Shifts in that concept, and in its connection with ideas of responsibility and consciousness, are crucial to revisions in our understanding of the religious—and therefore of the secular. What this calls for is not an abstract inquiry into mere changes in linguistic usage, but a response to questions about how the body lives pain and punishment, compassion arid pleasure, hope and fear. It is with this in niind that I now turn in a general way to some secular attitudes to pain.Reflections on Cruelty and Torture
A major motive of secularism has clearly been the desire to end cruelties—the deliberate infliction in this world of pain to the living body of others, and the causing of distress to their minds—that religion has so often initiated and justified. Only a secular legal constitution (so it is argued) can restrain, if not eliminate altogether, religious violence and intolerance toward religious minorities. This firm linking of institutional religion to cruelty has its roots in Western Europe’s experience of religious wars and in the complex movement called the secular Enlightenment. But this perspective tends to overlook the devastatingly cruel powers of the twentieth century—Nazi Germany, Stalins Russia, Imperial Japan, the Khmer Rouge, Mao’s China—that were anything but religious, and the brutal conquests of African and Asian societies by European powers in the nineteenth century that had little to do with religion. Of course these instances of secular cruelty do not prove that institutional religion cannot generate cruelty and violence. But then religious movements have also preached (and practiced) compassion and forbearance.
My simple point is that an equation of institutional religion with violence and fanaticism will not do.In this chapter, however, I want to take a different approach to the problem. Instead of measuring the cruelty of religious regimes against secular ones I want to look at the way moral sensibilities about deliberately inflicted pain have been formed in modern secular society. I suggest that the idea of cruelty in modern discourse has distinctive characteristics, and that in describing them one is also identifying aspects of the secular. I propose
Reflections on Cruelty and Torture ioi therefore to begin by way of the rule stated in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”) that assumes the idea has a clear universal significance. In this statement the adjectives qual-, ifying “treatment or punishment” seem to indicate forms of behavior that, if not quite equivalent to “torture,” at least have a close affinity with it.
Moral and legal judgments that derive from this rule have an interesting history in the West, to which I shall advert in what follows. I want to advance the thesis that this universal rule covers a wide range of qualitatively different kinds of behavior. More precisely, I shall try to make four connected points: First, that the modern history of “torture” is not only a record of the progressive prohibition of cruel, inhuman, and degrading practices. It is also part of a secular story of how one becomes truly human. The second point is this: The phrase “torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is intended to provide a cross-cultural criterion for making moral and legal judgments about pain and suffering. Yet it is given much of its operative sense historically and culturally. My third point is linked to the first two. It is that the new ways of conceptualizing suffering (which include “mental torture” and “degrading treatment”) and sufferer (a term that now refers also to nonhumans and even to the natural environment) are increasingly universal in scope but particular in prescriptive content. The final point is that the modern dedication to eliminating pain and suffering often conflicts with other commitments and values: the right of individuals to choose, and the duty of the state to maintain its security.
Together, these four points aim at underscoring the unstable character of a central Category deployed in modern, secular society. The instability relates, in brief, to the fact that the ideas of torture, cruelty, inhumanity, and degrading treatment are intended to measure what are often incommensurable standards, of behavior. Perhaps most important, the idea of measured behavior is subverted by ideas of excess that come from other secular discourses.