Democracy, human dignity incompatible with torture

Democracy is premised on a simple claim: All people, by virtue of their humanity, are entitled to respect and to be treated with basic dignity. This is why Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers believed that all people are born equal and have the same natural rights.

To be endowed with these natural rights means that being human is enough to warrant respect. Some will get rich, some will be poor. Some will become famous, others will not. But all our inequalities take place within a larger equality, our shared humanity.

Those who advocate torture are fundamentally endangering democracy. Some have said that we must balance freedom against security, that in certain situations torture is justifiable to protect Americans from impending threats.

According to The New York Times, the CIA recently told Congress that it may engage in illegal interrogation methods in order to prevent a terrorist attack. But there is no way to engage in torture and to protect American democracy. America's core premise is that all men — today we would say people — are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

The decline of torture and the rise of democracy were historically connected, as historian Lynn Hunt demonstrates in her recent book, "Inventing Human Rights" (2007). Only when we could respect the innate dignity of all people could democracy emerge. And we learned to respect others when we learned that other people's sufferings — their pain and agony — were similar to ours.

Once, in a world before human rights, in a world before the American Revolution, nobles thought of commoners as lesser people. They often attributed to the common folk qualities closer to animals than to human beings. The king, of course, was divine and untouchable. All men were decidedly not created equal.

During the 18th century, however, Enlightenment philosophers — our Founding Fathers among them — learned to sympathize with the pain and suffering of ordinary people. Because they came to believe in a universal human nature, they also came to the conclusion that other people experienced pain and joy, glory and humiliation, much as they did. This recognition of the universal qualities of human nature made possible Jefferson's assertion that all men are created equal.

One result of this new assumption was penal reform. Capital punishment was deemed cruel by many progressive thinkers. Our Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment because the Founding Fathers understood that others suffer as we do. If we impose cruel and unusual punishment on others, we will no longer be able to respect all human beings as human beings.

Jefferson, too, understood this dynamic. In his only book, "Notes on the State of Virginia," he argued that slavery is terrible for both whites and blacks. Slaves, of course, are subject to physical suffering and humiliation — they are not granted basic human dignity. They are the victims of torture.

But Jefferson feared equally for masters because, in Jefferson's words, "the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it."

If young Americans witnessed their fathers inflicting corporal punishment upon slaves, they would learn that it was OK to torture other human beings — that others do not suffer as we do and that their bodies are not entitled to basic respect and dignity. The result would be the end of democracy; America's youth would be trained to be despots rather than democrats.

The assumption that others feel pain as we do makes democracy possible. It is the foundation for our confidence that all Americans are entitled to the same rights and freedoms. Because respecting human dignity is the essence of democracy, there is no calculus in which our democracy can be protected by torturing others.

The moment we treat another human being as an animal, the moment we stop sympathizing with his or her pain and suffering, we are training ourselves to be despots and betraying the American Revolution's promise to the world. The moment we admit that it is OK to torture another human being — to deny his or her body human dignity — the terrorists have already won.