Unsuspecting Souls. Barry Sanders

ourselves: Who are we and what can we become?

      Unsuspecting Souls shows the frightening price we pay in not questioning prevailing assumptions and attitudes toward the life and death of other people—the minority, the poor, the vagrant, the person of color, the outsider, the so-called enemy, and the so-called stranger. For reasons I hope to make clear, this drift toward insubstantiality and disappearance has particularly victimized Americans. The rough-and-tumble way we negotiate with people, with the environment, with the other, and particularly the way America has over the years dealt with other countries—the assumptions of overwhelming force and power, the disregard of human rights—owe their insistence, in great part, to those transfiguring events of the nineteenth century. But then so does the current resurgence of evangelical fundamentalism and the renewed debate between evolution and creationism. In fact, these two things, the ferocity of America’s foreign policy and the tenacious commitment, by many, to fundamental religions, forged their intimate relationship in the nineteenth century.

      In the course of this book’s writing, the Marine Corps charged five of its men with plotting and carrying out the rape of a young Iraqi woman, dousing her body with gasoline, and setting her on fire, in the Iraqi city of Haditha on November 19, 2005. The men then allegedly killed the rest of the family and, for good measure, burned their house to the ground. Immediately after setting the house ablaze, the supposed ringleader is said to have announced in a matter-of-fact way, “They’re dead. All of them. They were bad people.”

      How bad could they have been? Bad enough, it seems, that those Marines no longer counted the Iraqi civilians as human beings. In fact, the military refers to all Iraqis as “Hajis,” a reference to those who have made the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca. I have heard them called worse things by GIs—“ragheads,” “desert monkeys,” and even “sand niggers.” Iraq and Afghanistan just present the most recent examples in the endless process of the United States denigrating people we perceive as the other, in anticipation of our attacking them, or in our outright killing of them. In good nineteenth-century fashion, the fact that the overwhelming majority of America’s enemies turn out to be people of color makes the process of denigration a much easier task, since people of color already occupy a lower place in the ordering of races.

      To understand events like Haditha, we need to know the history of that most lethal erasure that brought us to such a state of affairs, the disappearance of human sensibilities that began in the nineteenth century. We need to address the problem at its base, for the erosion of human essence runs very deep and very powerfully throughout our past. Toughness and power, strength and force, have become in our own time valued and privileged personal virtues. We are all, in the face of such a well-hidden but insidious force of erosion, unsuspecting and unwitting victims. Can a society hang together as one extended fight club, or one unending cage fight? We should not conceive of life as an extreme sport.

      If we are to regain our senses, atrocities like Haditha must no longer seem like routine acts in a ruthless world. They must, once again, surprise and repulse us. I know that, with minimal effort, we can make sense of such events—we are at war; soldiers are young and jumpy; and on and on—but the logic of Haditha and Hamdaniya and Mahmoudiya and a host of atrocities at other, similar places—not to mention those prisons both known and secret—must confound normal logic and once again disgust the great majority of us. And we must remain disgusted: Torture and this country’s commitment to it must replace the latest TV show and film as major topics of concern and interest.

      We must return the inhuman treatment of others to the nineteenth-century category from which it escaped—the aberrant. To argue about what constitutes torture should seem extraordinary and extrahuman to us. We simply cannot raise waterboarding, say, to a level where we parse its grisly elements to determine if it is truly torture or not. We must laugh out loud at the Justice Department’s argument that if GIs carry out humiliating and harsh treatment of prisoners suspected of being members of al-Qaeda, then no torture has taken place. We cannot allow the Justice Department to make people disappear twice—once as prisoners and once more as suspected terrorists. Torture is barbaric and beyond the boundaries of decent discourse.

      Many historians have seen the nineteenth century as the beginning of the modern world. Someone like Tony Judt, writing in The New York Review of Books, has taken as his signposts on the road to modernity innovations like “neoclassical economics, liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild), ‘revolution,’ the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism, and ‘industrialism’—the building blocks of the twentieth-century political world.”² But typically what is left out of the description is that the “isms” helped drive out the people, the theories helped displace the humans. Put another way, the “isms” would not have been so easy to implement if the human beings had not disappeared first. And thus I want to focus on the human “building blocks.” I want to discover what happened to them.

      In 1866, Cyrus West Field succeeded in laying the transatlantic cable. Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, witnessed its completion. (Morse’s first tapped-out message on May 24, 1844, to his assistant Alfred Vail, reverberates through the rest of the century: “What hath God wrought?”) The New York Tribune said the cable would bring about “a more sympathetic connection of the nations of the world than has yet existed in history.”³ Morse himself saw bigger things. He predicted the cable would signal an end to war “in a not too distant future.”⁴ Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, we have upped the technology and use the Internet to make that same sympathetic connection with other nations. Still, the drive to destroy the enemy continues; and still the number of enemies proliferates. Technology will not fix our human condition. Only a change in attitude can truly affect social problems. And that requires not high-level technological know-how but only the most basic technical skills—reading, analyzing, and understanding.

      This book rests on a firm belief: that human beings carry the capacity for continual self-critique and wholehearted renewal. We must once again recognize ourselves as actors and agents in the shaping of both political and social ideas, not just so as to rescue ourselves, but also to broaden the community we share with others. I see no other way to put a halt to the current fascination with torment and torture and the threat of total annihilation of the planet—people, plants, and animals—through war. H. G. Wells warned of the end of civilization in his 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, about the attack of England by aliens from Mars. More than one hundred years later, Niall Ferguson took his title for his new book from Wells’s tale of science fiction, for very much the same reasons—this country seems to have been invaded by aliens, motivated solely by arrogance, might, imperial hubris, and a thorough disregard for the other. Science fiction has become fact.

      Others have viewed the nineteenth century as a series of disparate events, or have focused on one small topic. I see a crucial, overarching theme in the century’s seemingly unrelated discoveries, innovations, and inventions: the desperate struggle to find the heart of human essence before time ran out. My hope, the hope of this book, is that by understanding that erosion of basic humanness in the nineteenth century, we can reclaim our own sense of being in this, the twenty-first century. Looking back may be the best way to move forward. To move the arrow forward means having to draw the bow back.

      One way of looking back, and the best way of doing it over and over again whenever we desire, is with one of the key inventions of the nineteenth century, the camera. Shortly after its introduction in the middle of the nineteenth century, the camera pushed actual events aside and made people pay strict attention to the reproduction of the real thing: The image took charge over the actual. The camera very quickly became a popular household appliance, a plaything for middle- to upper-class families. It also very quickly got consigned for specialized tasks, so that at every major crime scene, for example, some photographer stood by, ready to document and frame, to catch details that the eye could not possibly take in, and of course to create a permanent record of the evidence.

      Driven by the desire to capture the look and feel of actual experience, technological advances quickly made the images in the still camera move, giving the illusion that one was watching real life; and suddenly inventors brought it to little tent theaters in Europe: moving pictures, or motion pictures, or what we more commonly call today film.