Virginia Woolf famously wrote, with her usual sense of assurance, that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.”1 Some literary historians have pointed to the publication, in 1914, of W. B. Yeats’s collection of poetry Responsibilities as a document that records, on the eve of the First World War, the radical change in human nature. One of the more familiar poems in that volume, “The Magi,” gets at the new sensibility through the theme of disappearance: “Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,/In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones/Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky.” As telling as these writers are, the dates, for me, come too late. For me, the change began as soon as the nineteenth century opened.
The disappearance of the “pale unsatisfied ones” continues to clog the imagination. The Bush administration brought to the world “ghost prisoners” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. We hear of “the disappeared” in Latin America; the “ghosts of war” in Vietnam; and the “ghost fighters” in Lebanon. The CIA refers to its own clandestine operatives as “spooks.” We also periodically learn about those disappeared souls who have undergone extreme rendition, and who have been sent to who knows where, for who knows what kind of treatment. The Pentagon designated its prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib as “security detainees” or “unlawful combatants,” thus denying them prisoner of war status and allowing the United States to hold them indefinitely without judicial rights or privileges.
One of the images burned into the popular imagination shows a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, a pointed hood covering his head and a loose-fitting gown draping most of his body, his arms outstretched, electrical wires dangling from his arms, his whole being seeming to float on top of a box—a ghostly, spectral nineteenth-century icon from a twenty-first-century war. Even while film itself has disappeared, we have in the Iraq War the first digital images of horror.
How easy the United States military makes it for us to forget that the wired-up prisoner began the year as someone’s husband or brother or fiancé; that under the hood and gown one can find flesh and bone and blood. How gross that we need reminding that the outline we see is not something called a “security detainee”—whatever that might mean exactly—but a human being; not a stuffed mannequin but a live human being. How horrid that we have to remind the torturer—and us—that he is applying electrodes to one of his own kind.
Such atrocities do not just happen at our military prisons, but in our civilian prisons, and in our detention centers as well. The New York Times, in a May 6, 2008, editorial titled “Death by Detention,” detailed the horror of what the newspaper calls an “undocumented foreigner.” It seems that an immigrant from Guinea, Boubacar Bah, overstayed his tourist visa. Immigration authorities picked him up in 2007 and incarcerated him in the Elizabeth, New Jersey, detention center. As with most of our prisons in America, a private company runs the Elizabeth detention center. While incarcerated, Mr. Bah purportedly fell and fractured his skull and, although he was “gravely ill,” guards shackled and locked him in a “disciplinary cell.” As the Times reports: “He was left alone—unconscious and occasionally foaming at the mouth—for more than 13 hours. He was eventually taken to the hospital and died after four months in a coma.”
Those in charge of such facilities—prisons, detention centers, military brigs, and compounds—invest the word immigrant, in effect, with the same evil as the words prisoner or enemy combatant or suspected terrorist. As with prisoners at Guantánamo or Bagram or Abu Ghraib, immigrants in federal custody have no right to legal representation; most of them cannot defend themselves; many do not even speak English, and thus have no idea of the charges leveled against them.
Using the nineteenth century as its foundation, Unsuspecting Souls tries to figure out how we got to such a bizarre state of affairs—especially in this country—where the idea of immigrant went from marking the greatness of this country to becoming a stand-in term for freeloader and felon. The book explores what it means to be a modern human being, the assumptions on which that definition rests, and where those assumptions came from. The book also entertains ideas about where we may be heading. It shows how even the most ridiculed theories of the nineteenth century shaped our own interior lives, and created who we are today. Seen against the backdrop of the nineteenth century, key cultural artifacts that once seemed odd and complicated fall more neatly into place. For instance, only a radical alteration in attitude toward the human being could bring about something as revolutionary as nonrepresentational art, whose beginnings point to the late-nineteenth-century Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. Imagine: canvas after canvas without a single person, in a time when artists made their reputations painting the human figure. If people disappeared from the canvas, the loss of human essence helps explain, in great part, why they left—even if we do not know where they went. We might well ask, Have we all become unsuspecting victims in that great caper called disappearance? Are we all, in effect, nonrepresentational?
The erosion of human essence continues at a furious pace. If we hope for change in the world, we must regain our sense of being, our sentience. What does it mean to be alive, to be human, in this, the twenty-first century? Philosophers and artists, writers and teachers have always asked such questions. Nowadays, we also hear it from politicians and corporate executives, from advertising mavens and design engineers. But these latter types, who enjoy positions of authority and power, of course, have ulterior motives and hidden agendas. And their answers demean and simplify. They define our lives only in the narrowest of ways—as voracious consumers, fragile immune systems, frightened political subjects, and finally as cogs in a high-powered, relentless machine, over which the average person has utterly no control. We confuse the fact of their power and authority with outright intelligence. We believe that they know better than we what we need. That is not the case. And so, we need to be asking those fundamental questions 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. The camera of course exploded in the next century into a succession of screens—besides film, we have TV, the computer, various sorts of electronic games, and a variety of handheld devices—BlackBerrys and personal digital assistants—each with its own tiny touch screen. Even with all that innovation and invention, I grant the old and familiar still camera center stage in this book. I will spend an appreciable amount of time talking about the camera’s importance in shaping perception in the nineteenth century. But, equally as important, I also use the camera as a tool for converting the succession of chapters in this book into a more graspable reality.
I ask the reader to consider each chapter as a “snapshot,” a term that first described a way of hunting, dating from 1808, which involved a hurried shot at a bird in flight, in which the hunter does not have enough time to take perfect aim. Sir John Herschel, who coined the word “photographic,” applied the phrase snapshot, in 1860, to capturing events, in a hurried and offhand style, with a still camera. Here’s the first instance of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The possibility of taking a photograph, as it were by a snap-shot—of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.” For Herschel, time is crucial—do not think, just shoot. By 1894, the phrase had made it into newspapers and journals, and into the recognized organ of the profession, the American Annual of Photography: “Many think it is just the thing to commence with a detective camera and snap-shot.”
An odd locution, the “detective camera,” but by 1860, when Herschel used the phrase, cameras had become small enough and light enough so that even amateurs could use them with agility
and speed. Manufacturers designed the Concealed Vest Camera, one inch thick and five inches long, so a person could hide it under a coat or jacket with the lens poking through some small opening in the cloth, with the idea that one could use such a camera for all kinds of detective work—professional and amateur—in sleuthing or where the person wanted to capture real candid situations. The camera, in a sense, disappeared from sight.
The camera captures shadows, the dreamy images that make up so much of experience. The phrase “shadow catcher” got attached to the photographer and ethnographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, who set out in the 1890s to document the rapidly vanishing American Indians. He attempted to make a permanent record of some eighty tribes across North America that he saw disappearing in his own time. William Henry Fox Talbot, who invented the negative and positive technique for taking and developing photographs, so intimately connected with the early days of the camera, says, not so much about Curtis, but about the process of taking photographs itself: “The most transitory of things, a shadow . . . may be fettered by the spells of our ‘natural magic,’ and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy.”5
It is all about shadows, about the past. We can try to capture the past with some specificity, but events come to us only as shadows. The camera captures this better than any other appliance, certainly better than any other nineteenth-century invention. This is especially true of the detective camera, working its magic while completely out of view. I have tried, myself, to recede as much as possible in order for the extraordinary events of the nineteenth century to fully display themselves.
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