Elaine Scarry is an unusual professor of English. For one thing, she made a painstaking analysis of the mysterious explosion in 1986 of TWA flight 800, which killed all 230 people on board. Her conclusion -- that the Boeing 747 was brought down by electromagnetic interference -- was credible enough to be taken seriously by the US authorities.
For another, she has for decades scrutinized torture as an instrument of state-sanctioned policy, a preoccupation that grew out of her 1985 monograph The Body in Pain. Such eclecticism led to her nomination as one of the 10 women among Prospect magazine's top 100 public intellectuals in the world earlier this year.
Scarry became interested in pain, she says, "Because the number of literary texts which try to describe it is so small -- Sophocles's Philoctetes is one of the few. But because the writers hadn't dealt with it I had to turn to how pain was being expressed in non-literary areas. I would get -- as everyone does -- mailings from Amnesty International. And I would note how they used language to make someone like me who wasn't in pain feel pain."
Her book on the subject came out 20 years ago. Is torture -- the infliction of pain for political ends -- as big a problem now as it was then?
"Yes, it is. Torture is a huge problem today. Especially torture inflicted by my own country. And much of it turns on the problem of understanding others' pain. I once wrote an essay called The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,' in which I argued that the ease with which we injure people directly corresponds with the difficulty we have imagining them and their feelings. In political and moral life you must be aware of the pain of people whom you may never see," she said.
Sensitivity training for all? Is that what she is advocating?
"In a sense, yes. But I should back up and explain that sometimes I'm working on literature and sometimes I'm working on law. I would argue that you can't just rely on sympathetically imagining, for example, how someone on the other side of town, whom you've never met, feels," she said.
"Crucial though sympathy is, it can never take the place of having laws in place that actively prohibit injury. To go a step further, you should never have to rely on the ability of leaders to imagine or care about other people," she said.
So when former US president Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain," that was just politician's rhetoric?
"No, I don't think in his case it was just rhetoric. Clinton was known for being able to sympathize with a lot of different people, on a personal level. But the real issue is the distinction between individual compassion and statistical compassion," she said.
"Poor as we are, generally, at narrative compassion -- feeling another person's individual pain -- whatever weakness we have in that area is far surpassed by the weakness we have in statistical compassion, when we have to understand what's happening, or might happen, to huge numbers of other people at a given moment," she explained.
That geopolitical dimension relates to Scarry's other current interest, constitutional law. For a number of years, she has been working on a project pertaining to law and social contract. There's one particular issue that concerns her.
"The fact that my own country has so many nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction," she said.
"These are weapons that allow a small number of people, or one person even, to injure huge numbers of people. The book I'm working on argues that this power is wildly incompatible with laws deriving from our Constitution. In the US, we barely even talk about the fact that we have thousands of massively destructive weapons. We blithely talk about whether Iraq has one weapon, or might have one weapon, or probably doesn't have one weapon. And yet almost never does anyone say, `And, by the way, we have thousands of these things and they ring the earth every day,'" she said.
"I'll give you one quick statistic. The US has 18 Ohio-class submarines. Each of those submarines has the ability to destroy a continent and there are only seven continents. Eight of those Ohio-class submarines were built during the 1990s -- at a period in the US when the general feeling was `the Cold War is over, nuclear weapons are irrelevant,'" she said.
And can Americans who feel the same way as Scarry confront that problem using the law as a tool? She believes so.
"Two provisions within the US Constitution are starkly out of line with this kind of arrangement. One is the requirement for congressional assent to a state of war. Since the invention of nuclear weapons, we have never in the US had such a declaration -- even when we went to war. Presidents feel they can single-handedly, or with the consent of a few others, kill millions of people. Richard Nixon said during Watergate, when he was being impeached, `I can go into the next room and pick up the phone and 25 minutes later, 75 million people will be dead.' If a president can do that, why on earth would they feel they need to stop and get authorization for merely invading some country like Iraq? she said.
"In this country we think it's really only the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink. But the truth is, any president who has been asked whether he contemplated using nuclear weapons has said he did -- even multiple times," she said.
Even the Second Amendment, upholding the right to bear arms, can be used to steer the White House away from war, Scarry argues. The key is to read it metaphorically, as well as literally.
"What it means is that you leave the obligation to distribute weaponry, and the constitutional decision to use it, to the country at large. It endows the people, not the president, with the right to decide on military action," she said.
That would surely be disastrously cumbersome given the nature of modern conflict -- isn't democratic decision-making simply too slow for geopolitical crises? Scarry counters by pointing to the example of the passengers on United Airlines flight 93 above Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11.
"Within 23 minutes the passengers got information, checked it out, debated with each other, voted and acted to take back their plane," she said.
And how did those entrusted with the nation's protection react to the same threats?
"That really contrasts with the fact that the Pentagon, with all its weaponry, could not defend the Pentagon. [US President George W.] Bush, meanwhile, was flying round the country rather than coming back to Washington," she said.
Elaine Scarry is the Walter M. Cabot professor of aesthetics and the general theory of value at Harvard University.
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