The Meaning of Torture
Oct 17th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
Earlier this year I was told in all seriousness by one of our MBA course visiting lecturers that
The meaning of mangement is the management of meaning
I say in all seriousness because the absurdity of this proposition was unchallenged, except by people repeating it afterwards with a smirk. Of course, on one level it’s a reasonable idea. Successful managers are influential and do shape the views of others. But the word “managementspeak” exists for a good reason. A former colleague of mine could quote verbatim from Alice in Wonderland at length. He often did so after management had pronounced on something or other, and if he was really fed up said
That’s it. I’m wearing my fish tie tomorrow.
It was a very convincing looking dead fish, a rainbow trout, suspended head down, with irridescent scales and spots; the sartorial equivalent of an Elvis painting on velvet. I never heard that management ever noticed or even conceived that it could mean “you stink, but nobody will say it out loud.” The organization did swim upstream and die but I had moved on by then, thankfully. We’ve since had Bills Clinton and Gates wriggle on the hook over the meaning of “is”.
Today I encountered the meaning of meaning. A book of this title was recommended in the middle of an online discussion about technology. However such topics are framed I can’t help thinking of the White Queen, fish ties, and even the family butler.
My father’s great caught you red-handed question was “What is the meaning of this?” He was also fond of less philosophical questions like “Are you waiting for the butler to bring in the dustbin?” (Wrong answer: wonder if it’s the butler’s day off; suggest butler needed pay rise etc.).
Today I watched The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, an American documentary on the abuse of prisoners in that jail. I knew the story, more or less. A lot of it hangs on the meaning of “torture.” It was hard to watch without feelings of anger and dismay. What a sad, cynical betrayal of everything America supposedly stands for. The first thing that struck me was that soldiers, including the commanding officer Karpinski, called the place Abu Grab, Abu Gorrib and worse. And of course they all called Iraq Eye-rak. This is not a small thing. Did any American soldiers learn anything about the country before going there? I heard one say on TV recently about an incident in Afghanistan “I’m not real good on names” when what he clearly meant was “I didn’t have a clue where I was.” One can’t expect every grunt to be a Tim Collins, but the irony of the US army engaging in conduct that is utterly self-defeating is stark. It was the founder of the discipline of knowledge management, which grew out of “after action reviews” in Vietnam. But this was not just the immorality and stupidity that happens in any war. We now know that the whole war was a put up job and that, contrary to what has been claimed, that Abu Ghraib and what happened there followed directly from decisions taken at the highest level in the US administration.
Listening to consecutive lies from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld I hoped they would face trial some day. It seems now that Clinton sowed the seeds of much of what has transpired by turning a blind eye to wrongdoing by elements of the previous Bush administration and that he did so because he had to work with Republicans. Had special prosecutors dealt with illegal arms deals by the first Bush administration a second one, involving many of the people responsible for the war, probably wouldn’t have happened.
Is is any wonder western society seems to gives off a stench of hypocrisy? This was a fine article in the last Sunday Times: A lesson in humility for the smug West. The author, William Dalrymple, has written quite a bit on this topic. About the only high ground left for western society in its conflict with Islam, or rather, people with oil who happen to be muslims, is the honesty with which it confronts its own hypocrisy.
