Personalism in the Spanish-Speaking World: Mexico

by Jim Beauregard

I had not thought, previously, that personalism could be harmful to your health, but as I sat at Logan airport in Boston awaiting my delayed flight to Dallas and then on to Puebla Mexico, I watched Hurricane Harvey come ashore in east Texas with predictions of 40 inches of rainfall and widespread coastal evacuations.  Simon Smith, (he of the BPF) perspicaciously advised me that if my plane went down I should avoid witches, yellow brick roads, flying monkeys, men behind curtains, and ruby-toned high-heeled shoes.  Good advice on all counts. 

The conference, the Fourth Ibero-American Conference on Personalism: Personalism, Justice and Citizenship (IV Congreso Iberoamericano de Personalismo: “Personalismo, justicia y ciudadanía”)  was held in Puebla (México), August 28-30 at the  Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP), sponsored by that university along with the Iberoamerican Personalist Association (Asociación Iberoamericana de Personalismo – AIP) and the Spanish Personalist Association (Asociación Española de Personalismo – AEP).  

The conference’s goal statement noted that, “Personalism was born as a movement of social demand and struggle for justice.” Since then many things have changed, but the struggle for justice in society through renewed thinking remains one of its identity traits. The fourth edition of this Ibero-American Congress seeks to become a forum in which the new challenges that our society presents are discussed and analysed: growing inequalities, discarding people, the need for citizen engagement, how to foster intermediate societies, new paradigms for effective and ethical policy action, etc.”  the call for papers indicated that presentations “should be offered within the framework of personalist thinking.”

Present at the conference and people from all over Central and South America, North America and Europe. The keynote speaker was well-known personalist Rocco Buttiglione, who spoke on “Personalist Thought in the Face of the New Capitalism.” (more on specific talks to follow).  Topics covered included persons in community, personalism and education, philosophical, culture and religious phenomena, bioethics, and included reflections on the work of personalist philosophers such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Max Scheler, Xavier Zubiri, Karol Wojtyla, Roman Guardini, Julian Marias, Jan Manuel Burgos, Paul Ricoeur, Kierkegaard, Emmanuel Mounier, the American (USA) personalist tradition, and others. 

So, many countries, and many traditions were represented. I chose to speak on the topic of “Personalism, Justice and Torture.”  While the words torture and personalism don’t obviously go hand-in-hand, but themes that connect personalism, social justice and human rights do. There were some specific distant and recent events that led me to the topic. Here in the United States, after the September 11 attacks in New York, the Bush administration took steps to create what came to be known as “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques) to be used against detained terrorism suspects in secret locations outside the United States. In 2009, the Obama administration published documentation that outline the specifics of those techniques, to the outrage of many, and many of the practices were discontinued e memos in question are publicly available and can be accessed through the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html)

I recently read two works that cause me to think about this at some length from a personalist perspective: James Mitchell, one of the two psychologists who had developed the US governments Enhance Interrogation Techniques, publish an apologia for his work which he called J. Mitchell, with B. Harlow, Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the minds and motives of the Islamic terrorists trying to destroy America, (New York: Crown Forum, 2016). In that book, Mitchell acknowledged that he was a developer of those techniques and attempted a justification for the development and use in order to protect American citizens from future terrorist attacks.  the combination of seeing the so-called torture memos of the Bush administration and reading Mitchell’s book prompted me to choose the topic I did for the public conference.  I had recently read a second book by the Irish neuroscientist Shane O’Mara, Why Torture Doesn’t Work: The Neuroscience of Interrogation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).  The combination of these two works prompted me to take a look at the issue from the perspective of personal is him.

O’Mara neuroscientist, as noted raise a number of thought-provoking questions about the entire Bush interrogation program. One of the most damning was the extent to which the program is pushed forward without any sound scientific basis.  in my talk a problem, I commented that one of the most striking aspects of this entire episode was how little rational thought actually took place at the highest levels of government.  The decision to employ torture to attempt to extract information from unwilling captives was grounded in numerous unexamined and unproven presuppositions about the nature and efficacy of torture, as well as the belief that language itself could be co-opted and used to alter reality, through recourse to euphemism and legal argumentation claiming that acts of torture were not, in fact, torture, so that various international prohibitions against torture, such as the Geneva Conventions, and the UN Convention Against Torture could be circumvented, and so that those engaging in such acts could do so with some guarantee of immunity from any subsequent prosecution, based on the argument that their actions had been approved since it had been justified and approved by the executive branch of the United States government. In essence, they could argue that they were acting according to American law.

O’Mara points out in his book that much of the argumentation in favour of the use of torture for interrogation purposes takes a consequentialist perspective – it is based on a presupposition that torture actually works, and that since the outcome/consequence of using it is that information is obtained which can undermine future terrorist attacks, its use is therefore justified.  he then proceeded to take a close look, from his perspective as a neuroscientist, not of the philosophical issues underlying it – he does make mention of the fact that a consequentialist ethics is what is been typically in play in this matter, but asked the question of science – does torture actually work? More specifically, as a neuroscientist, he asked if the claims of efficacy made by the Bush administration regarding the use of torture had any basis in reality.  O’Mara acknowledges right up front that this is only one piece of the puzzle, and also acknowledges literature in which philosophers and legal experts have argued against the use of torture. This perspective is a deliberately scientific one, and in addition to other types of arguments made against torture, it is in the and damning.  He points out again and again that torture does quite the opposite of what its proponents intend. From a neuroscientific perspective, he states that the purpose of torture is to induce individuals to retrieve information from the long-term memory that they would not otherwise wish to divulge. O’Mara examines each of the techniques that James Mitchell outlined in his book and that were reported in the Bush administration memos in light of the neuroscientific literature on insults to the brain, high levels of stress, posttraumatic stress disorder and the basic neurobiological functioning of the human brain, showing again and again that the stated goals of the Bush administration were subverted by their use of torture.

I think that O’Mara brings to the table a new type of information and insight about arguments against torture that deserve a hearing by any personalist thinkers find the actions of the American government troubling. More recently, these concerns are again raised: Donald Trump, during his presidential campaign, talk about bringing back the very methods that Mitchell had helped devise four terrorism investigations. The issue then, is still very much with us, when I argued in my presentation the personalists ought to be taking a close look at it and bringing to bear the resources of personalism in the argument against the use of torture.