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constitutes, are made up of opinion—each person’s “the way it appears to me.” Every opinion arises from a particular perspective and is shaped by that perspective. Political conversation is made up of varied and con- flicting opinions, with each seeking to woo others to its position. In contrast, factual and scientific truth claims to be beyond argument and is therefore fundamentally coercive.Truth, once established, ends debate about whatever it asserts.11 Despite the tension between truth and politics, however, factual truth does play a vital role in public life as a counterweight to government lies. Arendt’s study of totalitarian government identified official lying as a crucial threat to the public realm, one that can lead to “a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture—the making of another reality, as it were.”12 To prevent governments, even representative democracies , from reconstructing reality, politics has to avoid treating facts “as the results of some necessary development which men could not prevent and about which they can therefore do nothing.” At the same time, politics must not deny facts or try to “manipulate them out of the world.”13 Truth requires impartiality and disinterestedness. Therefore it can only be sought and found outside the political realm. But factual truth is important for informing political opinions, “which can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth.”14 Thus there are two dangers: first, letting political dialogue float free from its mooring in factual truth and, second, mistaking factual truth for political truth: letting scientific and factual truth take over political dialogue and therefore extinguish it. Political debate can be informed by truth established outside politics, but political questions can never be settled by reference to truth. They can only be settled by persuasion. On the whole, career civil servants believe it is their duty to uphold the informative role of factual truth in public decision making to avoid a takeover by sheer self-interest and mutual back scratching.Yet torture reveals the dark side of the reliance on unarguable truth: the relationship between truth and power.This relationship has a long history.The ancient Greeks believed that truth, aletheia, came from another realm outside ordinary experience. It was buried, hidden out of sight, waiting to be uncovered. In the Greek legal system, the information extracted 46 thnkng, reason, and truth from slaves under torture was considered on its face to be the truth. One never knew whether citizens were lying or telling the truth and, besides, citizens were legally immune from torture. Slaves, on the other hand, ordinarily lied, but torture forced them to tell the truth—to reveal knowledge that otherwise would remain hidden.Therefore, if the city wished to know the truth about whether a citizen had committed a crime, the way to find out was to torture his slave—to extract the truth by force.15 From this practice has evolved the image of truth waiting out of sight for the requisite actions to reveal it. (Think of the recent TV series that began each episode with the admonition, “TheTruth Is Out There.”) The truth must be won through effort, especially, according to the ancient Greeks, through force inflicted on the body of the slave. The parallel to current understandings of torture is obvious:The truth is hiding inside the detainee, waiting to be extracted by the infliction of pain.The ticking bomb scenario reflects the sense of certainty on which the ancient Greeks based their use of torture.The truth is, unarguably, inside the person to be tortured. If you want that truth, you must be willing to torture to get it. Elaine Scarry suggests that “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”16 When you have a toothache, you know you are in pain. But when someone says to you, “My tooth hurts,” you wonder “How bad is it, really?” Extreme pain is virtually guaranteed to bring forth some response to the torturer’s questions. The certainty of pain, displayed in the bodily reactions of the prisoner, is transferred to what he says. The power of the torturer has “produced” the truth.Thus torture is taken to be a truth-producing mechanism despite the incontestable fact that there are hundreds tortured in the absence of any indication that they actually know something vital and who therefore...

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