It is fashionable today for those who need not worry about protecting anyone from anything (except fair, careful reflection) to moralize and sensationalize, idly and mischievously, about torture. Is it ever justified? Would our side ever do it?
Fair enough. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and torture is no idle matter. But consider where this eager Schadenfreude can lead, if given its head in hysterical times, when rumor and innuendo carry far, far more weight than sober analysis and answerability. Just as the terrorist need only succeed once, whereas his intended victims remain eternally vulnerable, so smears need only besmirch once, and thenceforward all the burden is ever on the victim to try free himself from the foul spot; all the better if the victim is already deceased and interred.
D.O. Hebb was the greatest research psychologist of the 20th century. (I say “research” to distinguish him from the armchair/couch kind of psychologist with which his work had about as much affinity as with a geologist’s or a gardener’s.) Hebb’s contributions spanned the full spectrum of human (and animal) experience, from behavior to brain function, from childhood to old age, from biological nature to cultural environment, from sensory deprivation to sensory enrichment — and the overarching theme of his life’s work was how experience affects the brain.
Now we are told that Hebb’s secret research taught the CIA how to torture at Abu Graibh. First, there was nothing secret about Hebb’s research. Generations of undergraduates have learned how his experiments discovered the disastrous effects of sensory deprivation (as well as the remarkable benefits of sensory enrichment). He had been investigating those factors long before the Canadian Defense Research Board (DRB) funded a portion of his research, and it is undoubtedly the case that they funded his research because of its possible interest to the DRB rather than that he did the research because the DRB was interested in it. That is transparent, because the implications of Hebb’s research for the DRB are a one-liner — sensory deprivation has disastrous effects, hence it’s a good potential form of torture — whereas their implications for Hebb’s life work on how experience affects the brain (positively and negatively) constitute the foundations of modern cognitive neuroscience.
That sensory deprivation is a good potential form of torture was what drew the DRB to Hebb’s work in the first place, and they did not learn anything from funding it that they would not have learned if someone else had funded it, and they had merely read it when it was published in a journal (as the DRB tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent him from doing). We must not forget that the the military, with its deep pockets, has funded an awful lot of research, a lot of it awfully trivial, and some (like the psychic research they funded to get people to divert nuclear missiles by telepathy), frankly absurd. Researchers, with far shallower pockets, must alas take their research funding where they get it — but that does not mean taking their research where their funder wants it to go.
D.O. Hebb was a great scientist, with a grand vision, who left a lasting legacy in our understanding of how behavior is organized in our brains; the DRB was and is thinking at about the scale and depth of the journalists who are now seeing in these banal and empty facts about some of the sources of his research funding the germs of a sinister conspiratorial theory of how Hebb’s work is behind the abuses pictured in those lurid hooded photos we’ve been seeing in the papers. Perhaps we should look more closely at the funding history of Faraday too, to see whether we can attribute some of the other abominations at Guantanomo to the father of electricity.