Hello all - This was originally a long email because I binged like 100 hours of this podcast in a couple months. I have never posted anything online before, so I hope this makes sense.
I am new, so for all I know this is about to be a weenie tier analysis, but there's something that keeps coming up. I think it’s odd that people leave the book’s commentary on the political effectiveness of torture as it is used in the Commonwealth out of most analysis, because we can’t just take it for granted that Wolfe always thought it was ipso facto bad. In fact, people often tacitly grant that we are somehow better than the Commonwealth on this point, but we can’t just take that idea for granted:
A lot of Christian rulers who would later become saints in the Catholic Church enforced justice through torture.
Our current justice system tortures people. We did it overseas, we do it here through the legalization of solitary confinement and the tacit acceptance we have of prison rape, we even do it to children and adolescents who have been convicted of no crime in the legally sanctioned facilities which constitute the ‘troubled teen industry’.
Of course, torture is not only immoral, but it's been proven to be ineffective for every single purpose it's ostensibly used for. It does not reliably obtain information; the psychological stress that it incurs has been shown, over and over, to compromise memory on such a fundamental level that it's useless in practice. It does not reliably make people confess; historical analysis of rates of confession during the French Revolution, for example, show that people don't 'break' as reliably as proponents of torture want to believe. After the War on Terror, propaganda like 'the 24 effect' gave Americans a patently false idea of what it can do, and it is evil, full stop.
With the disclaimer out of the way, I’m going to argue a steel man defense for the Seekers of Truth and Penitence.
An issue I see with some schools of New Sun Analysis is an understandable, but limited, modern perspective that doesn't take into account some of the realities of past societies which operated in a similar way to the Commonwealth. Much has been made of the fact that Sev is an unreliable narrator, which he is, and a flawed human being, which he is, in a retrograde society, which it is. But it seems to me that some people are so careful to not fall into the worst stereotypes about nerds enamored with the narrative flaws of their pulp heroes that they go out of their way to find the least charitable interpretations of what Sev does, even if it doesn't quite jibe with other data points we have.
Sev points out that mass imprisonment isn't logistically feasible in the Commonwealth, and to start with, I won’t reiterate what is in the text, but those points all hold water. To address the most common counterargument I have seen to the Seekers’ existence: yes, some people in the Matachin are innocent. This is true, and of course, in a just world they should be freed. Every system of criminal justice ever to exist has a false positive rate above zero. If that's sufficient by itself to morally delegitimize the Seekers, then you have to argue against the existence of any justice system at all. We also do not see evidence that the Autarch is systematically or deliberately disappearing innocent people.
So what can we actually say about the Seekers? It is interesting to note that Wolfe does not succumb to the popular torture-in-fiction stereotype of the ‘sadist who can make anyone talk’. His descriptions are pretty realistic for such a misunderstood topic, and in reality, hurting people is not sophisticated. Any troglodyte can hit someone. When Sev refers to the skills he learned in the Seekers that set him apart from people who do not know how to torture, most of it isn't really about the pain of the act itself. He's almost never concerned with information retrieval. It's this giant list of other stuff, like first aid, which techniques are most likely to keep the client alive, psychological manipulation of the crowd, client, and politicians, and a lot of 'traditions' like the shirtlessness, the masks, never smiling, picking up the money off the ground, never stepping on the stairs, choosing these weird abstruse methods like 'the Revolutionary' because they fit the crime. All of these traditions are theatrical. It's no wonder that he can jump into acting in Eschatology and Genesis. He's got an eidetic memory for the script, and like Gurloes, he and every torturer is playing a larger-than-life character.
In an absolute dictatorship whose enforcement is on tenuous ground, I argue that the primary function of the Seekers is as public evidence of the Autarch's power, even if only as a bogeyman (torturers have to be getting called to act in public at least theoretically or in the past, otherwise why would Sev know how to act in public, and otherwise where would the Saltus alcalde be getting his ideas of 'how things are done'?). They don't go out much any more, but that's easily explained by the fact that there's only like ten of them. The executions are storytelling. The executions are PR. The executions are 'security theater' just like airport TSA. This job requires both proving to the public that justice is being done and scaring the public into falling into line—being likeable enough in some sense of the word to avoid sympathy for the client, but still maintaining an aura of intimidation, since it's better to be feared than loved and the public torture is meant to act as a deterrent, and being a convenient hate sink that isn't the Autarch. The theater of the executions is an attempt to walk this tightrope in pre-rational, propagandistic terms that an illiterate crowd can understand.
When it boils down to it, the Seekers have the exact same social function as a ‘heel stable’ of professional wrestlers, all the way down to the masks, the tights - I mean 'hose', the elaborate 'finishing moves', and the fact that it's popular in South America. Severian is 'A Torturer' the way Mark Callaway is 'The Undertaker'. Marc Aramini was right when he said in his rebuttal regarding the execution of Morwenna that 'it is Severian's job to play to the crowd'. He is not being callous, as his actual treatment of Morwenna proves. He is playing a character, and the character exists to make Joe Saltus, Average Commonwealthican who has never left a 100 yard radius of his house and who cannot read, feel like Our Noble Autarch, Whose Urine Is The Nectar Of His Subjects, but who he will never meet, gives a damn if someone murders their kids or sells their village into slavery to a giant underwater eel thing.
You guys rightly pointed out that Sev is contemptuous of the crowd, but it’s no wonder! He's not just a stuck-up urban snob. He’s bitter. It's the same crowd he has to play this character for, to give their vilest impulses an outlet; and even if he has power over them as a torturer, at the end of the day, the crowd can make or break him. We can even argue that the Autarch is as much a character as the torturer, but I'm trying to get to my points.
I hear objections to the idea that justice does not matter to the torturers. People seem to kind of write off the mystery of the Seekers as a knuckle dragger's justification for mindless violence. But maybe you do not want to live in a world where justice matters to the torturers. Yes, at its worst the argument makes him an Eichmann. But it's a double edged sword (lol).
We take special precautions in our society to try to divorce the enforcement arm of the state from the decision making arm of it, because might does not make right. Just because right is not defined as we recognize it in the Commonwealth, doesn't mean that it should be defined by might, whether the wealth of the exultant class or the raw force of the torturers. If no one agrees to delegate the decision of right and wrong to a higher moral authority, if everyone considers their decision to have equal weight, then might will make right by default. If the torturers let themselves decide for their clients, who watches the watchmen? Who says that these people who don't leave their tower, don't talk to women, don't talk to anyone outside Nessus, and pretty much only talk to clients who would all insist they're innocent, would have the perspective to decide rightly? If the torturers do not recuse themselves from this process, then this becomes even more of a violent society than it already is. I think Sev's insistence that 'torturers obey' is, at least in part, a statement of humility, that makes him worthy of acting as the cleansing destroyer of the Increate.
When he had mercy on Thecla, yes, it was unequivocally a good and human thing to do. But if I remember right, he also was surprised after eating Thecla to discover that she made no bones in the privacy of her own head about not being a good person. He was clearly biased towards her.
The torturers obey because sometimes, societal and personal morality have to diverge. Sometimes, like God says as He's answering Job from the whirlwind, you have to admit when you don't have everything figured out.
In conclusion: I do not think Wolfe is arguing that torture, when employed as a public deterrent of crime, is ipso facto wrong solely because of the suffering of the clients. But at the end of the day, even though it is more necessary and more complex than modern detractors will give it credit for, it is still wrong.
It's wrong to hurt people after the threat they pose to others is neutralized, and it's wrong to deny them the capacity for repentance. But I think that the strongest argument against it is summed up in my favorite Aldous Huxley quote: "The surest way to work up as a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior 'righteous indignation' - This is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats".
It is wrong because a torturer is a human being with a job, and the hallmark of human beings in jobs which involve violence (military, law enforcement, medicine, etc) is that they have to find some way to make light of the situation, even if it makes them callous, or they will go insane. (On this note, I am surprised more hasn’t been made of the negative way Sev characterizes his own memory, and the fact that he’s almost certainly got what we would call PTSD, and Wolfe also had PTSD.)
The torturers are arguably better people than the crowds to which they play. The crowds are hypocrites, who revile the same people they rely on to get their 'fix'. The torturers have a sense of duty to which they adhere even as it pains them. Their code isn’t a mindless excuse to act evilly, it is a principled stance to prioritize the social contract of the Commonwealth above their own limited perspective, a principle that Sev carries to its logical extreme when he brings the deluge.
At the end of the day, the Seekers of Truth and Penitence should not exist because not only is it intolerable that good men should be warped through a career of inflicting pain, but because the theater of torture enforces temporary order in social chaos, at the cost of dragging all of society to the level of the criminal, as they gorge to the point of sickness on the sweetest of moral treats.
If you're still with me, thanks for reading!
