Gregory Cohen, Staff Writer

Torture is a more touchy subject than ever with new information about the Bush administration still coming to light. To be able to look at these revelations with some objectivity, it is important to understand the history of torture.

The UB Humanities Institute is running its second year of “Scholars at the Muse.” Several research fellows discuss their award-winning papers and lectures at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in downtown Buffalo.

On Friday, Oct. 30, Rachel Ablow spoke. Her seminar was “The (Victorian) Truth of Torture.” The reading was based on her research conducted at UB and her book published in 2007, The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot. She is also the main editor of the book The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature.

Tim Dean, a UB English professor and the director of the Humanities Institute, opened with a few words praising the work of all the people who applied to be part of the “Scholars at the Muse” series. He went on to speak about the great amount of work Ablow had put into the seminar, as well as all the other speakers to come in later weeks.

The headlining topic of the seminar was sympathy, and how it can be used to describe emotion between people.

“Sympathy can be used to generate passion as [a] prelude to pain,” Ablow said when describing how sympathy is related to torture.

Ablow went on to describe how views on torture have changed since 9/11. Before the attack, the general American view of torture was that the torturer was the “bad guy” and the person being tortured was the “good guy.” The example she used was that of a Nazi soldier torturing an American GI to extract strategic information.

Now, roles have been reversed. The torturer is now the “good guy” while the person being tortured is bad. This is how our government has justified the use of torture tactics to extract information from terrorists.

Ablow also mentioned how this reversal has moved into the entertainment industry. Popular shows such as 24 and Lost glorify the torturer as doing what is necessary to save what is considered the “good side.”

Ablow, during her speech, gave the example of the ticking time bomb. This is the scenario in which you are in a room with a mad scientist.  The mad scientist, who has been tied up, has strapped a bomb to your daughter a few miles away. She asks how far you will go to extract the information from him that can deactivate the bomb.

The example can change to say that someone else’s daughter, or every person in the city, has a bomb strapped to him or her. Your answer may change, depending on how much sympathy you have for those in danger. This sympathy is what determines how far you will go in torturing the mad scientist, if you will at all.

Ablow’s main point was about sympathy and who is deserving of it. How the people in the torture situation are perceived is the deciding factor in determining how the torture itself is perceived.

When torture becomes a subject in a television show, sympathy always lies with the main character. Even if methods of torture break half of the Geneva Convention laws, viewers will still side with the torturer because they sympathize with him or her.

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