Jack Bauer, Sociopath

Kevin Drum reads my mind in this post from Washington Monthly, which asks the perennial question, "Seriously, what's going on with 24 and its bizarrely casual use of torture this season?"

Watching the show last night, I had wondered the exact same thing. It's been one bout of torture after another, and it is getting pretty stomach-turning. In previous seasons, there was plenty of torture, but it was almost never Jack performing it, and he was usually as likely to be the recipient as the applicant.

Perhaps this just confirms what my wife thinks, which is that the show is pointlessly brutal. It may be, but Kevin has a novel theory:

At first it looked as though the writers had decided to portray torture as a routine interrogation device for use with terrorists, but now it looks like there's more at work here. The real goal is to convince America that torture is (a) revolting and (b) doesn't work anyway. Clever guys, these writers. I wonder if they'll convince anyone?

I think this is a potentially fruitful theory, but I can't help moving from the question of what the writers are thinking to the question of what Jack, the character, is thinking. In the past, I have used Jack as an example of an ethics of responsibility in my class -- somebody who is willing to take on guilt for the sake of another. I thought of him as a kind of secular verson of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, but with a gun.

However, after several seasons of his exploits, I've begun to have my doubts. The more I watch him, the more it occurs to me that he's really a sociopath, who as a counter-terrorism agent has found a niche in society that will allow him to act out his sociopathic impulses with impunity, as long as he's effective. He's continually disregarding authority, violating the law, murdering, taking drugs, robbing convienience stores (!), all in the name of doing "that which is necessary."

At a certain point, I think we would be justified in asking whether what Jack thinks is necessary has any actual correspondence to what is really necessary.