Scrolling Past the Dead

Humanities and Social Science
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About a year ago, an associate of mine passed me her phone and casually said “hey, look at this.” It was a video of someone being killed. I’ve always managed to avoid anything like that on social media, so I was shocked: horrified by seeing it, angry at my friend for showing it to me without warning, and baffled that she could treat it with such nonchalance.

Since then, I’ve come to learn that many normal people watch videos like this all the time on social media, that it’s become normalized. I dimly remember the time in the early 1980s when there was a media panic over “snuff” videos. Back then, viewing the recorded death of a human being was entirely taboo, whether for entertainment or in news reports. The change between then and now seems to represent a significant moral desensitization.

If this is accepted—and I can imagine objections—a common reaction might be to say that civilization is breaking down; indeed, the world is full of such narratives at the moment, all meant to explain the disorientating societal changes we are seeing. But my thesis is that this moral numbness is not so much a failure of the civilizing process as its logical extension.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his influential book, Modernity and The Holocaust, argues persuasively that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, not a setback on its forward march. Part of this argument is about how ordinary, decent people can be brought to commit or to contribute to acts of evil.

Bauman finds answers in the Milgram experiments and the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas.

Milgram

The Milgram experiments showed that ordinary people, when told to do so by an authority figure, will administer what they believe to be painful and sometimes even lethal electric shocks to a stranger. They do this not out of sadism but because the context of the experiment—perceived as a legitimate institutional organization—dissolves their sense of personal responsibility.

An aspect of this was distance:

Any force or event that is placed between the subject and the consequences of shocking the victim, will lead to a reduction of strain on the participant and thus lessen disobedience. In modern society others often stand between us and the final destructive act to which we contribute.

— Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 121

Levinas

For Levinas, morality originates not in rules, duties, or in reason, but in the direct encounter with the face of the Other.

The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill.

— Levinas, Ethics and Infinity

In front of the face, I always demand more of myself.

— Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism

Importantly for Bauman, this primordial source of morality is social, but it is prior to society. This is the distinction between (a) the mere fact of humans living together, and (b) the object of study of sociology, i.e., the structured system of institutions characteristic of civilization.

Putting it together

In a nutshell, Milgram showed very starkly how effectively distance disables moral responsibility, and Levinas identified exactly what it is that gets lost in these distancing mechanisms and processes.

The pre-societal source of morality is systematically dismantled by modernity. Bureaucracy works by increasing the distance between the actor and the consequences of their actions, replacing face-to-face encounters with files, numbers, efficiently and faithfully applied policy. Such moral impulse as remains is steered into dedication to the job and loyalty to one’s colleagues and bosses—those who, through proximity, remain within the moral circle.

What bureaucracy did in the execution of the Holocaust, the screen now does more widely. Though videos may appear to bring us close to the action, they actually constitute a distancing mechanism as effective as an administrative chain of command: the screen removes proximity and moral demand, and repeated exposure reinforces and deepens this effect, eroding our capacity to be affected by what we see.

For Levinas, in his phenomenology of morality, the power of the face is in its presence, and this is exactly what is lost in social media.

This connects up with @Baden’s concept of the faciality machine, described in his essay, Faciality and Pathology, which looks at

the transformation of the human face from a site of authentic sociality and character into a tool of technological and commercial exploitation.

The mechanism, the “faciality machine”, is

an abstract mechanism of the infosphere that harvests human attention by replacing real presence with simulated, virtualized emotion.

It’s in this context that a recording of someone’s death can appear between a makeup tutorial and a cat video, reduced to just another unit of stimulation.

What’s missing

I may develop this into a full article, but I wanted to see what the TPFers thought about it. The gaps I want to fill in are:

  • Something about the civilizing process, as described neutrally or positively by Norbert Elias, to justify a widening of the claims about modernity to cover civilization in general
  • The data: studies in social psychology by Konrath et al on changes in empathy over time—do these support my claim of desensitization?
  • And something about possible futures…

[!question]
If the civilizing process extirpates the pre-societal sources of morality, and if returning to a pre-institutional, unmediated existence is impossible or undesirable, how can civilization be adjusted, re-imagined, or re-structured to reinstate those sources of morality?

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would giving real-life punishment to distributing and recording these videos remove the distance?

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Is the desensitization you’re talking about really any different from what happens when people stop to gawk at car accidents? It’s just that it’s gotten so much easier to find shocking stuff than it used to be.

As to its effects on society—people have been saying that the behavior of younger generations, e.g. watching television or playing video games, will lead to more violent behavior. I don’t find that very convincing.

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Yeah, that’s not really what I’m claiming. But you’re right to bring it up, because I didn’t actually say what I thought the effects would be. And this is where it gets a bit complicated. It has to do with a fundamental loss of subjectivity, because the capacity to be morally affected by the suffering of another constitutes subjectivity, to an important degree. I’ll try to write a post about it.

EDIT: Also, as emphasized in the OP, the problem is not that distancing makes people more violent, but that it allows them to do evil without being violent. I’ll try to tie that back to the death videos in that post I said I’d write.

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Do I have to accept the premise of your hypothetical, meaning, can I challenge the idea that the good old days were all that good and that we’ve corrupted more recently? Did they not put heads on stakes and pack in closely to see hangings? And then there was that whole Cain murdering Abel thing.

I think we’ve just gotten better at things, more systematic, more organized, and more technological. The Holocaust was made possible only by trains and well designed methods of mass murder. I’d suggest we haven’t changed. We’ve just learned what we’re capable of and how we can get folks to do it. Ancient Man would have pushed the shock button just the same as Modern Man, but it’s just that Ancient Man didn’t have shocking devices and wasn’t clever enough to navigate around the psychological barriers that would stop many from engaging in the behavior.

My belief is that Ancient Man (who actually Jung called Archaic Man, but I won’t make that reference because I sound like a broken record with my Jung bullshit) carries with him all the relics of his past unconsciousness and those beliefs remain beneath the surface, now uncovered by our ability to delve into the unconscious. The fear then is reverse from what you suggest, which is not that we have corrupted from a state of greater purity, but that we still are the wild eyed men and women of the bush, ready to pounce and slash given the right motivation and equipment.

My solution I’d suggest though is close to yours, which is to stop fetishizing the future as if whatever might come must be progress. Looking backwards at who we are, how we got here, and what those structures are that we created often hold the key to how we ought proceed. “Ought” is the moral issue, which holds little place in technological advances. Let’s look backwards not because we were better then, but because the thousands of years we arrived at social strategies that took into consideration our basic underlying humanity existed then, as opposed to now, where we think scientific advancement has made those relics worthless and to be disgarded.

Look backwards here at one tradition among many: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/281553/jewish/Viewing-the-Remains-of-the-Deceased-in-Judaism.htm

Glen Slater who wrote “Jung vs. Borg” makes the interesting point that we finally accepted physical protections from the the scientific advances of the industrial revolution by building safety rails and instituting safety protection laws. The technological revolution is new and so we’re just now watching our internal London Bridge falling down with the rats scattering about. This revolution is of the mind and of systemitizing mental processes. We therefore need protections in that space, of our mental health and our spiritual well being.

My favorite part was the London Bridge part. Nice visual by me.

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I’m reading Critchley on Levinas right now, as it happens, so your OP is very pertinent. I will think about the question you raise, and keep my eyes open for relevant passages from C and L. My hunch is that you’ve created an excellent lens through which to look at what “ethics as First Philosophy” might mean in practice.

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Not at all.

But that is not what I’m saying. My story is not a Fall narrative. The “pre” in “pre-societal” is logical-structural, not temporal-historical: pre-societal sources of morality are still operative.

I concede that if you read only the question at the end, it looks a bit like I am talking about ancient versus modern, but it should be clear in context, so have a look at the rest of it. And anyway, that last question is quite explicit that this is not about returning to the good old days.

So as it turns out, I agree with most of your post.

That’s right: the Holocaust didn’t happen because modern humans were worse than ancient ones. It happened because modernity had created the means—the technology and administrative organization—that distanced the perpetrators from the victims (the functionaries from the consequences, in bureaucratic terms). I don’t know about the “just” though—genocide is barely even thinkable without modern civilization—but otherwise you’ve arrived at something close to my thesis.

Now, this is interesting. As I explained, I am absolutely not saying that we have been corrupted from a state of greater purity. But neither do I agree that “we still are the wild eyed men and women of the bush, ready to pounce and slash given the right motivation and equipment.”

Or maybe it’s better to say we are still both. Underneath the civilized veneer, Jung finds the shadow, and Levinas finds the sources of morality. Perhaps these are complementary accounts: both are primordial, but both—not only the former—are also suppressed and diminished by civilization. This is an important corrective to the Jungian and mainstream views, i.e., civilization produces morality, curbs our worst instincts, and the more civilization progresses, the more moral we become. Milgram and the Holocaust and many other examples show this kind of thinking isn’t right.

Yeah, and maybe that’s what I’m asking at the end.

Excellent. The dignity of the face as a living presence is preserved; to look upon the face of the dead is a violation, because they cannot look back. This is very Levinasian, and it’s one answer to my question at the end: religious tradition is one thing that can preserve and cultivate morality in the face of the extirpating pressures of modernity. It suggests, optimistically, that the civilizing process includes not only extirpation but countervailing traditions (religion being a product of civilization too).

So, in the process of reading my argument as if it were simplistic and boring you managed to agree with what I was really saying, and then enrich it, and give a good answer to the question at the end. :clap:

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Then I think you’d definitely find the Levinas section of Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust interesting. It’s short, although the rest of the book builds on it. This is most it:

To Levinas, ‘being with others’, that most primary and irremovable attribute of human existence, means first and foremost responsibility. ‘Since the other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard.’ My responsibility is the one and only form in which the other exists for me; it is the mode of his presence, of his proximity:

the Other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself – insofar as I am – responsible for him. It is a structure that in nowise resembles the intentional relation which in knowledge attaches us to the object – to no matter what object, be it a human object. Proximity does not revert to this intentionality; in particular it does not revert to the fact that the Other is known to me.

Most emphatically, my responsibility is unconditional. It does not depend on prior knowledge of the qualities of its object; it precedes such knowledge. It does not depend on an interested intention stretched towards the object; it precedes such intention. Neither knowledge nor intention make for the proximity of the other, for the specifically human mode of togetherness; ‘The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility’; and this moreover,

whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other. To say: me voici. To do something for the Other. To give. To be human spirit, that’s it … I analyze the inter-human relationship as if, in proximity with the Other – beyond the image I myself make of the other man – his face, the expressive of the Other (and the whole human body is in this sense more or less face) were what ordains me to serve him … The face orders and ordains me. Its signification is an order signified. To be precise, if the face signifies an order in my regard, this is not in the manner in which an ordinary sign signifies its signified; this order is the very signifyingness of the face.

Indeed, according to Levinas, responsibility is the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. Responsibility which means ‘responsibility for the Other’, and hence a responsibility ‘for what is not my deed, or for what does not even matter to me’. This existential responsibility, the only meaning of subjectivity, of being a subject, has nothing to do with contractual obligation. It has nothing in common either with my calculation of reciprocal benefit. It does not need a sound or idle expectation of reciprocity, of ‘mutuality of intentions’, of the other rewarding my responsibility with his own. I am not assuming my responsibility on behest of a superior force, be it a moral code sanctioned with the threat of hell or a legal code sanctioned with the threat of prison. Because of what my responsibility is not, I do not bear it as a burden. I become responsible while I constitute myself into a subject. Becoming responsible is the constitution of me as a subject. Hence it is my affair, and mine only. ‘Intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation … I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it. Reciprocity is his affair.’

Responsibility being the existential mode of the human subject, morality is the primary structure of intersubjective relation in its most pristine form, unaffected by any non-moral factors (like interest, calculation of benefit, rational search for optimal solutions, or surrender to coercion). The substance of morality being a duty towards the other (as distinct from an obligation), and a duty which precedes all interestedness – the roots of morality reach well beneath societal arrangements, like structures of domination or culture. Societal processes start when the structure of morality (tantamount to intersubjectivity) is already there. Morality is not a product of society. Morality is something society manipulates – exploits, re-directs, jams.

Obversely, immoral behaviour, a conduct which forsakes or abdicates responsibility for the other, is not an effect of societal malfunctioning. It is therefore the incidence of immoral, rather than moral, behaviour which calls for the investigation of the social administration of intersubjectivity.

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@T_Clark notes that people have been saying for decades that TV and video games would lead to more violent behavior. As I mentioned, the OP doesn’t make that claim, and is actually saying something like the opposite—but it does encourage me to say something about what the effects might be.

Unlike the mechanics who built the gas vans of the Second World War—ordinary people, proud of their own small contributions and eager to get along with their colleagues—the people viewing death in their social media feeds are not part of a genocidal war machine. What I’m going for is the diagnosis of a condition, not predictions about consequences. My point, via Bauman, is that the civilizing process produces subjects who are not more likely to engage in violence, but who are structurally available for complicity in evil, by means of societal distancing mechanisms and processes.

But come to think of it that does look a lot like a dire warning, so let me try to put it differently. According to Levinas, being faced by the Other makes one responsible, and this responsibility constitutes subjectivity itself. To be a subject is, in part, to be capable of being addressed by and responsible to the Other.

If it’s true that this capacity is being numbed, the most disturbing thing—or maybe I should say the most interesting thing to me at the moment—is not that people will become more violent (as discussed, they probably won’t), or even that they will be more likely to take part in genocide, but that they have been in some sense hollowed out by participation in a society of pervasive distancing mechanisms.

To see what I mean, think of the difference between witnessing death or pain right in front of you and witnessing it on a screen. The former activates a moral response because of the presence of the suffering Other, whereas the latter increasingly doesn’t—and this is the specific sense of desensitization I meant: not that we become less sensitive to violence right in front of us, but that when repeatedly presented with real violence and suffering via a screen, whatever residual moral force the videos might carry is diminished.

Now extend this across the whole of society, in which an increasing proportion of morally significant reality—suffering, death, war, torture, and natural disasters—reaches us through screen-mediated channels.

So I’m trying not to issue dire warnings about all this, and I’m certainly not complaining about younger generations, but I do think it’s worth asking about the way people might be changing.

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It occurs to me that this lets us off the hook too easily, as if the only form of complicity worth worrying about is the extreme case of genocide. But through the distancing mechanisms operative today, we are complicit in other evils: buying clothes made in sweatshops, using AI every day (as I do) that consumes vast amounts of power and water, paying taxes that pay for military operations in which operators kill people as if playing video games.

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Good question and I have wondered about this too. I suspect we’re simply going to change our perspective and redefine morality along with it.

It is interesting to me that running alongside this moral “disinterest” is another strand of culture invoking incessant moral outrage, sometimes parodied as “woke.”

Maybe the two can cancel each other out?

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Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin. Moral outrage seems like an abstract, screen-mediated performance more than an expression of the pre-reflective encounter with the Other that Levinas identifies as the source of morality. In other words, it’s as much a product of the societal, rather than the social—as much as the disinterest itself.

So they don’t cancel each other out so much as reinforce each other. Or it’s just that they’re two symptoms of the same condition.

So civilization or modernity might extirpate morality, but it doesn’t eliminate moral language. That reminds me of Alasdair MacIntyre, who said that modern moral debates consist of mere rhetorical gestures and have no genuine morality to back them up on either side. The social frameworks that gave rights, justice, and freedom their meaning have largely gone, but the language remains, with the effect that people just don’t know what they’re talking about any more.

Thanks :+1:

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I don’t think we can hope to consciously produce a functioning, sustainable moral framework ourselves.

Genuine moral structures like religion, traditions, culture, etc. develop in large part spontaneously over the course of hundreds of years.

We in the West have mostly been preoccupied with erasing those structures, and calling it progress.

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I like this frame, but I wonder if it is correct. I know a lot of people like this, and I’m afraid they seem entirely sincere. And while there are some performative psychopaths who use heightened emotions to live like trolls among us, I don’t think we can dismiss the hyper-woke as entirely bogus (not that you are saying that exactly).

Despite the bitter taste modernity leaves in some people’s mouths, I wonder if MacIntyre underestimated how much people today still agree on basic moral ideas, like being fair, avoiding harm, and respecting human rights, even without sharing the same traditions.

I’m fascinated by this idea of “genuine morality,” and I’m not sure if it matters, but I certainly see the argument that morality, unconnected to some sort of telos or coherent system, might just a lot of words in search of a value system and lacks rational grounding. I can’t take myself out of this: I hold a series of moral positions without reflecting on them or caring much about what they are. I just tend to do what I think is right, without locating my position in any broader context; despite second-person urging to embrace Nussbaum’s tweaking or reframing of Aristotle. :wink:

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Yes, I don’t think I want to say that it’s not sincere, just that they are unknowingly engaging in a performance, using language that is not as rooted in the moral life of face-to-face encounters as it should be to count as genuinely moral.

Maybe. And if I can take it back to Levinas, we do still draw on the face-to-face encounter as the source of morality; that’s the source of the basic moral ideas you mention. Insofar as these things still matter—and they obviously do—we have not lost touch with that pre-societal source of morality.

Same here. And I think that’s the important point. The fact that we “just tend to do what we think is right” without appealing to an ethical system for justification is evidence that the pre-societal moral impulse is doing most of the work. The worry is not that this will disappear but that its domain is being narrowed, while the vast machinery of mediated life carries on indifferent to it.

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I agree, but we have not lost these things completely. I don’t know if I want to suggest that we can “produce a functioning, sustainable moral framework ourselves,” as in, invent a new moral tradition out of nowhere. On the other hand, I’m not normally one for reviving religions and traditions, so it’s something I have to think about.

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I guess my first question would be: was it ever any different? Have we ever really used more than our intuitions in practice (tied to cultural values, etc)? I wonder if it’s a case of the often referenced ‘nostalgia project’ to hold that morality meant more to us back in the day. “Because it says so in the Bible” was what my grandma’s generation and her forefathers held to and I suspect this is even less engaged than many disenfranchised folk today. The difference is that my grandmother and her ilk were arrogantly confident in the supposed transcendental validity of their judgments.

I am tempted to think that morality does not require grounding in anything ultimate. Rather, it can emerge through ongoing social interactions, shaped by experience and shared values, and evolve as communities evolve, without appeal to a fixed or absolute foundation. Indeed, could it not be argued that moral systems tied to specific notions of telos or ultimate purpose risk becoming rigid and unreflective in their own way?

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I think I agree entirely. You’re pushing back against MacIntyre. I mentioned him in passing and he’s not central to what I’m saying, but you’ve brought out the crucial difference, between Levinas’s pre-reflective social interaction and MacIntyre’s systems and frameworks.

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Perhaps it should be pointed out that this isn’t limited just to suffering, but basically the screen and photo makes us separate from everything we see, not just violence.

How many children have been educated by adults that what they are seeing isn’t real, that “they are just actors” when the child is looking at a movie or a theater play? When we see a play, we know our role as viewers and we don’t rush to the stage and take away the blades from Hamlet and Laertes before something bad happens.

Let’s just remember that one of the first moving pictures, “Arrival of a train” from 1896, created a panic, because there, in the blurry black and white picture was a train coming towards the people. And we still can see this “transition” from reality to an act when people are caught on candid camera. Here it’s a norm that in the end it is something silly that the person can laugh when it’s told to him or her that it’s been a prank. Because the “not-so-funny” pranks can go horrible wrong, or at least end up in court.

And when it comes to reality, like war footage, we understand the messaging here too. Not to show the graphic details of war or the victims doesn’t affect many people as it should. Hence it’s far easier to market a war to people when they see just buildings or vehicles being demolished by smart bombs on an infra-red camera shot. That we hear numbers of thousands being killed doesn’t affect us much. Actually I would tip my hat for those war correspondents that do show the actual reality of war and put their own lives at stake. And we should remember that there’s far more violence and gore that is make believe. The statistic just how many murders on television or the movies has the average child seen in the US before he or she is 16 I don’t remember.

Lastly I’d say that Bauman has a normative stance here, which he doesn’t deny. Yet I think we still now the difference between reality and make believe, just as we know what is happening in front of our eyes and when we are looking at something on the screen.

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What follows is a bit of an experimental line of thought:

I think what draws most people to extreme media is a morbid curiousity about their own mortality. Given our natural fear of death and suffering, this curiousity is understandable.

The contents of extreme media of course offer no solace, and would sooner heighten one’s sense of mortality and vulnerability.

I don’t think the human brain distinguishes very heavily between real death and suffering happening infront of them, real death and suffering seen through a screen, or very accurate depictions of death and suffering like in horror movies.

The effect they produce is a combination of empathy and fear. In the case of watched media, one can add helplessness to that as well, because one is of course unable to stop whatever it is that is happening on the screen.

What I believe is effectively what is happening is the viewer is psychologically injuring, or perhaps even traumatizing themselves, in the very real sense of the word.

Through consumption of the media, their fears are confirmed and probably even amplified. The (non-psychopathic) brain cannot help but identify with the victim, but due to the extreme content, its logical response is to then distance the self from the victim - this is what causes the “numbness” or desensitization, which is actually dissociation.

When people talk about having watched extreme media, they might jokingly remark that it “scarred them for life,” and I don’t think that is far from the truth.

Reality can be too much to bear, and associated trauma very difficult to resolve. This can lead to all sorts of behavioral spirals, even including the consumption of more extreme media in the brain’s desperate attempt to reframe that which it cannot bear.

A bit of a tangent, but I find these sorts of psychological dynamics fascinating. Let me know if this touches on the types of things you’d like to discuss in this thread, or if it is too far off-topic.

I guess my overall point would be that the resulting ‘desensitization’ is not something that society does or encourages, but a natural reaction to being confronted with an unacceptable reality.

Curiousity killed the cat, as they say.

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