Interesting. We’re looking at the same things very differently, but not ultimately disagreeing very much.
While I say that the screen strips away presence, and that’s the problem, you say that it doesn’t strip away presence, and that’s the problem. This is puzzling, because I can see your point too.
Well, either way the screen is the problem. The question is whether it damages us by failing to engage our moral responses (as I’m arguing), or by engaging them too fully and forcing us to shut down (as you’re arguing).
Maybe both. Initially, viewing the videos traumatizes, and then repeated exposure teaches the brain to stop engaging, at which point my account takes over from yours. And this would make sense, because your account is about individual psychology, and mine is socio-historical.
So…
No, I don’t think it’s off-topic, and I can feel my brain expanding as I write this.
This is a bit backwards. Before going into a great theory explaining the moral desensitization between then and now, I hope we can first confirm that there is moral desensitization.
There was a meta-analysis by Konrath et al finding a decrease in empathy between 1979 and 2009. But it’s gone back up according to an update. But I am not sure you could see what you are talking about in empathy curves. You seem to be saying there is no great moral difference between then and now; it’s simply that whereas in the past, you would have to go through the face, today you don’t. Why would this suggest changes in ‘raw’ empathy levels?
The Holocaust analogy is questionable in my opinion. As I understand it, we have two theses:
There is an increase in moral numbness.
This increase is simply the logical consequence of modernity/the civilizing process.
The problem is the time frame. At the beginning, you note a change between the 1980s and now. But the Bauman Holocaust theory is obviously about a more distant past. The consequence is that it’s not clear what new bureaucracy or new distance brought those changes after the 1980s. There could still be something about modernity responsible for the increase, but it would probably be tangential to the modernity responsible for the Holocaust.
If the distance we get with news reports on TVs in the 1980s wasn’t enough for the desensitization, why would the distance from screens be the game changer here? The face already wasn’t there in the 1980s, or was it?
Are you (or Bauman) claiming that bureaucracy reduces the number of actors “on the ground”, i.e., directly confronted to the face? Because it could be the case that we still have a similar number of actors on the ground and bureaucracy simply adds distanced actors, not actually reducing encounters with the face most of the time. What makes the actors on the ground act evil (and destroys the pre-societal source of morality) could be loyalty or dedication to the job, but this doesn’t seem very specific to bureaucracy or even modernity.
Also, are you saying watching those videos contribute to the death of those people like the Holocaust bureaucrats? If not, what’s wrong with scrolling past the dead?
Well, what counts as desensitization in the specific sense I was using the term might not be captured by such studies:
But it might have been misleading to call it “desensitization”—maybe that was a mistake on my part. It has led to misunderstandings already. It invites interpretations along the lines of the old debate around video games, horror movies, and death metal making young people violent. I want to steer clear of that—mostly.
Yes, I was aware of Konrath’s update. But I agree that the empathy data might not be directly relevant to what I’m talking about. This is alluded to above but I may explain it more in another post. In any case, I intend to address it somehow in the final article (if I write it), because even if it turns out not to be all that relevant, it seems like it ought to be.
A fair challenge. But I think the face was still operative in a sense in the 1980s, because of the conventions of traditional broadcast media: the taboo on showing death, the gravity of the reporting, the contextualization. These to some extent maintained the conditions under which a mediated encounter with death and suffering could still activate the moral impulse.
This context is lacking in a social media feed. Death is served up algorithmically alongside trivial content, and consumed alone (or collectively and alone at the same time, which is sort of like the loneliness of the big city). Maybe this means that (a) there are degrees of absence, and (b) the distancing mechanism now is the feed as much as the screen itself. That’s a useful refinement; thanks
I’m not claiming that, no. As for what’s wrong with scrolling past the dead, I’ve tried to answer that in some of my more recent posts, including here. And I’m not ashamed to say that it offends against what I take to be important moral impulses.
EDIT: I didn’t address your criticism of Bauman’s basic thesis on the Holocaust. I might not get into that—we’ll see.
On the other hand, I was born in 1951 and have been immersed from birth in television and it’s distancing factor. And look how well I turned out. A joke, but I like to think I have a good sense of empathy and fellow feeling for other people.
Sure, but in a more general sense, what evidence is there for this desensitization, however you define it?
What does that have to do with the “face”? You defined it as “the direct encounter with the Other,” so that’s still missing. It’s not really the face now; it’s something else.
But I am now confused about your claims. I can accept that, depending on the context, the same death video could elicit different reactions. For example, if the context tells you it’s fake, you’ll have a different reaction than if the context tells you it’s real. So news reports add a heavy tone and whatnot.
What else are you saying? Is it simply that we have more death videos without context than in the past? That death videos without context don’t bring the same reactions as they would have in the past? That modernity leads to the removal of the heavy tone? That watching death videos without context leads you to lose some moral impulse, not just when you watch the video but even outside of it?
Very important and timely OP. And though it would be nice if the title could be considered hyperbolic, I think we’re well past that. Anyway, a few quick thoughts before I read all the replies.
So,yes, following Levinas and Bauman, the face is that point at which symbolic and physical reality cohere in the unique salience of human emotional life, and because of this, it’s the grounding for social reality, i.e., the organic pre-societal connectivity at the base of all our social relations. So, the face can be considered the physical representation of intersubjectivity itself - the closest we have to a concertization of morality.
So, when a technological mediation of the face-to-face relationship becomes naturalized, particularly for the purpose of commodifying this relationship, it’s not surprising that the result is the degradation of the moral imperative it grounds.
Your example is on point in several ways: Firstly, it’s very banality shows how deep the rot is. I’ll bet many of us have had similar experiences - I know I have.
Secondly, note the perniciousness behind it that gives an insight into how that type of thing becomes banal, naturalises itself. The first level of mediation between the user of the phone and the victim on the other end manifests through something like an analogical shortcut: ‘screens entertain me so what’s on the screen is entertainment’. (And there is much to analyse in that step alone, but suffice to say the reactivity - as opposed to reflectivity - screen media tends to engender is self-reinforcing.) The second level of mediation between the phone user and you demonstrates a kind of mirror blindness: ‘This entertains me so it will entertain you’. In both cases, the other substantially disappears: in the former, reduced to a "show”; and in the latter, just another version of the self. The point here is that to naturalise this kind of mediation is to naturalize a kind of solipsistic narcissism that requires no malice or ill-feeling for its destructiveness.
And we don’t have to be luddites to recognize this; technology doesn’t have to be used this way - we have choices. But the path of least resistance is the passive acquiescence to increased mediation and the concomitant commodification of - if we’re to take Levinas, Bauman (and others like Stiegler) seriously - the root of our humanity.
Because this process is self-reinforcing, the more we lose, the less sensitive we become to what’s missing. And so, it’s hardly a stretch to argue that the inter-positioning of a trivialized virtuality where the form degrades in advance the salience of the content - homogenizes it as mass consumable - is the process of making invisible to us the visceral call of the other because it is the deletion of something within that, when its gone, we literally don’t have the sense to look for.
The ultimate trajectory here, it seems, is the ‘denaturing’ of the natural grounding of morality. We make substantial moral sentiment culturally illegible and replace it with a kind of game of symbols where to win is to say the right thing while maintaining the inherent distance and lack of commitment of the typical virtue signaller. It is to construct a society full of the type of people who can post a disturbing video on social media with a sad-face emoji while doomscrolling through pages of such media just to feed their dopamine-induced addiction to technotainment. A shell society without true sociality.
None of this is to say we’re at the point of no return for authentic morality. But we might get there. And if we do, the way we use/abuse technology will play a big part in our “progress”.
But in an attempt to be more accurate, I’ll lean on @Baden’s post:
So the literal face is the paradigm case of a phenomenological structure, and it is this structure that I mean. So, when I said that the conventions of broadcast media in the 1980s “to some extent maintained the conditions under which a mediated encounter with death and suffering could still activate the moral impulse,” and that “the face was still operative in a sense”, I meant that the experience of death and suffering on the screen back then, if it was experienced at all, had the same structure whereby the Other appeared as singular, vulnerable, and as making a moral demand just by their presence, virtual though it may be—rather than as content to be scrolled past.
The gravity of the reporting, the rarity of the footage, etc.: these recreated the conditions in which suffering could still face the viewer, though it was mediated technologically, i.e., could still exceed the frame and demand a moral response.
For Levinas, I think the face was necessarily face-to-face in close proximity, but I’m claiming the basic structure of the encounter can be found, possibly in diluted or derivative form, beyond that restriction.
So, I should probably make a small revision to the OP. Something like:
Very interesting thread, thanks for the great reading, and I certainly cannot disagree that a person feels greater responsibility – the social responsibility - to the Other if they are face-to-face with that person. And I somewhat agree that a distance between a person and the Other – perhaps by an authority directing their actions – or by the internet! – may “disable” one’s social source of morality.
But, I am a little hung up on that word – “disable” - because I am not sure that morality for the distance ever evolved at all, so it can hardly be “disabled.” It’s not a trait we ever had. Fear/distrust of the stranger is hardwired into us. Morality only evolved in relation to kith and kin.
Perhaps - in the distance - ideology trumps morality? Especially if the ideology used to justify hurting others in fact makes the violent ones feel righteous? What if they feel that is how they are best able to protect their own group?
I think there are better alternatives to the psychological concept of desensitization you are applying to moral feeling. Rather than treating moral and non-moral feeling like mechanical receptors which can be adjusted up or down in their sensitivity to being triggered as a function of the sheer quantity of stimulation they are subjected to, I embrace psychological approaches which understand emotional receptivity as expressions of our relative success or failure at making sense of events in relation to our aims and purposes. Whether constant exposure to a specific content of experience leads to boredom and disinterest or a deepening of caring depends on what it is I am looking for in that experience, and why I am doing so.
Death is a profoundly mysterious notion and as such is rightly an inescapable topic not just for philosophers but the average person. I spent some time devouring images and videos of death. I accomplished what I set out to do; I became ‘desensitized’ to these images. But what that meant was not that meaningless repetition of death-related images dialed down my emotional feeling receptors, it meant that I became bored by these images after learning that the process of dying in itself is not very illuminating. I might just as easily have come to the opposite conclusion, that profound insights concerning the nature of existence were being opened up by my study of the mechanics of dying. Which of these two responses ensue, ’desensitized’ boredom or deepening caring and understanding, can’t be determined by the frequency of exposure itself, but by what I want to do with that exposure. Since my interest here was strictly in this process rather than in the moral circumstances surrounding the event, my boredom did not in any way carry over to my responsiveness to the moral aspects.
On the contrary, satisfying my curiosity concerning the mechanics of death allowed me to disentangle the different aspects of death in my mind (mechanical process vs moral dimensions)so that the moral dimensions could appear more clearly when I decide to shift my attention to them. If I were then to bombard myself with repeated exposure to Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky in an effort to grasp these moral dimensions better, whether this endeavor resulted in desensitization or a deepening of my moral understanding would be a matter of how I construed what I was reading.
In a sense, I was acting ‘bureaucratically’ in deciding it was useful to pair down my focus on death to the distanced, indirect perspective of its mechanics. Doing so allowed me to satisfy my curiosity while at the same time more clearly delimiting the bounds of its ethical dimensions. A surgeon approaching the body as a mechanism is also treating it bureaucratically, in order to better focus on the immediate goal of repairing injury by disentangling it from the empathized felt body.
You raised the question of whether someone who chooses to remain at the distanced, detached ,bureaucratic’ level of involvement is protecting themselves from the intensity of feelings they can’t cope with. I think this is certainly true, but I don’t think such defense strategies are mere forms of denial or rationalization, they are necessary for all of us. No one can cope with experiences which exceed their ability to make sense of them. The fault doesn’t lie in the strategy, but in the existential predicament of not being prepared to assimilate strange, threatening otherness. It isn’t desensitization or bureaucracy which keeps us from greater empathy, but our not having the intellectual resources to makes sense of others in a way which allows us to relate to them.
I think Levinas’ notion of the face of the Other comes up short in this regard. Levinas loads the ethical dice, so to speak, in his formulation of the Absolute Other. The ethical dilemma we face is not that of recognition vs reification, self-transcendence vs self-interest, the arbitrary conservative thrust of the lure of the familiar vs the compassionate embrace of otherness. When we seem to fail to recognize and maintain the other‘s autonomy this is not a retreat into self but, on the contrary, an experiencing of otherness which is too other to be intelligible. For Levinas, justice begins
with maintaining the autonomy of the other, as if one first glimpses this autonomy and then decides not to honor it. But the other’s autonomy can only exist for me to the extent that I can integrate it intelligibly within my way of life, which is itself the ongoing production of a collaborative community.
The failure to coordinate harmoniously among competing realtional intelligibilites results in the appearance of injustice, as though there were an intention on the part of one of the parties not to recognize an aspect of the other. However, it is not autonomous content that we strive to maximize, but intelligible process, and intelligibility is ontologically prior to the actions of an autonomous subject who recognizes or fails to recognize others. When there is disagreement between the victim and the alleged perpetrator about whether an injustice has indeed been committed, who determines, and how is it determined, that someone is closing themselves off to the face of the Other?
If it is intelligible ways of going on that are being protected, then from the vantage of the ‘perpetrator’, what is being excluded, closed off and eliminated is not a particular content (the face of the Other) , in the service of reifying one’s own autonomy. On the contrary, the aim is to exclude from a system of practices that which would render it nonsensical and deprive it of coherent meaning. In other words, from the vantage of the so-called perpetrator, the practices of exclusion and elimination are in the service of rendering justice by preventing the degradation of meaningful autonomy in general.
Levinas’question of how to be alive to each being’s suffering assumes a need to resist the unjust desire or intention not to be alive to the suffering of others, that is, the unethical impetus to intra-affect with others by excluding their experience. But the suffering other can only be acknowledged if they can first be identified and made sense of as a suffering other. What matters to us, what we care about, whose suffering we empathize with, is dependent in the first place on what is intelligible to us from our vantage as nodes within a larger relational matrix. We can only intend to recognize and welcome the Other who saves us from chaos; we intend to reject the Other who offers the oppression of incommensurability. Freedom from incoherence implies a sense of liberation, freedom from the order of intelligibility and intimacy a sense of subjection.
We always have intended to welcome, sacrifice ourselves for the intelligible Other, and always disliked, `chose against’ the incommensurate Other. What is repressive to us is what we cannot establish harmonious relation with. To choose to embrace the unforeseen and is to prefer that aspect within unforeseen experience which is foreseeable, which offers us the hope of avoidance of the abyss of senselessness and incoherence. To the extent that we can say that we look forward to the unknown, it is only to that degree that we ANTICIPATE the unanticipatable that there is the hope of trust and recognition in that otherwise meaningless unknowable. We cannot get beyond this link between the lovable and the recognizable without losing the basis of any ethics, which is the ability to distinguish between, even if without yet defining, what is preferred and what is not.
Their virtual presence doesn’t do that because the virtual presence is still there in social media and it (supposedly) doesn’t happen. It’s the context doing it.
So, it’s not the “face” as understood by Levinas, but something else (the contextualization) you also call the “face” because you find it similar.
Yes, “disable” may have been the wrong word. I don’t mean to suggest that humans originally possessed a reliable moral responsiveness to all distant others, which modernity then broke.
What I meant—and this is what Bauman means too—is that modernity systematically dismantles the interpersonal mechanisms that do reliably activate moral responses in face-to-face contexts. I called it distancing, but it’s not always literal: in Milgram’s experiments, it was a wall placed between the participant and the learner, combined with the distancing effect of the institutional context.
And I think your objection confirms the basic point. It’s not that we lose a capacity we once had for the distant stranger, but that in situations where evil is being enacted, the victim has been systematically turned into the distant stranger.
I think you’re right, and I may revise the argument to get rid of that concept.
And this means that in your fascinating experience with images and videos of death, the significant thing is not a numbing of the moral response through quantity of exposure or a dialing-down of affect, but something else, something more contextual.
You approached it as a student of the mechanics of death, with a specific intellectual aim; it’s clear that you conceive it that way from your account. So you were not a consumer for whom someone’s death was just another unit of stimulation, without context and faceless.
So, maybe instead of the facile concepts I reached for originally—desensitization and numbness—what I’m diagnosing is a transformation of the conditions under which moral responsiveness can arise.
On Levinas, I thank you for your critique, and for setting out your intelligibility first position. I’m just not equipped to debate it—I know Levinas mostly through Bauman. But in any case, I find myself drawn to an intelligibility second position, which Levinas and Adorno share (to some degree at least). Levinas puts the face first: an encounter that makes its demand before we’ve categorized it. And Adorno does something similar with the somatic: suffering as the irreducible, non-identical reality that exceeds the concept (not that this is a pristine pre-conceptual ground, but that’s a finer point).
So although I won’t attempt to defend Levinas, I can say that the idea of intelligibility as ontologically prior doesn’t sit well in my stomach.
Although I told @Joshs that “I’m just not equipped to debate” Levinas, I’ll take a first look at his thought through an Adornian lens, in the hope that it’ll help my argument about death videos—though I’m aware this is likely of only fringe interest.
Following Bauman, I’ve taken up Levinas’s pre-societal sources of morality. And it’s a very comforting theory. But I have to reckon with Adorno and what I imagine would be his critique: Levinas’s ethical immediacy could be read as an example of a second immediacy or second nature: something produced by society but which appears as unmediated and pure, plain as can be, right under our noses.
For example, just the idea of an ethical encounter between autonomous subjects is something that Adorno might call into question. What presents itself as direct and self-evident might actually be thoroughly mediated, dependent on historically formed notions of subjectivity that, while contingent in origin, have formed sedimentary layers of a “second immediacy” or “second nature,” and now appear as natural and immediately graspable.
On the other hand, Adorno has an ethical conception not dissimilar to Levinas’s. It comes out negatively:
The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.
Suffering in Adorno’s thought is a bit like responsibility in Levinas: it’s irreducible and can’t be completely subsumed by theory. Like the face of the Other, the suffering of the Other makes a claim on us, not by grounding morality as in an ethical system, but by exposing the failure of our concepts and demanding a response, if we remain alive to it. What differs is that for Levinas this claim has something like a fundamental ethical priority, whereas for Adorno it’s negative and mediated—what remains from the failure of conceptual identification, rather than appearing apart from its mediation.
