Scrolling Past the Dead

Humanities and Social Science
41

Good post, thanks.

I haven’t abandoned it completely, but I am now a lot less sure about how to make use of the concept. I’m wary of getting into the psychology, since my level of analysis is societal, but in fact your example, taken from your own military experience, makes me think that we can treat desensitization in terms of social structure: it’s not just individual habituation, it’s a process structured by group conventions and institutional expectations. There is something to what you are saying, but I don’t want to claim anything so straightforward as viewing execution videos => lack of empathy on an individual level.

So, maybe the kind of desensitization I’ve been aiming at all along is not just, or even especially, to do with too much exposure, i.e., the numbing effect of repeated exposure.

So, take the Milgram experiment. The desensitization of the participants wasn’t a numbing effect caused by repetition, but a result of the institutional context that made the shocks seem legitimate (so a combination of authority and what I’ve been calling distancing), and the gradual escalation that made each step feel like it didn’t matter much—all leading to a diffusion of responsibility. This is desensitization as a social phenomenon, not just a psychological one.

Which is not to say that the numbing effect of repeated exposure doesn’t happen.

When you say that consuming extreme media requires a necessary suppression of the person’s capacity for empathy, that makes it sound like empathy is a fixed capacity. But maybe empathy is not a faculty that exists independently of the situations we’re in, but is more like something that’s situationally constituted and appears or disappears depending on the structure of the encounter. It’s something that happens paradigmatically in the face-to-face encounter, and derivatively when viewing violence and suffering on a screen. Regarding the latter, the claim that over-exposure numbs the faculty of empathy depends on the consequence, namely that people will be less empathetic in face-to-face encounters—otherwise, why worry?

But the structural description of the same phenomenon, as a change in the social and institutional context of exposure to violence and suffering, doesn’t depend on this empirical result. We don’t need to show that people who watch death videos become less empathetic toward their friends or colleagues. What matters is that there might be a progressive replacement of face-to-face encounters with screen-mediated ones, and a corresponding constriction of the social spaces where empathy, as a response to the face, is even possible.

So I’m not sure we even need to defend the claim that desensitization leads to reductions in empathy that can be measured. I think what I want to do is describe the transformation of the moral field, the way that empathy is being structurally displaced. This can be a significant change and even a very bad one, even while people continue being really nice to those who are close to them.

Yeah, I can’t take it myself: I have to look away at the violence in almost every movie these days, never mind extreme horror or real violence and death. So I definitely feel the same. But I try not to let it intrude, because there’s a feeling of self-righteousness in it that I just don’t trust any more. It may come from a good place—I trust the source, as in Levinas’s source of morality—but it too easily becomes a moral consolation and a source of thoughtless indignation: I’m still affected, therefore I’m still moral and properly human, unlike the awful masses. I suspect this is as much a performance as the moral outrage that @Tom_Storm and I were talking about earlier in the discussion. Thus it would be part of the problem it attempts to critique: a performance of sensitivity that floats free, costing nothing and changing nothing. It allows us to feel virtuous without having to confront the structural conditions that produce what we’re observing.

Point is, I sympathize, but it’s something to be wary of.

Sure, but availability isn’t some external thing imposed on a steady-state civilization; it’s produced by specific technological, economic, and social conditions. I’d go further and say that how human beings think changed in modernity too: genocide, as something carefully and calmly carried out through normal institutions, was not something people had always wanted to do and it just had to wait on technology and organization to catch up. It was only thinkable in modernity, with the technical and organizational means, as well as the ideologies surrounding scientific racism. Obviously mass killings had happened before, but the kind of mass extermination carried out by ordinary people filling out forms and consulting train timetables, all while thinking they were helping to cure a kind of infectious disease—this was something new in means and in the way people thought.

But I realize you’re not talking about genocide. Maybe the same kind of logic applies directly to social media exposure too: it’s not that a static human nature makes use of changing means, but that people’s subjectivity is shaped by new structures of encounter.

I think this is actually very much in line with the OP. They heard the pleas but did not perceive them as moral demands to a sufficient extent to override authority, due to the distancing mechanism of placing a wall between two people who were physically quite close.

That they experienced PTSD shows that they weren’t psychopaths; the point is that they continued anyway. So maybe we have two kinds of distancing:

  1. No moral demand experienced, as in the workers who proudly built the gas vans for the Nazis
  2. Moral demand experienced but overridden, as in the Milgram experiments

I’m not quite sure where scrolling past death lies here.

In any case, maybe we just need to make it more general. As Bauman put it:

In a nutshell, Milgram suggested and proved that inhumanity is a matter of social relationships. As the latter are rationalized and technically perfected, so is the capacity and the efficiency of the social production of inhumanity.

— Bauman, Modernity and The Holocaust

42

Thanks Jay, this is a helpful parallel. Repeated consumption of pornography surely does reshape expectations, and can displace face-to-face intimacy. And how it fits here is that this is not because people lose some fixed capacity of intimacy, but because the conditions for intimacy have changed or have been bypassed—like vulnerability, reciprocity, actual presence, etc. Obviously the screen offers sex without the demand of the Other’s face.

So it’s similar with death videos. The screen offers suffering without the demand of the victim’s face. You don’t have do anything to help, don’t even have to feel sad or shocked. This consumerist posture becomes then the default, and it doesn’t even mean that people are morally broken, but rather that the conditions for moral responsiveness have been replaced by conditions that only require the participant’s attention.

43

I think it all has less to do with desensitization, and more to do with how the algorithms, as you mention “between makeup tutorials and cat videos”, becomes interlinked into a stream of fiction. The screen itself, the act of watching video on your phone, TV or a cinema screen has formed a new kind of processing of reality for people.

It’s as if we, through the development of visual media, have formed a new perceptive reality in our cognition, separated from how we process actual reality. Our minds have split into an inability to recognize reality through our screens, it has become a fundamental fiction.

The same people who with a desensitized eye watch someone dying on screen, may be absolutely traumatized if being in the same room with the dying. What should amount to a similar desensitization between the real and the screen, has become a distinct and extreme difference in emotional response.

The Milgram experiment has more to do with authority than desensitization or distance and I don’t think distance is all it’s about.

I think our cognition has been conditioned to view screen material as fiction, regardless of authenticity. And with the rise of AI videos and the total reduction of the visual media as any form of authenticity, our brains seem to further interpret anything on screens as fiction.

It becomes the act of watching a screen itself that transforms truth into fiction, and not so much that we are desensitized to the violence and death. It is an interpretation error in our mind, conditioned by the our relation to media.

This is especially true in nations with active form of propaganda news, like the US, which has almost no media dedicated to upholding truth, only to corporate, partisan, and financial reasons. But it can be seen in other nations as well; In Sweden, our news outlets are very strictly forced to uphold neutrality and sticking to facts, but the very fact that our news feeds now plays dramatic music over news footage shows how we are still falling into the dramatization and fictionalization of truth through visual media. What this does to our minds is nudging the experience of truth through visual media into fiction, into a dramatization using storytelling means.

The odd thing that’s happened is that while fiction, through post-modernity, held up a mirror to itself, examining how it transforms and distorts truth and reality; fiction is now moving towards meta-modernity, and a dedication to examine meaning in the meaningless. While our attempts at delivering truth instead turns in the opposite direction, becoming fictionalized, trivialized, dramatized for casual consumption.

We’ve entered a time of fictionalization of reality through media, for the sake of attention and clicks, transforming our cognition into viewing actual fiction as truth and representations of reality as fiction.

44

Funny choice of study. The abstract says:

The current study evaluated whether pornography-related perceived peer norms, own approval, and self-reported use are associated with negative attitudes towards women in a sample of college men. […] A multiple linear regression model revealed that only perceived peer norms for acceptance of pornography that depicted rape was positively associated with negative attitudes toward women.

So the study doesn’t find significant correlation between pornography use and negative attitudes towards women. The quote is in the introduction where they try to present some of the past literature.

Perhaps the claim is true but the study given as an example might not be the best one to show that. The big interesting claim of the study is that:

Among male participants, exposure to violent pornography (AOR = 3.34; 95% CI 1.85–6.04) and marijuana use (AOR = 3.01; 95% CI 1.36–6.67) were significantly associated with greater odds of sexual TDV perpetration after controlling for age, a history of suspension/expulsion, heavy alcohol use, rape myth acceptance, and gender equitable attitudes.

male adolescents who were exposed were over 3 times as likely to perpetrate sexual TDV [Teen Dating Violence]

It might be an interesting result, but it doesn’t show the causation we want. If we tried to claim it does from this analysis, we would have to accept other weirder results. Marijuana use would also cause sexual violence per the quote. They also found that exposure to violent pornography was significantly associated with sexual violence victimization for male participants, almost as much as sexual violence perpetration. So, we would be saying that violent pornography is causing them to be victims of sexual violence.

Pretty much the same thing. It doesn’t show causation, and even the biggest correlation was merely 0.245, and it was between “Pornography-Related Problems” and the belief in the myth that the rapist did not intend to attack the women.

We should also be cautious perhaps about what is treated as “pornography” and what effects we are discussing. Sometimes, it’s about porn in general (first study), other times it’s about violent porn (second study) or it’s about “problematic porn use” or porn cravings (third study). The effects change too: sometimes it’s about sexual violence, other times it’s about sexist beliefs or attitudes.

Although the idea of porn causing violence or sexist beliefs or false ideas about sexuality is popular, the evidence isn’t clear despite a vast literature. I’ll recommend reading this 2016 open-access meta-analysis. It’s pretty comprehensive, although it’s about adolescents specifically.

But thank you for trying to provide evidence unlike someone.

45

You’re welcome. I think the studies can be interpreted differently, as indeed you and I are doing, but that’s a side issue for @Jamal 's thread so I’ll drop it.

46

There might be a way to tie the Milgram experiments to your sense that something has changed between the old broadcast environment and the modern social media environment.

You note that back in the 80s, there was a taboo about showing film of someone being killed. More than that, either the newsreader would do the story and explain why they weren’t showing the footage, or they would show the footage with suitably somber warnings about its content, and an explanation of why they thought it was important enough to show anyway.

You could call that approach a kind of cue from authority about how you were expected to react to something like this.

Now? There is no trustworthy newsreader using a legible note of seriousness before the video appears. There may be nothing at all. It’s simply in the feed. Maybe it’s shared by an account you know, maybe not.

Where is the voice of authority prompting your response? Gone. If there is authority here, it is diffuse, implicit, structural. It’s in the feed, so it’s normal for me to look at this. (Specifically I didn’t have to go to some shady website; there’s nothing “underground” about this that lets me know I’m doing something I ought not.)

The old model seems to be modeled on, or to rely on for its effectiveness, the authority relationships that originally shaped your moral sense. Your parents and your teachers taught you how to think about right and wrong, sometimes taking just that solemn tone the newsreader uses.

In the social media setting, it’s more likely to be someone coded as a peer, or no one at all, just the footage.

So it could be there is no moral cue being given at all, or the absence of a moral cue counts as the opposite—this can’t be a serious moral matter because there’s no cue from authority.

I’m not really taking a position on whether morality is innate or learned or both. I’m saying that in addition to whatever moral content our parents and teachers send our way, they also signal a particular somber register as the one in which we discuss tragic events, moral transgressions, and so on. Speaking in that register is then a cue that a serious moral matter is on the table, and that’s the code newsreaders in broadcast media tend to still follow. And we expect figures of authority, in particular, to respect the code.

Social media is, at the very least, much less consistent in using that code.

47

Yes, that’s the parallel I was seeing. Watching is so different from participating, though I suppose you could argue that masturbation bridges the difference a little bit. But it can hardly become a vulnerable, intimate moment – which I think is the whole point of auto-eroticism (apart from practice in getting to know how your genitals work, when you’re first starting out).

48

So, we go from here:

to here:

and I’m not quite sure I can follow the path.

The following seems important, and maybe it provides an entrypoint for me:

I’m unfamiliar with Bauman beyond some catchphrases (“liquid morality”), but what you say here is fairly commonplace in the social sciences: for example, Ferdinand Tönnies distinguished between community (co-presence and tradition) and society (rational and purpose-driven) in order to outline the subject of the still young discipline of “sociology”. In the present context might lead to two different kinds of morality:

First, a face-to-face we-don’t-do-that-here morality, and then a goal-driven, rational this-is-wrong-because morality. It’s really just two aspects of any morality - but one might expect different accents in, say, a remote, isolated village and in a bustling metropolis.

Different evironments will need different methods of social control. But no method of social control will get to each individual the same way.

In a face-to-face driven social configuration death, as something that happens to everyone, is right there. Your grandfather dies at home. The local farmer gets gored by a bull. Etc. You can’t spare your children the sight, and you haven’t been spared the sight yourself. In modern societies, death is an exceptional thing to witness. Dying people, by default, go to the hospital and to be there when they finally die in a suitably clean environment is a decision you can make, but more often than not you’ll have a last meeting while they’re still aware (to one degree or another), and then the dying happens off-stage.

Which leaves us with unexcpected and sudden death, which becomes “exoticised” - a kind of shocking event, not only the regular face-to-face catastroph. To put it in a maybe satirising way: it’s rude to die in front of others. It’s not just social media, though - it’s also the hospice, if you get my drift.

And then there’s person-to-person variation in “squeamishness”. This cuts across social organisation. “Squeamishness” is a vague and bad word to use here: it’s not quite what I mean. It’s part of it, but not all of it. There are personality variants - all distinct:

  • Some people are stunned by catastrophe, some people spring into action.
  • Some people can’t stand the sight of blood, some people don’t care.
  • Some people react to catasrophe with aversion, others with curiosity.
  • Some people avoid troubling stuff, others seek it out (maybe in some kind of ritualism)

And so on.

“Desensitising” (I know you questioned the term, but bear with me here), as in a reduction of initial adverse reaction, is not in itself moral. Think of medical students who have train on corpses, so they don’t mess up in life-or-death situations. I could never, not with a thousand years of training, have become a surgeon (or so I think). I’m quite grateful that there are people who can cut into me with a steady hand.

The flipside is that normalisation, distancing, etc. have unsavoury uses, too. In the eighties I might have said it’s easier to shoot someone, or to drop bombs on… something than to run someone through with a sword, or set fire to building while the people outside make eyecontact through the window. Now we’re talking about videos on social media. (Youtube, for what it’s worth, does curate content - too much for my taste.)

If the dark side of “distancing” is Milgram, the dark side of pre-societal morality is torch-and-pitchfork persecution. And personally I’d much rather someone laugh at my unusual death video than to be dsignated the odd-man-out and beat up by a crowd of people who demonstrate to each other what is right and good. But that is just my bias. What to make of it?

Bascially, I can’t answer any of your questions, nor am I sure I fully understand what you’re driving at. What I’ve done so far is outline my somewhat-slighty-beyond-the-starting-point point (as I’ve actually read the entire thread).

Also another thing: I’m Austrian, and I grew up in the 70ies. During the seventies we were still in the grip of post-WW2 trauma, and the media were firmly in the grip of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (Dealing with the past). By the age of 5 years old I was used to seeing piles of naked corpses in black and white, less frequently execution videos. That was just part of the way they thought they could teach us to avoid making the same mistakes again. I grew up a cynic, a lot of people became activists, and some responded with denial. In the eighties it was starving children in Africa (did grown ups starve, too? I had no visual proof). Is this sort of emotional manipulation better somehow, because you can name noble purpose? If we make death, blood, etc. a taboo, we can’t fault people for being curious. That’s where I currently stand.

That doesn’t quite mean that there are no problems, or that you’re not putting your finger on something important. My problem is that I can’t quite grasp what that is. I do get the general direction, and from a different angle it fits my aversion to social media as self-reinforcing bubbles and slogan machines, so I’m sort of sympathetic to… someing (?) here.

So, finally, a question (but not one to answer in public): Your friend, if faced with a similar situation in real life is more likely to: (a) rush in and see if they can help, or (b) whip out the phone to record the moment for posterity. It’s the (b) part (which must exist for there to be the video in the first place) that’s troubling, right?

49

I’ll answer your question with another question, but to put it this way: are we assuming that civilization eradicates the pre-social sources of morality? Is this a fact or an opinion? I mean: If we were to reason about morality, we could define morality as conformity to certain norms of behavior (and life), related to specific principles. Since it’s clear that morality refers to the entire social entity (which by its nature is changeable and inconstant), it’s equally clear that it must enjoy, as one of its requirements, the flexibility needed to accommodate social change. Unless we live in the nightmare of an ethical state, such as a theocratic regime, morality does not prescind from or precede the population, but generates and succeeds it, defines its core values, and is a clear indicator of its overall intellect. How, then, should we define morality? Morality is therefore a social transmission belt, which adapts to change. Could “scrolling through the dead” be a sign of the times (smartphone + social media) that leads to a moral adjustment? Death is no longer taboo (the death of others), but consumable content, if available. Society is much more secularized; even the assumptions of “guilt” and “sin” are almost entirely absent. Human life is always perceived as valuable; it’s not by watching a death live that it is debased, because the intrinsic value is separated from the historical fact itself (it happened/I can see it). Would this therefore be part of an increased tolerance of moral margins (therefore of an evolution and not of involution or zeroing)? What do you think?

50

Thanks Pat. Another interesting post.

I think it’s more like I’ve tied them together already, but I need to work out exactly what I’m saying and then say it better. Your suggestions might help.

The central thesis that I forgot to defend in Putting it all together is “this moral numbness is not so much a failure of the civilizing process as its logical extension.” (But taking numbness a step back to normalization because of the trouble I’ve had with the concept desensitization).

The idea is that bureaucracy and Milgram show the distancing effect of modern social arrangements, and that Levinas’s theory shows why this is significant, i.e., what gets lost and why it matters. And on to screens and feeds, which have the same distancing effect, roughly speaking. (I’ll leave aside the question of civilization vs modernity).

That was the idea. I’m not sure I want to concentrate on authority, even though authority is central to Milgram; it’s not the only thing to learn from it.

But to respond more directly to your post, what you say is very much in line with what @Hanover was saying about religious traditions, that although they’re products of the civilizing process, they counteract society’s tendency to dismantle or constrict the sources of morality. The same could be said of the 1980s newsreader (and the parent). This makes authority look like a means for good or ill, while distancing is the deeper mechanism that authority can either reinforce or counteract. Thus the newsreader bridged the distance for the moral good of the viewer. We had to be told: not to treat these events and images as being on a continuum with the surrounding sitcoms and ads.

I’m not sure what to do with that, but thanks :nerd_face:

51

Thanks for the response, DS.

You say you can’t follow the path from my anecdote to Milgram and Levinas. Here it is:

My friend handed me a death video like it was nothing. That nonchalance is less a feature of her personality—she’s not a sociopath, for instance—than it is of a social and technological structure which has normalized the consumption of suffering, on a continuum of “content”. Milgram shows that ordinary people can participate in harm when the institutional context distances them from consequences. Levinas identifies what gets lost in that distance: the face of the Other, which makes a moral demand prior to any rule or reason (this is where social vs societal fits in). The screen is the contemporary version of that distancing mechanism.

But that’s not the thesis, about which more later.

Yes, @Joshs pointed this out too, in a very interesting post here. The difference is in the special, strictly bounded context, and the purpose—indicating that it’s not the raw exposure in itself that matters, but again, the social arrangements.

I’m not clear about the logic here. You acknowledge the dark side of distancing, but then set up a choice between torch-and-pitchfork persecution and watching death videos. But we can point to effects of this distancing in modernity that are much worse than watching death videos, and arguably much worse than torch-and-pitchfork persecution. So I don’t know what you’re trying to say.

The civilizing process is usually taken (including by sociologists, even after the Holocaust) as the source of morality, as taming our wildness and as making us more humane and more averse to suffering. But the rationalizing, distancing mechanisms that gave us the modern administered society also gave us the Holocaust, and now they give us a situation in which watching someone die is just another way to pass the time, day in, day out. There are gaps in the argument, but this is what I’m driving at.

Whether or not it was a good idea or did any good, it had a deliberate pedagogical frame; it was meant to teach a moral lesson—perhaps another example of authority in the service of counteracting the constriction of the moral sphere.

The troubling thing isn’t just that someone recorded the death, it’s that the video then circulates as content, and that my friend could watch it, share it, and not feel very much. That is the nonchalance I’m interested in, because the answer to your question might in fact be (a), that she would help. Of course, if (b) is more likely too, that’s certainly troubling, but maybe it’s not the only thing to be troubled about.

52

If I’m not mistaken, this is a complicated way of saying that morality is whatever norms people have in whatever social arrangement they happen to have. Therefore, it is what it is?

That’s not the idea of morality I’m working with. While I’m not saying there’s a transhistorical moral essence—that would be its own kind of ideology—I think there are contexts of moral responsiveness that can be cultivated or constricted.

It’s possible I’m being uncharitable here, but I feel I have to point out that human life is not always perceived as valuable. Is every morally significant event just an aspect of moral evolution, according to you?

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53

I understand what you’re saying, and yes, I partially agree with you. The fact that responsiveness exists, even moral responsiveness, occurs spontaneously until a temporary moral adjustment occurs. It’s not necessarily a mechanism that identifies watching a video of an execution or shaking the dead as immoral. It could be a responsiveness that supports this change. Could responsiveness contribute to the physiological change in common morality? In part, yes, I think. So I was wondering: is that what’s happening with this kind of activity? Normatively, only acts contrary to accepted morality are prosecuted when the moral value itself is so deeply rooted that it has been translated into law (an obvious example: stealing someone else’s property). I agree that human life isn’t always precious, but here some specific clarifications are needed; I think it would be material for a separate discussion. Generally speaking, yes, what you say is true. But within the limits I had taken for granted, I was operating within the paradigm of our everyday lives (the friend who might show us a video like that on their phone), where human life is generally considered a value not to be disregarded. Your most direct question requires a direct answer: you ask, “In your opinion, is every morally significant event nothing more than an aspect of moral evolution?” My answer is no, bluntly. However, this question of yours also opens up a much broader reflection, which could be a topic in itself.

54

If I am right, this was something Nietzsche suggested among possibly other philosophers.

55

I like this. It’s more interesting than the desensitization angle. I’m not sure what to do with it though, as it seems tangential to my main point. Meaning, there may be several ways to account for the normalization that’s happening, including the fictionalization of reality, but my feeling is that my argument about the civilizing process and the loss of the face stands more or less independently of the psychological or cognitive mechanism that turns out to be at work on individuals.

56

Another thought:

Henry Ford realized that few, if any, had the skill set to build an entire car, but everyone had the skill set to tighten a bolt, so if the car were broken down into thousands of bolt turns, perfect cars could be produced with zero reliance upon knowledge or craftsmanship. We’re over a hundred years removed from that, but now that basic principle applies everywhere. Provide the masses various simplistic tasks, they will do them more or less acceptably, all the workers can be easily replaced with others, and only the few owners at the top will impose their judgment on anything, and the product will get cranked out effectively.

We’re all now fluent speakers of Chinese in the Chinese Room thought experiment, but none of us know what we’re talking about.

I wonder if this too plays a role in the divorce of technology from morality. You were pointing out to the distance between the actor and recipient, where it’s easier to kill if you don’t have to get blood on your hands and experience the event. But I’d also think that the removal of agency from the equation plays a role as well. If we reduce ourselves to cogs in the process, we don’t see ourselves as the true actors.

This reminds me of the “I was just following orders” defense. It’s not just that I could do horrible things without seeing the pain in the other person’s eyes, but I could claim I was just turning a bolt in something much bigger that I could not possibly understand.

That is, it’s not just the distance between the subject and the actor that allows for the deterioration or morality, but it’s the amoralization caused by technology and sophisticated society that occurs because the acts of the actor are no longer the result of his thoughtful conduct.

Religion’s role, depending upon the religion, might be in insisting upon the infinite and sacred value of the human being, causing the believer (ideally) to pause before submitting himself to the machine.

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57

I’m starting here, because it’s easiest: this is not supposed to be convincing. I’ve studied sociology at university, and there’s always been this type of argument - raising one element above another and thus creating a narrative you either buy into or don’t, and then construct a theory from it.

For instance, I don’t believe there’s a single “dark side” to anything. Life is bloody complicated, and if you start analysing stuff you need an entry point, but what works differs from person to person. When I was studying sociology, a joke was making the rounds at my university “two sociologists, three opinions”.

I was trying here, to lay open my own bias, sort of like you did in your opening statement, but as a reaction to what you wrote. I was trying to simulate the level of depth of my current understanding of what you said.

I did mess up, though, here. Rather than torch-and-pitchfork persecution, which is actually further down the line (when compared to watching death videos) I should have said something like complaining to your clique in the local pub, or something like that. Would have been a more accurate comparison.

I’ve read Joshs post, but I need to re-read it before I can say I grasped what he said. That’s unusual, since I usually find Joshs’ posts intuitive (given that the stand of sociology I most intuitively gravitated towards was very much influenced by Husserl).

So now:

That’s a single link (“distancing” as a pattern to relate two distinct situations) surrounded by a… theoretical direction I don’t quite grasp. Part of it is my unfamiliarity with Levinas: what are the moral demands the face of the Other makes? What would I be missing if I said that the face of the Other makes some sort of “emotional appeal” and that in face-to-face situations usually more than one Other is involved, and people prioritise. How does levinas’ morality sit with that? A sub-unit, a spear pierced through it, a tangent? I’d need to read Levinas or about Levinas, but I don’t currently have the time.

So:

I’m not sure about usually, but I certainly recognise the mind-set (Norbert Elias comes to mind). I suppose I gravitated more towards the view of mankind making up for biological inefficiencies with culture (see Gehlen, for example). So if you wanna be nice you can be so more efficiently when banding together, and if you wanna be nasty you can be so more effiently when banding together.

Maybe let me put it this way: when you’re watching a death video, you’re not actually being distanced from the death. If it weren’t for that video that particular death probably wouldn’t ever have entered your awareness horizon. It’s more a question of how we deal with stuff that’s distant to begin with and wouldn’t be part of our world to begin with. When you’re talking about “distancing” here, you’re to some degree imagining you were “there”. Technologically mediated presence as “distancing” when it’s actually bridging distance. The question then is: What comes through? And who contributes what via their imagination.

So: what’s the realtionship between a face-dominated morality, and an expended-world rational morality? I’ll come back to pictures of starving children on a TV screen to motivate donations. I’ll say I never really had a strong emotional reaction to that, just a generalised sense that “something should be done”. An awareness of a problem that crossed a continent via technology. Given that my emotional reaction to these images was subdued compared to what I would have presumably experienced had I been there. But we don’t talk about that emotional disjunct in terms of distancing. Why not, though?

I certainly never considered the dignity of any particular child in any particular picture. Presumably, they were real. And presumably nobody asked their permission to be a global stand in for a poor starving child.

With respect to your friend, I don’t even know anything about the practical effects of having witnessed a mediated distant death in a non-face-to-face situation (comparable to my “there’s famine in Africa” awareness and my sense that something should be done).

If it’s just another five minutes of your day, doesn’t that create an openendedness that could be triggered any one way?

I’ve been around an elderly farmer (family friend) when the topic of WW2 came up. He started crying and couldn’t understand what people were up to. A face-to-face situation like this was far more powerful than any of the “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” we all were sitting through every few days. It was long ago for me (decades before I was born), yet here was someone broken by the experience.

Presences and absences are woven into a pattern here. I would very much like to rant against social media, but is it fair? What are the layers of reality when faced with something like a video. What good is judging this situation on an if-we-were-there model? This sounds like a rhetorical question, but it isn’t. I need to puzzle stuff like this out to understand where you’re coming from. My primary intuitive takeaway from the opening anecdote is that you and your friend react differently to videos of violence. (I’d likely be somewhere in the middle.)

I wasn’t quite happy with that part when I remembered writing it while walking to the railway station on my way home. For instance, I don’t even know what sort of video it was. It could easily have been intended to be just a regular holiday video and then things went wrong. So, yeah, I appreciate that point.

58

If you don’t mind, I’ll just concentrate on this, because I think it’s the heart of your post. Answering it will help me get things clear.

The video and the feed do not distance the viewer from a death they might have witnessed in close proximity. But what is relevant is that the interaction lacks the character of an encounter with a suffering Other, despite having the structure of one. There is a person on one end, and a person suffering on the other—yet it does not elicit a moral response. This gap—social and ethical, not merely spatial—is what I’m calling “distancing.”

More simply put, the face in social media loses its moral demand—witnessing suffering becomes morally neutral. I think that’s significant.

The latter is secondary and derivative, and can become unmoored from the former.

Yes, and this is precisely why the responses of many people are subdued. But some people do respond, and when that happens I take it to be the effect of a pre-societal Levinasian moral response to the children perceived in their individuality, translated into expanded-world rational morality.

Do you mind if I mind?
59

Yes indeed. Bauman has a whole chapter on the part played by the division of labour.

All division of labour (also such division as results from the mere hierarchy of command) creates a distance between most of the contributors to the final outcome of collective activity, and the outcome itself. Before the last links in the bureaucratic chain of power (the direct executors) confront their task, most of the preparatory operations which brought about that confrontation have been already performed by persons who had no personal experience, and sometimes not the knowledge either, of the task in question. Unlike in a pre-modern unit of work, in which all steps of the hierarchy share in the same occupational skills, and the practical knowledge of working operations actually grows towards the top of the ladder (the master knows the same as his journeyman or apprentice, only more and better), persons occupying successive rungs of modern bureaucracy differ sharply in the kind of expertise and professional training their jobs require.

— Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust

So, division of labour is one of the distancing mechanisms—distance as understood socially and ethically.

I think sometimes it might have that effect, and sometimes it might persuade the believer to just put his head down and tighten another bolt.

60

My personal sense is that this phenomenon has more to do with a lack of moral education, and less to do with distancing.

Arguably, the distance when watching an extreme video is not all that big. That’s why to normal people it tends to elicit a visceral response.

I can’t think of a more direct confrontation with reality other than witnessing the actual event in person.

Due to the availability and natural morbid curiousity this type of content may be shared more often, but it unquestionably remains highly taboo.

My sense is that the term ‘distance’ and ‘distancing’ are used too arbitrarily here and are not necessarily reflective of the actual experience.

Where distancing is very visible, is for example in (video(game)s of) modern warfare, where artillerymen, drone operators, fighter pilots, etc. never witness the suffering they inflict on their victims.

Videos of missile impacts are similar. There is no visceral reaction here for most people, because we don’t see or hear any victims.

But then, you’d hardly start to question a person’s sanity if they are unmoved by a video of a distant explosion.

So it appears that distance reducing the empathic response is normal, and not something that requires a special explanation.