Scrolling Past the Dead

[Baden]

@Jamal

It makes me think that this prurient appetite for the grisly details, in the same register as salacious gossip, is a perennial feature of families and communities going back to ancient times. From this point of view, my friend’s wish to share the video with me was actually her saving grace—a venerable gesture of invitation to shared knowledge. The problem then (or another problem) would be those who don’t share it, who literally scroll on past without reaching out to another human being.

In the scene, I feel like my sympathies are with Mary and Mrs Boyle, not with Johnny, playing the role of moral authority.

The voyeuristic tendency is nothing new, nor are objections to it, but the commodification of its means of gratification, I think, is, at least in scope. There is hardly a horror left we can’t now instantly enjoy, either overtly or behind some performative screen we place between ourselves and self-understanding.

Anyhow, my issue with technocapitalism is its effectiveness at injecting a general dullness into life that makes us want more of what it has to offer, whether that be voyeuristic or not. And it is not that we were ever innocent of the desire to over-indulge, it’s that social reality was never so indulgent of desires it has a less than innocent hand in fostering.

But I guess in distancing myself from the general milieu deliberately and consistently for so long, I’ve developed a sensitivity that few likely share.

[Baden]

@Jamal

From this point of view, my friend’s wish to share the video with me was actually her saving grace—a venerable gesture of invitation to shared knowledge.

Interesting take, but it seems a kind of sociality eerily stripped of the other, self-contradicting, like, ‘I want to connect with you, but I don’t really want to know you, I just want a mirror image of me outside myself to share a moment with, not someone with their own set of sensibilities’. And what could the meaning of the gesture be anyway even presuming recognition, ‘Let’s share someone else’s pain together… and enjoy it…’ ? I can’t think of a way to make anything truly social out of it given your description.

[Baden]

@Jamal

The problem then (or another problem) would be those who don’t share it, who literally scroll on past without reaching out to another human being.

It could also be interpreted as having the common sense to realise the inhuman in the behaviour, and having at least the dignity not to advertise it.

@Jamal

In the scene, I feel like my sympathies are with Mary and Mrs Boyle, not with Johnny, playing the role of moral authority.

Gulag.

[Jamal]

@Hanover

To the extent your fear of my position is thinking I’m advocating theocracy, worry not. As I’ve noted, my view of religion is entirely abstracted, specifically rejecting institutions and not suggesting we pick a representative one. A society necessarily chooses an ideology, and the current one that pretends neutral isn’t. Whatever fear of indoctrination exists is just a fear a new one will be installed, not that our neutrality will end.

@Hanover

As to how to bring about the soul politic, the creation of spiritual protection as exists for bodily protection? Beats me really. I’m not a utopian or revolutionary. I’m a guy with goats. I do suspect it arises from proper upbringing and schooling more than any governmental effort, which usually ends up looking like limited government, private or charter schools, and religious affiliation. You know, like being Republican.

Neat!

@Hanover

Do I think Carlyle"s view we ought do away with democracy and find the heroic leader or whatnot to fix this? My thought is not, largely because he too is not some great social designer, having no idea what actual results he will achieve, all likely far worse than we have. I just wish Marxists would accept the same of their views and attempts to fix society by destroying it.

I don’t really see the relevance of your line about Marxists. I agree that most of the hacks and fanatics who went by the name of “Marxist” were bastards and assholes. Now let’s move on and make use of the relevant thinkers, who happen to include Marx, a thinker whose thinking changed constantly in response to world events, along the way producing a remarkable critique of the economic system, a system we pretty much still live with. Your obsession with Marxism as villain gets in the way of a good conversation. You don’t see me reducing you to an archetypal Republican (which is not to say that Republicanism is an ancient Jungian archetype).

@Hanover

Generally I was struck by Carlyle’s observations from over 100 years ago that still ring true but his appeal has limitations.

Indeed. I’m glad you shared it, because I enjoyed reading it. I never thought anyone would have been able to persuade me to read Carlyle, so you should be honoured.

The good thing about conservatism of that era—and there were some interesting conservatives along the same lines through the 20th century too—is its scepticism towards capitalism and its emphasis on community, obligations, relationships, and organic development. That point of view is going to get quite a lot right, even if it was batting for the bad guys at the time.

@Hanover

But back on point, which I’ll hold to: you can’t expect our humanity to be protected unless you protect it. What holds true for the physical holds true for the spiritual. Guard rails must exist in the factories. We need some guardrails for our humanity as well.

I’m just not sure if this says much more than “To fix the problems you’re pointing out, we need to do what needs to be done.” And that means religion. But, I’m analyzing a situation. How does religion help, specifically?

The central thesis of the OP is here:

@Jamal

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.

And we agreed that religion might be a product of the civilizing process that counteracts the bad stuff we’re talking about (the mechanical penetration of the spirit, etc.). But, it hasn’t worked. It’s just not powerful enough. I mean, I know nothing else has worked either, but—

In any case, I’m trying to analyze what is going on, and you’ll forgive me if I’m sceptical towards one who says, “look, it’s simple: just get on your knees.”

[Hanover]

@Jamal

Your obsession with Marxism as villain gets in the way of a good conversation.

Fair enough, but you might overstate my emotional attachment to or rejection of any economic theory, including Marxism. My interests are academic more than personal, but I can see how it could be read as me picking at your leanings for reaction, so I’ll cease that distraction.

My real point though was to draw an equivalency between what horrors you fear might arise in a Carlye-ocracy as to what others fear of a Marx-ocracy. Enforced ideology upon the masses without sufficient allowance for variation is the source of much oppression. Which is why I’m reluctant to offer a solution that imposes ideology, but I do think certain ideologies are more protective of dehumanizing forces than others.

I can only be in favor of allowing the voluntary acceptance of these ideologies, without proselytizing.

[quote=“Jamal, post:104, topic:493”] How
does religion help, specifically?
[/quote]

Religion generically is a belief in a higher power that imposes meaning upon all this otherwise random chaos we live in. At a most basic level we’ve got to sanctify (to set apart, to make holy) humanity, else we have no basis to object to the treatment of humans as physical, mechanical objects like all others except for pragmatic reasons. As in, it makes us sadder, less productive or whatever to treat us as part of the machinery, so let’s pretend to be too important for that.

My reason has nothing to do with utility or that which might lead to greater happiness. It’s that no child of God ought ever be relegated to that of the animal and certainly not the machine. It’s an objection of a different magnitude to argue from morality and desecration.

If you agree with me but feel more comfortable with langauge that suggests only secular sacredness, then my question is why one chunk of physical matter can be sacred and another not?

@Jamal

But, it hasn’t worked. It’s just not powerful enough. I mean, I know nothing else has worked either, but—

I submit it has worked and does work. If you sincerely believe you possess a divine soul, the fear of mechanization doesn’t exist. It is a psychological disengagement that often reveals itself in varying degrees of insularity from living apart from society at large, dressing differently, eating differently, preserving own languages, having own sources of authority, etc. Those folks surely observe the chaos of society at large and have opinions of it, but they aren’t participants like the secularists.

[Jamal]

@Hanover

My real point though was to draw an equivalency between what horrors you fear might arise in a Carlye-ocracy as to what others fear of a Marx-ocracy. Enforced ideology upon the masses without sufficient allowance for variation is the source of much oppression. Which is why I’m reluctant to offer a solution that imposes ideology, but I do think certain ideologies are more protective of dehumanizing forces than others.

I can only be in favor of allowing the voluntary acceptance of these ideologies, without proselytizing.

I, too, dislike oppression in all its forms, whether based on a glorious restoration of traditional morals and national greatness or on building a free and equal society. But one of the good things about ideas is that they can be used to oppose such oppression.

@Hanover

My reason has nothing to do with utility or that which might lead to greater happiness. It’s that no child of God ought ever be relegated to that of the animal and certainly not the machine. It’s an objection of a different magnitude to argue from morality and desecration.

If you agree with me but feel more comfortable with langauge that suggests only secular sacredness, then my question is why one chunk of physical matter can be sacred and another not?

I’ll go with Levinas, and he is particularly interesting here because alongside his philosophy he was doing Talmudic interpretation the whole time as well. His answer to “why one chunk of physical matter can be sacred and another not?” is: the face. One chunk addresses you, placing a moral demand on you—not to destroy it, not to use it as a means, and so on—and the other doesn’t. (You mentioned animals: to what extent animals might place this demand on you is debated, of course, but rocks and trees definitely don’t).

He even uses the word “religion” to name the encounter of the I with the Other, which has to do with transcendence and infinity—and yet he still somehow manages to be offering a secular, non-theological ethics.

Anyway, leaving the religion aside, I think it’s a good answer. Of course, if you’re looking for a metaphysical answer, it won’t satisfy you, but I agree with Levinas that metaphysics is the wrong orientation here. Ethics comes first.

@Hanover

I submit it has worked and does work. If you sincerely believe you possess a divine soul, the fear of mechanization doesn’t exist. It is a psychological disengagement that often reveals itself in varying degrees of insularity from living apart from society at large, dressing differently, eating differently, preserving own languages, having own sources of authority, etc. Those folks surely observe the chaos of society at large and have opinions of it, but they aren’t participants like the secularists.

Your answer is the strongest so far, but I am looking for a secular equivalent, one that does not assume an opposition between the soul and techno-modernity, thus does not need to merely protect the soul from an inherently dehumanizing machine—but one that humanizes and democratizes the machine.

[woof]

The paper that comes to mind reading most of the posts/OP is Susan Sontag’s last (very short) book, “Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)”, still in print, read and studied in humanities/arts dept than in sociology. Alas does not really answer the OP in terms of strategies of pragmatic intervention, nor a depth empirical explanatory underpinning. As a broader cultural overview, the Sontag piece covers a brief historical context of horror reportage, beginning from Goya’s The Disasters of War, her critique is more embedded by Benjamin, Barthes (i.e. photography and the politics of representation) than the excesses of Deleuze, appropriately the book is without any explicit photo illustrations as “spectacle”, and includes the obligatory footnotes to Plato:

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic…Socrates relates a story he heard about Leontius, son of Aglaion:

“On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, “There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.”

Declining to choose the more common example of an inappropriate or unlawful sexual passion as his illustration of the struggle between reason and desire, Plato appears to take for granted that we also have an appetite for sights of degradation and pain and mutilation. Surely the undertow of this despised impulse must also be taken into account when discussing the effect of atrocity pictures.

At the beginning of modernity, it may have been easier to acknowledge that there exists an innate tropism toward the gruesome. Edmund Burke observed that people like to look at images of suffering.

“I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others,” he wrote in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

“There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity.”

William Hazlitt, in his essay on Shakespeare’s Iago and the attraction of villainy on the stage, asks, "Why do we always read the accounts in the newspapers of dreadful fires and shocking murders?" Because, he answers, “love of mischief,” love of cruelty, is as natural to human beings as is sympathy.

[Jamal]

Excellent, thanks @woof. I remember being struck by that passage in the Republic. I also like Sontag, so I must read that one.