Photographic Effects

"Reflection on the ethical climate is not the private preserve of a few academic theorists in universities. After all, the satirist and cartoonist, as well as the artist and the novelist, comment upon and criticize the prevailing climate just as effectively as those who get know as philosophers. The impact of a campaigning novelist such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dickens, Zola or Solzhenitsyn may be much greater than that of the academic theorist. A single photograph may have done more to halt the Vietnam War than all the writings of moral philosophers of the time put together." ~ Simon Blackburn*

Phan Thi Kim Phuc, near the village of Trang Bang,
Vietnam - June 8, 1972. Photograph © Nick Ut.

Blackburn's overall claim (made in reference to Nick Ut's famous image) is hardly astonishing given that, even during the late sixties, the writings of philosophers had scant impact on matters of practical politics. I read his comments less as stressing the futility of philosophers than as a useful reminder of the influence that literature and the arts can, in particular instances, have on the politics. In a sense, Blackburn is re-cycling a claim that Richard Rorty regularly made, namely that morality and ethics presuppose some process of defining the "we" to whom we apply our ethical categories. Rorty insists that that process of categorization often trades upon the kind of ‘sad, sentimental story’ conveyed by writers of the sort Blackburn mentions just insofar as such stories revolve around ‘detailed descriptions’ of human hardship and suffering.

But that, in turn, raises the question of how photographs might have such profound impact and why they so rarely do so. Those are large, important questions. I think Blackburn (and by extension, Rorty) is correct about the possible impact of photography. But neither provides an especially compelling account of how that impact comes about or how it too commonly is thwarted.
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* Simon Blackburn. 2001. Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics. Oxford UP,
page 5.

Political Ambiguities ~ Arundhati Roy on Compassion & Non-Violence

I started to write this post last winter and then somehow let it fall by the wayside. Waste not, want not? . . .

I have posted here about (and linked to interviews with) Arundhati Roy numerous times. The folks at Guernica have yet another interview with Roy in a recent issue. The interview includes a comment I find especially interesting relative to the discourse about preaching "non-violence" and "compassion" in politics. Here is what Roy says:

"Guernica: You have written that “people believe that faced with extermination they have the right to fight back. By any means necessary.” The knee-jerk response to this has been: Look, she’s preaching violence.

Arundhati Roy: My question is, if you are an Adivasi living in a village in a dense forest in Chhattisgarh, and that village is surrounded by eight hundred Central Reserve Police Force who have started to burn down the houses and rape the women, what are people supposed to do? Are they supposed to go on a hunger strike? They can’t. They are already hungry, they are already starving. Are they supposed to boycott goods? They can’t because they don’t have the money to buy goods. And if they go on a fast or a dharna, who is looking, who is watching? So, my position is just that it would be immoral of me to preach violence to anybody unless I’m prepared to pick up arms myself. But I think it is equally immoral for me to preach nonviolence when I’m not bearing the brunt of the attack.

Guernica : According to Macaulay, the rationale for the introduction of English in India, as we all know, was to produce a body of clerks. We have departed from that purpose, of course, but still, in our use of the language we remain remarkably conservative. I wonder sometimes whether your style itself, exuberant and excessive, isn’t for these readers a transgression.

Arundhati Roy : I wouldn’t say that it’s all Macaulay’s fault. There is something clerky and calculating about our privileged classes. They see themselves as the State or as advisors to the State, rarely as subjects. If you read columnists and editorials, most have a very clerky, “apply-through-proper-channels” approach. As though they are a shadow cabinet. Even when they are critical of the State they are what a friend once described as “reckless at slow speed.” So I don’t think my transgressions as far as they are concerned has only to do with my style. It’s about everything—style, substance, politics, speed. I think it worries them that I’m not a victim and that I don’t pretend to be one. They love victims and victimology. My writing is not a plea for aid or for compassion towards the poor. We’re not asking for more NGOs or charities or foundations in which the rich can massage their egos and salve their consciences with their surplus money. The critique is structural."

It is, in other words, easy to see the point at which moralism and politics part company - the latter requires that we recognize asymmetries of power and resources and their consequences, the former more or less requires that we remain oblivious to them.

Rethinking 'Humanitarian' Action

"Surely what is needed . . . is an end to the evasion of politics, and the attempt to substitute humanitarian action for it. . . . Humanitarianism is . . . an often noble enterprise . . . but it was never meant to topple tyrants, end wars, redistribute wealth or solve political conflicts. Humanitarianism has been burdened with tasks it cannot accomplish, which is part of what makes the present moment both unutterably sad and terrifying."

That is among the provocative points Susie Linfield makes in this typically provocative essay. The dichotomy that traps us as we think about how best to respond to systematic social-political-economic dislocation of various sorts consists on the one hand in the aspiration to a neutral, moralistic brand of liberal humanitarianism that, at best, treats the symptoms of man-made mayhem and, on the other hand, the use of military force, brute and blunt as it is.

Among the problematic aspects of the essay is Linfield's near wholesale misunderstanding of Hannah Arendt's analysis of compassion and its limits. That is not merely a quibble on the part of a political theorist. As rightly points out: "It is a sign of the great distance between Arendt's time and ours that compassion – whose objective form is humanitarian action – has become not only politically relevant but politically central." Actually, what institutionalized compassion does is precisely what Arendt thinks it does; it subverts the space of politics, introducing moralism for political action animated by political impulses like solidarity. It does this not just because it is an emotion, but because it undermines our ability to think in terms of large numbers. While Arendt makes a conceptual argument to this effect, her views are - as I've noted here - sustained by recent research by cognitive psychologists.

Linfield directs us to the important task of imagining new forms of politics, forms that might be effective in protecting the vulnerable and holding perpetrators, individual and collective, to account. That is a huge task one that demands not just that we cease evading politics, but work at re-configuring it by re-conceptualizing the terms on which we approach others. It seems to me that jettisoning the politics of compassion and its institutional forms is an important first step. The picture of humanitarianism and its failings that Linfield paints seems to leave us no alternative.