Originally published in The MIT Press / Daedalus
The British nurse was picking her way through the mass of women and children squatting in the dust at the entrance to the field hospital of the refugee camp at Korem in Ethiopia. She was selecting which children could still be helped. She was choosing who would live and who would die. A television crew trailed behind her, moving its way among the starving. A television reporter approached with a mike and asked her how she felt about what she was doing. It was not a question she felt capable of answering. The look she gave the camera came from very far away.
It is in scenes like this one, with questions like this, that television confronts consciences of the West with suffering in the Third World. Through its news broadcasts and spectaculars like “Live Aid,” television has become the privileged medium through which moral relations between strangers are mediated in the modern world. Yet the effects of televisual images and the rules and conventions of electronic news-gathering on such moral relations are rarely examined. At first sight, the moral relations instituted by the Ethiopian images could be interpreted in radically different ways, either as an instance of the promiscuous voyeurism a visual culture makes possible, or as a hopeful example of the internationalization of conscience. The difficulty, of course, is that both of these opposing interpretations may be true. Let us take each in turn.
There is little doubt, first of all, that the television coverage of Ethiopia had a remarkable impact upon Western charity. In Britain alone, more than £6o million was donated to famine relief agencies in the months since the Ethiopian footage was first shown in October 1984• For the first time since Biafra, governments throughout Europe found themselves under continuous public pressure on a development issue. Many facts known but relegated to the realm of the taken-for-granted—the tons of surplus grain produced by the European Common Market agricultural policy—suddenly became a public scandal when juxtaposed with the images coming out of Ethiopia.[1] TV brought public pressure to bear upon the bureaucratic inertia, logistical stumbling blocks, and ideological excuses that had allowed a long-predicted food crisis to become a disaster. Television helped to institute a direct relation of people to people which cut through bilateral governmental mediations. For a brief moment, it created a new kind of electronic internationalism linking the consciences of the rich and the needs of the poor. As a medium, television dramatically reduced the lag-time between pressure and action, between need and response. Without it, thousands more Ethiopians would have died, as they have died unseen and unlamented by the West in the famines that have ravaged the country nearly every twenty years in this century.
Yet if this is the case for television’s good conscience over the Ethiopian story, there are other more troubling aspects to the gaze it cast on disaster. There is the accusation that TV news ignored food shortages until they acquired the epic visual appeal of famine, and there is the suspicion that the story will drop out of the nightly bulletins when the focus upon horror shifts elsewhere in the world.[2] The medium’s gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short. Other disquieting aspects of the televisual gaze are brought into focus by the reporter’s question to the nurse: how do you feel? The question may have come out of a desire to reach out across the distance the reporter knew to separate her from those watching in their living room. It may also have come out of a need to fill the terrible silence, the unspeaking finality, of those starving at his feet. But the question served only to make plain the chasm that empathy—”suffering with”—cannot hope to cross. The question laid bare the interstellar moral distances that a culture of visual images conjures away with its cruel mime of immediacy.
On the one hand, television has contributed to the breakdown of the barriers of citizenship, religion, race, and geography that once divided our moral space into those we were responsible for and those who were beyond our ken. On the other hand, it makes us voyeurs of the suffering of others, tourists amidst their landscapes of anguish. It brings us face to face with their fate, while obscuring the distances—social, economic, moral—that lie between us. It is this tangle of contradictory, mutually cancelling, effects that I want to try to unravel.
II
Television images, as Jonathan Miller says elsewhere in this volume, cannot assert anything; they can only instantiate something. The images from Ethiopia do not assert their own meaning; they can only instantiate a moral claim if those who watch understand themselves to be potentially under obligation to those they see. Behind the seemingly natural mechanics of empathy at work in viewers’ response to these images lies a history by which their consciences were formed to respond as they do. It is the history by which Europeans gradually came to believe in a myth of human universality—the simple idea that race, religion, sex, citizenship, or legal status do not justify unequal treatment; or, more positively, that human needs and pain are universally the same, and that we may be obliged to help those to whom we are unrelated by birth or citizenship, race or geographic proximity.
The Christian promise of the universality of salvation was the first ethical claim to confront the classical partition of humanity into citizens and slaves, and the medieval common law built this idea of the identity of all human subjects into the basis of European legal systems. With the Reformation, the human universality premised on the unity of Christendom had to be thought anew for a world divided into warring confessions.[3] The jurisprudence developed by Grotius and Pufendorf sought to provide a universal natural law for a world of sharply conflicting laws and ethics. Natural law was centrally concerned with defining the rights of those strangers—prisoners of war, survivors of wrecks—who happened to fall from one jurisdiction into another, or who fell between them, and who thus stood in defenseless dependence on a culture of obligation between themselves and their captors or rescuers. Much of this struggle to define and defend the rights of a universal subject went on against a somber and even despairing backdrop of religious war.[4]
From the pens of Montaigne, Bayle, Locke, and many others who were disgusted by the ways in which partial human identities—religion, nation, region—were used to justify the slaughter of other human beings, there emerged the modern doctrine of toleration. Its central claim, as Judith Shklar and others have pointed out, was to deny that sins against God—blasphemy, heresy, disobedience—justified sins against men. No higher law could justify the non-judicial taking of human life.[5] The exponents of the doctrine of toleration also insisted that, given the shared human ignorance about the ultimate metaphysical foundations of the world, all human creatures had an equal right to construe those foundations as best they could, provided they did no harm to the property and lives of others. The philosophical ground for civil peace among confessional communities within and between states, the seventeenth-century philosophers argued, was a shared adherence to the idea of natural human identity and equality.
All of this applied, of course, only to white males within the European world, but its application to the non-white peoples encountered on the frontier of the European penetration of North and South America was only too apparent to figures like Montaigne and Las Casas. If their pens were unable to halt or delay the decimation that accompanied European imperialism, they helped to create that sense of guilt, that sense of conscience betrayed, that is as much at the heart of the imperialist story as conquest itself. If European imperialism was premised on a partible conception of human identity—us and them, white and black, Christian and heathen, civilized and savage—there was always present in the European conscience a Christian and jurisprudential universalism to mock this partible, racialist, definition of human obligations. We are still living out the history of conscience that began with the first European voyages of discovery, but surely one of the moments when the universalist definition of human identity won an irreversible victory over the partible definition was the successful campaign against the slave trade, and then against slavery itself, from 1750 to 1850.[6] Certainly, the intentions at work in these campaigns were not exclusively high-minded: the costs of slavery, the relative inefficiency of slaves compared to free labor, also counted in the squaring of the pocketbook and the conscience. Indeed, this whole story cannot be written as a progressive unfolding of moral enlightenment, but rather as a struggle to reconcile universalist moral impulses with their often uncomfortable consequences.
Some of these consequences were brought into sharp focus by the issue of famine. From the time of the early Church fathers, the question of whether the duty to relieve the needs of the poor was a compulsory obligation or a voluntary one was central in the debate about the public ethics of a Christian person. If the obligation was one of justice, the needs of the poor might be said to give them a right to the property of the rich. Church fathers like Aquinas were concerned that this right would unsettle the fixed entitlement to property which was the basis of social order itself. On the other hand, an obligation to help the poor which was merely one of charity might result in the starvation of many in times of famine. The history of Christian ethics revolved around this debate between the rights of property and the claims of the property—less in time of famine.[7] In practice, the claims of ethical universalism came to be strongly limited in Christian teaching and then in European natural law by the injunction that a rich man had a merely voluntary charitable obligation to strangers in need. In more general terms, a descending order of moral impingement has come into place: the claims of kith and kin first, then neighbors, co-religionists, co-citizens, and only at the very end, the indeterminate stranger. To this day, the claim of the stranger—the Ethiopian on the screen—is the furthest planet in the solar system of our moral obligations. The claim that we should help those “closer to home” will always be persuasive. Whether or not it is right to be so persuaded is another matter. There is thus a great deal of moral confusion in the supposed natural outflow of charitable empathy over Ethiopia: faced with two claims—one based on the extent of need, the other on the closeness to us of the subject in need—we tend to choose in favor of the latter. There has always been a conflict, therefore, between the conscience of ethical universalism and the demands of a private property system, and between the known subject of need and the stranger at the gate. The history of ethics is a history of contradiction, not a history of progress.
Faced with this history of contradiction, the Marxist tradition has always regarded bourgeois moral universalism as a veil of ideological deception concealing—from the bourgeois conscience itself and from the awareness of those it exploits—the exploitation and inequality integral to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Marxists have also argued that the doctrine of the natural inviolability of all individuals as rights-bearing creatures could only become a reality in societies that do away with capitalist and imperialist social relations.[8] The history of Marxist sarcasm towards bourgeois universalism would give special mention to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror written as a reply to liberal and socialist critiques of the show trials of Stalin. The humanist critique of Soviet political violence, Merleau-Ponty argued, was a hypocritical attempt to deny the violence constitutive of bourgeois rule itself, as well as an attempt to delegitimize a revolution’s necessary means of self-defense. The pity of bourgeois humanism, Merleau-Ponty argued, was a form of piety that refused to understand that violence has been the motor of progress from the rise of the bourgeoisie to the triumph of the Soviet revolution.[9]
Roland Barthes’s essay on the photographic exhibit “The Family of Man” belongs to this postwar French Marxist counterattack on bourgeois humanism, and extended Merleau-Ponty’s line of argument into the realm of aesthetics. The exhibition’s celebration of man’s natural human identity—his membership in “the family of man”—Barthes argued, reduced real historical men and women to the inconsequential sameness of their zoological identity. In doing so, the images sought to wrap essential elements of human experience—work, play, suffering, and grief—in an aura of eternal inevitability, and thus to remove suffering and oppression from the ambit of human agency.[10]
If we follow this Marxist critique of bourgeois cant, the shame of the Ethiopian images would lie not in what they show, but in what they suppress. The culture of the visual image, so a Marxist would argue, moralizes the relation between viewer and sufferer as an eternal moment of empathy outside history. Television mediates economic and political relations as human relations, and asserts a connection between the Western conscience and the needs of the strangers of the Third World as inhering in human nature itself, beneath the history of exploitation that links the West to its neocolonial hinterland. On this view, the charity unleashed by empathy is a form of forgetting, the reproduction of amnesia towards the responsibility of the West for the causes of African famine.
It is doubtless true that the mechanisms of pity are a complex mixture of forgetting and condescension, and heightened self-regard is a constitutive part of the glow of moral empathy with the suffering of others. Yet television’s—and our own—encounter with these images is considerably more ambivalent than such an analysis would suggest. While it is easy to argue that a culture of the visual image favors the icons of suffering over the tomes of analysis, it simply isn’t the case that pictures of the famine have suppressed analysis of its causes. Every structural feature of the crisis—the arms race in the Horn of Africa, the injustices of the world commodity price system, the failure of Western development agencies to invest sufficiently in soil reclamation, land reform, and resettlement projects, the grotesque preference of local rulers to fight their civil wars instead of attending to the needs of their peoples—all these have been documented on television.[11] If viewers take it for granted that the Ethiopian starving are, in some degree, their business, it is because the pictures have been preceded by more than a decade of documentaries on Third World development, which, while tending to favor the ideology of Robert MacNamara at the expense of Franz Fanon, have at least made plain some of the structures of neo-colonial economic and political dependency. Current-affairs television did not create this new culture of understanding between First and Third Worlds which mediates the flow of empathy between viewer and sufferer, but it has played an honest and sometimes honorable part in building an inchoate popular understanding of development issues in Western public opinion. If television is bourgeois ideology, then the least we have to say is that bourgeois ideology—in relation to the Third World—is a deeply complex mixture of willed amnesia, guilty conscience, moralizing self-regard, and real understanding. Television does not suppress this ambivalence; it faithfully reproduces it in all its confusion.
The myth of human identity, that vision of common human needs and common human pain that binds viewer and sufferer together, is itself fraught with ambiguity. White viewers who mail checks on behalf of black victims at the other side of the globe may combine their generosity with very different behavior towards blacks nearer home. One of empathy’s pleasures is to forget one’s moral inconsistencies. Yet the claim that moral empathy at this distance is nothing more than self-deceiving myth relies tacitly on a moral myth of its own: that full moral empathy—full “suffering with,” based on commonality of experience—is possible only among persons who share the same social identity, for example, the same class. Class identity, however, is no less mythic, no less imagined, than universal human brotherhood. The ethics that derive from it must divide the world into us and them, friends and enemies. The moral internationalism based on class solidarity has had its hours of glory—the International Brigade in Spain, for example—but also its hours of ignominy. When the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the troops were told they were marching to the aid of their comrades against the common class enemy. “Weeding out the class enemy” has been the moral mot d’ordre for the atrocities committed in the van of the Soviet and partisan armies after World War II, not to mention in the rice paddies of Kampuchea. If the fragile internationalism of the myth of human brotherhood has returned as a moral force in the modern world it is because partial human solidarities—those of religion, ethnicity, and class—have dishonored themselves by the slaughter committed in their name. Human brotherhood may be a myth, and a weak one at that, but it is the only myth that has yet to murder someone in its cause.
In the twentieth century, however, this myth has a more somber moral hue than such nineteenth-century antecedents as the evangelical campaigns against the slave trade and Gladstone’s campaign against the Bulgarian atrocities. Nineteenth-century “bourgeois humanism” drew its inspiration from the political economy of free trade—with its vision of a world of peoples brought together in a world market; from a doctrine of progress which understood the spread of the British imperium as an instance of the march of the human mind, and which conceived of human universality in terms of bringing the lesser breeds within the law of civilization.
In the twentieth century, the idea of human universality rests less on hope than on fear, less on optimism about the human capacity for good than on dread of human capacity for evil, less on a vision of man as maker of his history than of man the wolf towards his own kind. The way stations on the road to this new internationalism were Armenia, Verdun, the Russian front, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lebanon. A century of total war has made victims of us all, civilians and military, men, women, and children alike. We no longer live in a time in which violence is distributed—and pity and compassion too—along the lines of tribe, race, religion, or nation. If new technology has created a new form of war and a new crime—genocide–we have also witnessed the creation of a new kind of victimhood. War and genocide have overturned the moral boundary-markers of citizenship, race, and class which used to allocate responsibility for the relief of the suffering. If we take it for granted now that the Ethiopians are our responsibility, it is because a century of total destruction has made us ashamed of that cantonment of moral responsibilities by nation, religion, or region which resulted in the abandonment of the Jews. Modern moral universalism is built upon the experience of a new kind of crime: the crime against humanity.[12]
Famine, like genocide, is a process of human fission which pulverizes huge numbers of different individuals into exactly equal units of pure humanity. In the camps that dotted northeastern Europe forty years ago, peasants from Poland, bankers from Hamburg, gypsies from Romania, shopkeepers from Riga—each with a separate social identity and a different kind of relation to their oppressor—were placed on the anvil of suffering and hammered into sameness and then into oblivion. In the Ethiopian camps, highland Christians, lowland Moslems, Eritreans, Tigreans, Afars, and Somalis are being re-worked on the anvil of suffering into the sameness of victimhood.[13] In this process of suffering, each individual was severed from the social relations that, in normal times, would have saved their lives. Each individual in the Ethiopian camps is a son, a daughter, a father, a mother, a tribesmen, a citizen, a believer, a neighbor. Each one of these social relations will sustain an appeal for help in a time of distress. Famine, like genocide, destroys the capillary system of social relations that sustain each individual’s system of entitlements. In so doing, genocide and famine create a new human subject—the pure victim stripped of social identity, and thus bereft of the specific moral audience that would in normal times be there to hear his cry. In these conditions, the family, the tribe, the faith, the nation no longer exist as a moral audience for these people. If they are to be saved at all, they must put their faith in that most fearful of dependency relations: the charity of strangers.
Human brotherhood in these conditions, therefore, can be under-stood as a residual moral system of obligations among strangers which comes into force when all other social relations capable of saving a person have been destroyed. In this sense, human brotherhood is a myth made actual and concrete by the history of twentieth-century horror: it is a myth with a history, a necessity only history can give. It is a moral truism, put to the test in the twentieth century on a scale never before imagined, that there is no such thing as love of the human race, only love of this person for that, in this time and place. Obligations, it is always said, are social, contextual, relational, and historical. But what then is to be done for those whose social and historical relations have been utterly pulverized? Human life is now confronted with a range of new conditions—continent-wide famines, nuclear war, ecological catastrophe, and genocide—that constitute victims who have no social relations capable of mobilizing their salvation, and who, as a result, make an ethic of universal moral obligation among strangers a necessity for the future of life on the planet. Doubtless such an ethic of obligation will always have a subsidiary claim on our moral will to the attentions we lavish on a brother, a sister, a fellow citizen, a co-believer, or a co-worker. But without this weak and inconstant ethic, this impersonal commitment to strangers, the universal victim will find no one beyond the wire to feed him. It is this weak moral language, and the new experience of universal victimhood it is trying to address, of which television has become the privileged modern medium.
III
Television is also the instrument of a new kind of politics. Since 1945, affluence and idealism have made possible the emergence of a host of non-governmental private charities and pressure groups—Amnesty International, Care, Save the Children, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières, and others—that use television as a central part of their campaigns to mobilize conscience and money on behalf of endangered humans and their habitat around the world. It is a politics that takes the world rather than the nation as its political space and that takes the human species itself rather than specific citizenship, racial, religious, or ethnic groups as its object. It is a “species politics” striving to save the human species from itself, as Greenpeace and World Wildlife are striving to protect natural and animal species from the predator man. These organizations seek to circumvent the bilateral governmental relations between peoples and institute direct political contacts between, for example, Amnesty sponsors and particular political prisoners, or American families and Latin American foster children, field service volunteers and their peasant clients. It is a politics that has tried to constitute a world public opinion to keep watch over the rights of those who lack the means to protect themselves. Using the medium of television, many of these international organizations have managed to force governments to pay some degree of attention to the public-relations costs of their exercises in domestic repression. These organizations also try to raise these costs wherever they can, by persuading Western nations to tie loan agreements, arms contracts, and development packages to certain standards of behavior in the field of human rights. As a result, what happens in the jails of Kampala, Moscow, Memphis, and Johannesburg has become the business of television viewers across the world. At a time when the politics of nation states, when party ideology and civic activism alike, show signs of exhaustion, disillusion and impasse, this new politics has shown itself a robust mobilizer of commitment and money. Its popularity owes much to the fact that it is an anti-politics rejecting all the arguments that political ideologists devise to justify harm done to human beings. It is also an anti-politics in its refusal to differentiate among victims. Amnesty International, for example, refuses to differentiate between right-wing or left-wing political prisoners, between torture conducted in the name of socialist revolution or torture conducted in the name of American-style freedom.[14]
Television is particularly well-suited to certain features of this kind of politics, able as it is to bring political intentions and their consequences face to face with each other: with one flick of an editing switch, television can point out the gulf of abstraction that separates the politician’s speech about the defense of freedom from the butchered bodies in the jungle. At its best, television’s morality is the morality of the war correspondent, the veteran who has heard all the recurring justifications for human cruelty advanced by the Left and the Right, and who learns in the end to pay attention only to the victims. Don McCullin, the British war photographer, voiced this ethic in his introduction to a collection of some of his photographs of Biafra, Bangladesh, and Vietnam:
But what are my politics? I certainly take the side of the underprivileged. I could never say I was politically neutral. But whether I’m of the Right or the Left—I can’t say. I feel I’m trapped by my background, my inability to retain facts, and my utter bewilderment when faced by political theory: I’m so defeated by it I don’t even vote. I’ve tried to be a witness, an independent spectator, with the result that I can’t get beyond the facts of what I’ve seen. I’ve experienced too much suffering. I feel, in my guts, at one with the victims. And I find there’s integrity in that stance.[15]
Television’s good conscience could be described in much the same terms: to pay attention to the victims, rather than the pieties of political rhetoric; to refuse to make a distinction between good corpses and bad ones (though this was notoriously not the case in American coverage of Vietnam); and to be a witness, a bearer of bad tidings to the watching conscience of the world. This is the moral internationalism of the 198os, and it is a weary world away from the internationalism of the 196os. If someone had said in 1967 that they refused to distinguish between the human rights violations of the Americans and the North Vietnamese, they would have been set upon by Right and Left in equal measure. But now that a North Vietnamese victory has been followed with further wars of aggrandizement, a moral position that assesses ideologies by the victims they leave behind has gained the right to be heard above the righteous din.
There are fashions in morals as there are fashions in clothes. Television followed moral fashions on the Vietnam war: it did not create them: only television executives believe that television made it impossible for the Americans to win the war. If the dominant ethics in television today is that there are no good causes left—only victims of bad causes—there is no guarantee that the medium will not succumb to the next moral fashion. There is even a danger that television’s healthy cynicism towards causes will topple into a shallow kind of misanthropy. The coverage of Lebanon is a case in point. The ethics of victimhood generate empathy only where victims are obviously blameless. In Lebanon, there are victims in abundance, but it is always difficult to identify the innocent in a frenzied killing-ground in which women, children, and the aged—the usual categories of innocence—have been implicated in acts of terrorism and war. Night after night, audiences around the world have watched Christians, Moslems, Jews, Palestinians, Falangists, Shiites, Marxists, anti-Marxists engaged in a seemingly endless cycle of massacre, reprisal, and terror. The corpses strewn among the rubble seem to make further comprehension superfluous: here are people locked in a spiral, each with fine reasons for killing each other, each reason as insane as the other. The nightly corpses encouraged a misanthropic retreat from the attempt to understand. One sign of this withdrawal of empathy and understanding was the undersubscription of international appeals on behalf of the Lebanese victims.
Where empathy fails to find the blameless victim—as in Lebanon—the conscience finds comfort in shallow misanthropy. For the reaction—”they’re all crazy”—reproduces that reassuring imperial dichotomy between the virtue, moderation, and reasonableness held to exist in the West and the fanaticism and unreason of the East. Here misanthropy shades into amnesia towards all those occasions—Vietnam, the Falklands, the Grenada invasion—where the same consciences that deride the fanatics of the East found themselves swept up in warlike enthusiasms of their own.
It is not only the victims whose world one has to enter, if one wishes to understand Lebanon, but the world of the gunmen, torturers, and apologists of terror. To such people, the idea that human beings are sacred rights-bearing creatures would be true only for their own. As concerns their enemies and their victims, they have carpentered together persuasive reasons for refusing to think of them as human beings at all. The horror of the world lies not just with the corpses, not just with the consequences, but with the intentions, with the minds of killers. Faced with the deep persuasiveness of these ideologies of killing, the temptation to take refuge in moral disgust is strong indeed. Yet disgust is a poor substitute for thought. Television has unfortunate strengths as a medium of moral disgust. As a moral mediator between violent men and the audiences whose attention they crave, television images are more effective at instantiating consequences, than in exploring intentions; more adept at pointing to the corpses than in explaining why violence pays so well in a place like Lebanon. As a result, television news bears some responsibility for that generalized misanthropy, that irritable resignation towards the criminal folly of fanatics and assassins which legitimizes one of the dangerous cultural moods of our time—the feeling that the world has become too crazy to deserve serious reflection.
IV
Thus far I have made the following arguments: the moral empathy mediated by television has a history—the emergence of moral universalism in the Western conscience; this universalism has always been in conflict with the intuition that kith and kin have a moral priority over strangers; the twentieth-century inflection of moral universalism has taken the form of an anti-ideological and anti-political ethic of siding with the victim; the moral risk entailed by this ethic is misanthropy, a risk and a temptation heightened by television’s visual insistence on consequences rather than intentions.
It is time to focus more closely on television news itself, on the impact of its regimes of selection and presentation on the moral relation of viewers to the events it depicts. When we say that watching television is a passive experience, we mean, among other things, that we are unaware of the nature of the visual authority to which we are submitting. Television news is an extremely recent genre: the half-hour news we take for granted is barely twenty years old, and novelty itself may explain why its codes tend to register subliminally. With increasing familiarity, however, these codes tend to become more evident, more a matter of cultural discussion and interrogation. News is a genre as much as fiction or drama: it is a regime of visual authority, a coercive organization of images according to a stopwatch. Many conventions of television news are taken over from newspapers and radio: the convention that home news is more important than foreign news; that news is about what happened to “the nation” and “the world” in one day; that yesterday’s news—yesterday’s famine—is no longer news; that some news has to be good news, i.e., that broadcasts should discharge a certain function of good cheer in a cheerless world. To these existing conventions, television has applied two of its own: that news to be news at all must be visual and it must fit into fifteen-, thirty-, and sixty-minute formats. Some of the consequences of these conventions are notorious: the entire script content of the CBS nightly half-hour news would fit on three quarters of the front page of the New York Times. The promiscuity of the nightly news—the jostling together of tornadoes in Pennsylvania, gunmen in Beirut, striking teachers in Manchester, a royal outing in Suffolk, and infant heart surgery in a California hospital—is dictated by the time constraints of the medium. Yet this jumble of events is presented to the viewer as if it were a representation of the promiscuity of the external world. This incoherence is compounded by the growing importance, across all media, of human-interest stories. The growth of this dimension of the news might once have been understood as a populist counter-ballast to the dominance of official, governmental information. Yet this populist redefinition of news value to include the curious, bizarre, and the entertaining has destroyed the coherence of the genre itself so that thoughtful viewers of the news ask themselves at least once a night, “Why am I being shown this? Why is this news?[16]
The myth sustaining the news is that it is a picture of what happened to “the nation” and “the world” in a given time period, usually the time since the last bulletin. Millions of households look out through the screen in search of their collective identity as a national society and as citizens of one world. The media now play the decisive role in constituting the “imagined community” of nation and globe, the myth that millions of separate “I”s find common identity in a “we.” The fiction is that all the events depicted have somehow happened to “us.” News editors act as ventriloquists of this “we,” serving up a diet of information that is legitimized as being what “we” need to know; in fact, what we get to know is what fits the visual and chronological constraints of the genre. In this circular process, the news is validated as a system of authority, as a national institution with a privileged role as purveyor of the nation’s identity and taker of its pulse.
Yet news is not only a system of authority, it is also the site of social competition among interest groups and individuals struggling to influence the representation of themselves in the eyes of the watching “we.” The struggle over representation has become as important as the struggle for power; indeed, has become the privileged means by which interests fight for power itself. What was once called, in the nineteenth century, the battle for public opinion conducted within the relatively restricted press read by the middle and upper classes, has become a struggle for “coverage” on a nightly news with a massive and socially heterogeneous audience. Since public opinion polls now exist to aggregate individual reaction to this struggle, and since these opinion polls are watched attentively by those in power, the struggle for favorable media coverage has become the key battleground in elections, strikes, and charitable campaigns.
In the process, the rationale for news decisions has been put under an intense degree of public scrutiny. Charges of bias are hurled from all sides of the political arena at media executives, while they in turn, faced with this pressure, lean heavily on their journalists to comply with rough and ready guidelines of balance.
This focus on political bias as the source of the media’s distortion of the “we” leaves unaddressed the distorting effect of the news genre itself. News is a mythic narrative of social identity constituted from commodities bought and sold on the international market. The nightly news could be understood as a market in which startling and terrible images compete with each other for ninety-second slots in the bulletin. There is a market in images of horror as there is a market in grain or cameras, and there are those who specialize in the production and distribution of such images. Moral intuition might lead one to suppose that such a trade in images of suffering is immoral. There are many goods that are not traded, even in a capitalist culture—goods like health care, justice, and public office.[17] Though many societies have attempted to ban the traffic in images of degrading sexuality, few have attempted to restrict the commerce in images of human suffering. To ban a trade in images of suffering would be to exclude not only disturbing and casual atrocity footage, but also many of the masterpieces of Western art, including Goya’s Horrors of War, or Picasso’s Guernica. As long as culture itself is a process of market exchange between producers and consumers of images, and as long as we think it wrong for anyone to have the right to dictate the content of these images, then our culture will constantly have to confront the moral ambiguity of making commodities out of other people’s pain. Some of the deep ambiguity at the heart of our discomfort in watching the scenes from Ethiopia comes from our knowledge that we are consuming images of other people’s suffering, that our moral relations to them are mediated as consumption relations. The shame of voyeurism, therefore, in relation to their suffering has certain unchangeable elements that inhere in the nature of the consumption of representation itself.
Yet certain other components of our shame are susceptible to intervention, because they derive from the news genre itself. The pell-mell competition to fill the nightly news results in a blur of tragedies and crimes—one minute Afghanistan, the next minute Lebanon, then Ethiopia, or a bloody train wreck in Kansas—the cumulative effect of which is to create one single banalized commodity of horror. The time disciplines of the news genre militate against the minimum moral requirement of engagement with another person’s suffering: that one spends time with them, time to learn, to suffer with, to pierce the carapace of self-absorption and estrangement that separates us from the moral worlds of others. Moral life is a struggle to see—a struggle against the desire to deny the testimony of one’s own eyes and ears. The struggle to believe one’s senses is at the heart of the process of moving from voyeurism to commitment. Visitors to the refugee camp at Korem have all insisted that, faced with the testimony of their senses, they found themselves fleeing mentally into the fantasy that what they were seeing was some terrible nightmare from which they would awake.[18] In the same way it is an effort to look at footage of Dachau and Belsen and not find oneself taking refuge in the thought that what one is seeing is just a piece of celluloid moving through a projector gate.
Goya’s Horrors of War and Picasso’s Guernica confront this desire to evade the testimony of our own eyes by grounding horror in aesthetic forms that force the spectator to see it as if for the first time. There is no reason to suppose that the new media lack the same capacity of representation to make the real truly real and to force the eye to see, and the heart to recognize what it has seen. Yet the nightly rhythm of the news militates against this kind of seeing. In the mingling of heterogeneous stories, and in the enforcement of the regime of time, the news makes it impossible to attend to what one has seen. In the end one sees only the news, its personalities, its rules of selection and suppression, its authoritative voice. In the end, the subject of the news is the news itself: what it depicts is a means to the reproduction of its own authoritativeness. In this worship of itself, of its speed, its immense news-gathering resources, its capacity to beat the clock, the news turns realities like Ethiopia into ninety-second exercises in its own style of representation.
A dishonor is done when the flow of television news reduces all the world’s horror to identical commodities. In a culture overwhelmed by the volume of promiscuous representation, there must be some practice by which the real—the instant when a real body is struck, abused, or violated—is given a place of special attention, a demarcation that insists that it be seen. Anthropologists would call such practices rituals.[19] While it is often said that modern culture is impoverished in sacred ritual, this is nit exactly the case. It certainly has its own fetishisms—money and consumption—and, for all the surface din of moral controversy, a generally shared belief in the special respect due the human person. The idea that the person is sacred, in property, rights, and life, is widely shared, if honored more in the breach than in the observance. Whether the world we live in is any more violent, any more full of suffering, is, in the nature of things, impossible to decide. What seems less disputable is that the culture is less able to satisfy human needs for an account of our dignity as creatures, less able to treat the human experience of violence and suffering with the respect it deserves: the respect of outrage. The violence and suffering of the world burst upon us with greater force not merely because global media no longer allow us the luxury of ignorance, but because we lack in the public realm those frames of interpretation and judgment which we use in private life to give meaning to our own experience.
The sceptic might well reply that if the television audience wants moral reassurance it should turn to the churches: television’s business is news, not piety; information, not sermons. The sacred is not its domain. This reply would be adequate if it were true, if television worshiped at no altars other than the search for information. The claim that television should pay some respect to suffering would be irrelevant if the medium paid no respect to anything at all. Yet while television news publicly adheres to the sceptic’s code of honor—that nothing is sacred—in practice it worships power. Television is the church of modern authority. Consider, for example, the television broadcasts of the 1953 British Coronation, the funeral of John F. Kennedy, the funeral of Winston Churchill, or the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. These are the sacred occasions of modern secular culture, and television has devised its own rhetoric and ritual to enfold viewers in a sense of the sacred importance of these moments: the hushed voices of the commentators; cameras so respectful of grief or majesty that they have the humility of pages; loving attention to uniform and vestments of power; above all, the tacit inference, throughout the commentary, that what is being represented is a rite of national significance.
The televised state pageant is the only occasion in which television executives feel able to jettison the regimes of the stopwatch which determine coverage of events like Ethiopia. In dispensing with advertising breaks, in scrapping schedules and in going on live, television makes an awesome assertion about what its audience wants to see. In the case of such events as royal marriages, for example, it presumes a universal identification with royalty which is at least contestable. The sacred function of these broadcasts is to constitute an event as being of “national” significance and thus to bind the competing “I”s of civil society into a momentary “we.” Yet the “we” is asserted, rather than simply addressed. There are moments—the funeral of John F. Kennedy might be an example—when these practices attain the cathartic power of liturgy, and do seem to speak for an audience that, momentarily, does experience itself as one in grief. But there are other occasions—summits of world leaders, royal marriages—that many viewers regard as “non-events” and that are nonetheless treated to the sacred discourse of coverage. Such “media events” open up a gulf between the language of television and the watching audience. In this gulf it becomes possible to see that television is worshiping state power and insisting that we do so as well. It is power itself—the sacred offices of state—that is worshiped. The same medium subjects the holders of these offices to such searching and even contemptuous scrutiny that television could be said to consume those it covers. Any politician making a career in the television age is always dicing with the adage “familiarity breeds contempt.” Television, however, is not contemptuous about power. Towards the handful of offices that rules the modern word, it displays a degree of humility that contradicts the journalist’s code of honor, that nothing is sacred.
If, then, television is capable of treating power as sacred, it becomes plausible for us to ask it to treat suffering with equal respect. If television can jettison its schedules and transform its discourse for the sake of a wedding or a funeral, then we can ask it to do the same for a famine in which millions of people are at risk. If television does know how to liberate itself from the news regime, then it becomes possible to ask it to reconsider the adequacy of the news regime as a whole, not merely as a means of covering famines, but all news. It becomes slightly less utopian at least to pose the question whether television should have news at all. Serving up the world in ninety-second slices is, on television journalists’ own admission, a poor second best to the explanatory power of a good newspaper. In moments of self-doubt and self-examination, good television journalists will admit that if the general population were entirely dependent on their nightly bulletin for their understanding of the world, they would be exceedingly poorly informed. Perhaps the logic of these doubts should be pushed further. Television does some things supremely well. It has adapted the documentary format from cinema to produce a style of feature reporting that in half-hour and hour-long segments has the time necessary both to inform and explain. The best documentaries sometimes achieve the prerequisite of moral vision itself; they force the spectator to see, to shed the carapace of cliche and to encounter alien worlds in all their mystery and complexity. There is almost never an occasion when the time formats of news bulletins allow even the best journalist to do the same. When the rules of a genre are in such contradiction to the needs and intentions of those trying to make best use of it, there is a case for scrapping the genre altogether. If the nightly news were replaced by magazine programs and documentary features with open-ended formats, the institutional preconditions for a journalism that respects itself and the terrible events it covers would begin to exist. Such a journalism would be forced to take the hardest part of a journalist’s job selection—very seriously. It would have to discard as many stories as it chose to cover, and it would have to change its conception of what a story is. It would have to challenge accepted definitions of newsworthiness to intervene before starvation becomes famine, before torture becomes genocide, before racial persecution becomes mass expulsion, and religious conflict becomes civil war. It would have to get to the scene, in other words, before the ambulances arrive. Such a journalism might then be able to challenge other coercive features of its own genre: for example, the newsroom rule of thumb that one British, American, or European life is worth—in news value—a hundred Asian or African lives. As the charitable response to the images from the Ethiopia make plain, the medium itself is helping to generate an international awareness that has less and less patience with these kind of discriminations.
Utopian, no doubt. Yet let us at least be clear that the grounds for wishing this utopia into existence are moral. Whether it wishes or not, television has become the principal mediation between the suffering of strangers and the consciences of those in the world’s few remaining zones of safety. No matter how assiduously its managers assert that the medium’s function is merely informative, they cannot escape the moral consequences of their power. It has become not merely the means through which we see each other, but the means by which we shoulder each other’s fate. If the regimes of representation by which it mediates these relations dishonor the suffering they depict, then the cost is not measured only in shame, but in human lives. For if we cease to care, not merely about their fate, but about how their fate and our obligations to them are represented in our culture, then it is they—the victims on the screens—not us, who will pay the heaviest price.
Footnotes
[1] Information on British response to the Ethiopian famine was provided by Oxfam’s public relations department, Derek Warren, in particular. I wish to acknowledge their help in the preparation of this article.
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[2] For an excellent study of television coverage of the Ethiopian famine, see William Boot, “Ethiopia: Feasting on Famine,” Columbia Journalism Review, March—April 1985, pp. 47-49.
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[3] On European natural law, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, z vols, vol. z (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Hugo Grotius, Of the Law of War and Peace, 3 vols. (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 19z7); Samuel Pufendorf, The Elements of Natural Jurisprudence (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1931); see also Peter Stein, Legal Evolution (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
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[4] On the background to the rise of the idea of toleration, see Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1967); see also the excellent study by Elisabeth Labrousse, Bayle (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983); also the introduction to John Locke’s Epistola de Tolerantia (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1968); Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1979).
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[5] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); see also Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays,(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965).
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[6] David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
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[7] See Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-45, for a detailed discussion of needs, rights, and entitlements in times of famine as treated in the theories of natural jurisprudence and early political economy. For modern treatments of these issues, see Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1981); also Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
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[8] See Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” and “On the Jewish Question,” in Lucio Colletti ed., Marx: Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975).
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[9]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et Terreur (Paris: Plon, 1972)
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[10] Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man,” in Mythologies (London: Fontana, 1973); see also Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1978); John Berger “Photographs of Agony,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
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[11] On the background to the famine, see Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1983); see also the brilliant portrait of Haile Selassie in R. Kapuscinski, The Emperor (London: Picador, 1983); Graham Hancock, Ethiopia: The Challenge of Hunger (London: Gollancz, 1985).
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[12] This theme is developed further in my own The Needs of Strangers (New York: Viking, 1985).
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[13] Hancock, op.cit., chap. 1.
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[14] Amnesty International, Report on Torture (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux,
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1975).
[15] Don McCullin “A Life in Photographs,” Granta, Winter 1985, p. 188.
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[16] On the regimes of television news coverage, see Anthony Smith, The Shadow in the Cave (London: MacMillan, 1973), chap. 3; also Philip Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together: The BBC News (London: MacMillan, 1978).
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[17] On market goods and public goods, see the excellent discussion in Michael Walzer’s Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford, England: Martin Robertson, 1983), chap. 4. On the nation as an “imagined community,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
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[18] Hancock, op.cit., p. 95.
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[19] On the sacred, see Marcel Gauchet, Le desenchantement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); also on the sacred in contemporary political life, see Regis Debray, Critique of Political Reason (London: Verso, 1983); on the sacred in general, see Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (London: Fontana, 1983).
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