I'm not against tombstones or efforts to comfort people whose friends or family have died. But I am made uncomfortable by highly symbolic recognition of mass murders by parties with no personal connection to the victims, whether in the form of moments of silence (think of September 11th) or awareness ribbons (like the one on the Google homepage a few days after the Sandy Hook shooting). I'm afraid such memorials reinforce our (quite dangerous) need for belief in a just world, and they make us feel we're doing something logical in response to the event ("We will never forget!") when in fact we're doing nothing. The obvious truth is that there are always going to be mass murders—we can't prevent them entirely, no matter how hard we pray—and if we want to reduce their frequency, much less glamorous kinds of social change will probably be necessary.
We should probably also keep in mind that ordinary causes of death, like old age, heart attacks, and car crashes, are little better from the victim's perspective than being murdered. The really nasty part of the human condition isn't murder so much as mortality in general.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
I think there's something even more basic than the memorials. There's a real sickness somewhere in the interactions between people and the globalized world when it comes to tragedy/horror/what-have-you. Specifically, there's the desire to experience a distant tragedy in a local sense, whether by obsessively watching the news coverage or twighting about it and thus participating, or by making a pilgrimage to this sort of memorial. There's definitely a lot to be said about the memorials themselves* but there's also something bizarre and unsettling about how people consume tragedy. Part of that's certainly a "trainwreck effect," and some of that's political theater, and some of that's the way our media use tragedy--that is, as a ratings booster.
Honestly, it's probably a chicken and egg relationship between them all--politicians wouldn't throw around 9/11 if people wouldn't vote for them in fear of it, and network news wouldn't televise funerals if people wouldn't tune in and watch--but I find it really unsavory.
I hate to go all :biotruths: but like I already did in the first paragraph, I kind of have to blame globalization and mass media, specifically how we haven't yet caught up to them--not that our monkey brains can't catch up, just that large swaths of the population haven't yet (and, because it's a moving target, never will--one day we'll be confounded by technology like the twitters). It's pretty easy to overlook how vastly different the world has become in terms of connectedness--CNN and the 24-hour news cycle are only thirty years old; cell phones and the internet are younger; there are people on this board who do not remember worry about long distance telephone charges and have never written a letter because that was the most efficient means of communicating with someone (as we did in 1995). More to the point, think about streaming video--early adopters of broadband had the capability, but there was no one (reputable) to serve it up until ~2005. And now we get it on cellphones!
I don't want to call media "insidious" like some kind of Neil Postman** but the changes in perception that arise from new technology--particularly visual, and particularly audio-visual technology--are very hard to see because we use them to watch cats say things about food items.***
I was originally planning to approach this by saying "I'm from New York; I've seen people mourning family who died in 9/11 and people from the heartland swinging by to mourn for a little bit; I have at least one buddy from Newtown who talks about the roving packs of uninvited representatives of the global community: I have a unique perspective." But I'm thinking now that it's less about that and more a generational thing. For that matter, I wanted to compare our experience of tragedy to that experienced by people living fifteen hundred years ago in isolated groups, getting news when travelers from afar came through town. But that's going too far--we have a much nearer comparison.
Let's think 1996. You have video, you have newspaper with national distribution, you have CNN (probably). You don't have competing cable news networks (Fox News is still a year away). You don't have Twitter. You don't have, critically, cell phone cameras or the limitless capability to reproduce an image for which we can thank the internet--you still have to catch the news broadcast or wait for the paper. We probably did have news helicopters, but we probably still thought of them as a joke on some level.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
In a word, there's less immediacy. As a result, after, say, the Oklahoma City bombing, we don't get localized mourning on the national level. We get shock, we get unsettledness, we get people wringing their hands shouting "why?" to the heavens--but without 24-hour, on-demand coverage, we don't get pilgrimages.º Which I think is what we're all objecting to. (That and the t-shirts.)
I suspect that it's (in part) because we were used to day-old AP photographs and brief video of aftereffects--you know, the kind of thing that depleted support for Vietnam but had lost its motivational power in time for Iraq and Afghanistan. When we did get minute-to-minute video, often from amateurs with cell phones, we of course get 9/11. It became a national event, in part because I saw the same raw, devastating coverage from Westchester that you could see in Maryland, Nebraska, Timbuktu. (Not that that's the only reason, but it's a factor.)ºº It may have happened hundreds or thousands of miles away, but it still happened in America, and so on.
And finally when we get down-to-the-minute Twitter rumors, Gawker et al. "break" the "story" that a guy who isn't the Sandy Hook shooter has a Facebook, and we get this story which I'll just let Matt Bors tell because as a reaction that actual people had to a frankly remote tragedy, it demands to be studied:
http://www.mattbors.com/blog/2012/12/16/i-am-facebook-friends-with-ryan-lanza-which-became-a-problem/
Anyway, Kodi to finally add something about your original point, I think Just World stuff enters into it a great deal, particularly as it ties into the human experience of mortality. (With funerary rituals, there's absolutely an attempt to "do right" by the deceased according to our particular obligations to them.) But as a rule we "work" on mortality a religious/ritualistic framework which is highly vexed right now.
The thing is that we have two distinct frameworks for mourning. For local, personal mortality, we have a participatory model--you bring baked goods, attend a funeral or other memorial, leave grave goods, dedicate an artistic work, that sort of thing. For distant, nonpersonal mortality, we have a nonparticipatory model--you ignore it or say "oh what a shame" and move on, or you send a card to the relatives, or if the scale is sufficient you can send money to an aid organization.
All of this destructive spectatorship (not my word) imbues the death with a false sense of locality, so that people who have no business doing so want to participate. And it's annoying. They cause traffic problems. (No but seriously it leads to people filming and broadcasting children's funerals and just ****ing stop it guys.)
*E.g. This piece from *sigh* Slate about the absurd security measures at the 9/11 memorial: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2012/09/sept_11_memorial_does_the_world_trade_center_site_really_need_so_much_security_.html
**I haven't actually read Neil Postman, but then it's comm studies so no one has: http://dont-tread-on.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death1.png
***Cf. http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/2000083-paper-mario-social/64981031
º To the best of my recollection; this could well be an artifact of the level of coverage--that having covered all that there is to be covered, the contemporary media are now covering the response to the coverage. This might be an interesting direction for research.
ºº I do think on some level the public experience of trauma was mitigated by knowing people more directly affected--both in the sense of being able to do normal third-party mourning things like sending baked goods and in the sense of modulating one's reaction in comparison to "real" grief. But that all lies well outside the scope of this post.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I didn't think about technology. But it makes sense. My own mother probably would've taken 9/11 a bit more easily if she hadn't been able to watch the towers burn live. My parents and I lived nearby, but when the attacks happened, all of us were in our respective schools in mid-Manhattan.
I suspect that it's (in part) because we were used to day-old AP photographs and brief video of aftereffects--you know, the kind of thing that depleted support for Vietnam but had lost its motivational power in time for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, man, my dad, who proudly dodged his duty in Vietnam, was all "As soon as the first photographs of body bags from Iraq show up in
The New York Times, the public will revolt." And we didn't withdraw from that stupid war until December 2011.
I try to avoid the word "tragedy" when I talk about these things. Tragedy is a spectacle that's put on so we can enjoy crying our little hearts out. We should try not to enjoy these real-life disasters so much.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
Just because belief in something is incentivized, doesn't make it wrong. It could be a just world -- the fact that annoying people post trite things about it on Facebook really doesn't prove otherwise. If we can't see the justice, we move it to the afterlife, which is the ultimate in brilliance really -- you can't disprove it but it makes people feel better. I don't see that it's such a bad thing, because people kind of know on some level that they probably don't fully believe it. Like, typically you have some doubt about that even if you're a Christian or Jew or whatever, so that you kind of hedge your bets and don't give yourself *completely* to the idea. Seems like the only people who do are like, terrorists hoping for their reward in heaven.
I know it might seem annoying to watch somebody personally grieve for something that's not really personal and maybe you think "what an irritating bleeding heart" but come on now. It's a somber thing and the more you find out about it, the more emotion is justified. So yes, the 24/7 news cycle contributes to this annoying situation, but considering that we have all this information, the appropriate response *is* to grieve. We can and should treat these things gravely.
Kodiologist posted...
Yeah, man, my dad, who proudly dodged his duty in Vietnam, was all "As soon as the first photographs of body bags from Iraq show up in The New York Times, the public will revolt." And we didn't withdraw from that stupid war until December 2011.
Actually, there's been a longstanding ban on pictures of soldiers' coffins for that exact reason. I don't know precisely where things stand now, but here's some MSNBC coverage from 2009 when they were *thinking* about letting it go:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29410258/ns/us_news-military/t/pentagon-lifts-media-ban-coffin-photos/#.UN9Phm80XTo
Also I agree about "tragedy." It's really a dead word if we apply it to both natural disasters and mass murders. It kind of goes hand-in-hand with throwing up our hands and asking how this could possibly happen yet again this year.
HeyDude posted...
...considering that we have all this information, the appropriate response *is* to grieve. We can and should treat these things gravely.
I don't know that it's appropriate to grieve for people you don't know. On a really practical level, it just seems like borrowing trouble.
Like it's well and good and an act of basic humanity to sympathize with survivors, but grief-grief isn't good for you on its own. Kodi can probably speak better to this than I can, but grieving is a pretty heavy, pretty taxing process. It's necessary if you're bereaved of something, and it's healthier to grieve than to bottle up the feelings of grief, but there doesn't seem to be some self-evident benefit to grieving (at least not to the point that we should artificially induce grieving). Meanwhile, it self-evidently sucks and is miserable.
I should go back and clarify that I don't see the consumers of media who go and cause traffic disruptions as the perpetrators of some kind of evil, selfishly imposing on actual mourners (though they are irritating), but rather as victims of a media establishment hell-bent on riling people up in the careless pursuit of money. 'Cause that's all 24 hour coverage of children's funerals is--reality teevee.
(There was a really good 30 Rock episode where Alec Baldwin decides to produce a really nonspecific disaster relief fundraiser ahead of time so that NBC could air it right away and scoop the other networks. I feel that that's appropriate here.)
I completely agree that we should strive to treat death and atrocity gravely, but that's not really happening. And I guess people like that, but why are we feeding the beast, man?
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
It could be a just world…
No it can't. If the world was just, then the Holocaust, for example, never would've happened.
I know it might seem annoying to watch somebody personally grieve for something that's not really personal and maybe you think "what an irritating bleeding heart" but come on now.
I'm not annoyed so much as scared.
…considering that we have all this information, the appropriate response *is* to grieve. We can and should treat these things gravely.
I don't agree it's appropriate to grieve over people we've never met. Otherwise, we should be grieving continuously, since people we've never met are dying every second. Heck, people get murdered every day. The only reason mass murders are considered newsworthy is that the same person is responsible for several deaths (unlike ordinary murder) and the killing is intentional (unlike car crashes).
Now, if you want to take death seriously ("gravely"), that's all well and good, but putting an awareness ribbon on a website is anything but serious; it's insultingly lame, because it's
like doing something but it has no benefit.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
Well I totally agree that awareness ribbons are lame.
I can get behind the ones that cost like $5 and the money goes to cancer research.
I don't know for a fact that those exist, but if they do I would get behind them.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I'm against hypocrisy, obviously-- I nearly had an aneurism about the Kony 2012 thing. Whatever that was. People on tv speaking to the camera about how they're realizing these horrible things are going on in the world and we need to help. Help... how? Nothing but hypocrisy-- perhaps a tear and inside, "I'm not going to do anything, because I prefer the life I have now to taking action, but perhaps I can say 'Kony 2012' or send 20 bucks to a cause and pat myself on the back". Mind you, I'm speaking of people at large, not absolutely.
Similarly, the collaborative effort of strangers building a monument to victims is usually kind of in the same boat for me. Paying lip service.
But, the idea that the nasty part of the human condition is death... I think is a direct clash with the mental framework I exist in. I've rarely if ever equated "death" with "something rotten" so much as just "something to be avoided for a while" (and that, probably due largely to genetic influence!).
To what I understand, why I don't suffer (as much) to find that someone died of a, let's say, mundane cause, when compared to someone who was murdered, is just this: the hate. Evil, hatred, nastiness-- that's what is nasty about the human condition-- our propensity for vileness, and that's what I am sorry for. Death is a release, or an end, yes, and one I am avoiding so far-- but nasty?
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Let me be more specific, as I'm inventing things as I go. Maybe it's a house of cards.
Collaborative effort from strangers to erect a monument to strangers is misguided because of confusion. The death of a loved one, it triggers suffering. The knowledge that there's evil, that triggers suffering, too (newsworthy events just make it more poignant to the otherwise lazy)
While grieving may be the appropriate way to deal with the suffering induced from a dead loved one, it is not the appropriate way to deal with injustice. It may not be a just world, but action can at least fudge the numbers a little bit in the positive direction, and action is the appropriate way to deal with the suffering from the knowledge of evil.
Thereby, I expose the splinter hidden in my palm, and put a face on the nagging bit about all this hullabaloo. I mean, as long as the house of cards stands.
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[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]
Evil, hatred, nastiness-- that's what is nasty about the human condition-- our propensity for vileness, and that's what I am sorry for. Death is a release, or an end, yes, and one I am avoiding so far-- but nasty?
Well, I feel like evil wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we weren't mortal. If we couldn't be injured or killed, violence would be mostly harmless. If we didn't need to eat, poverty and therefore theft would be less dangerous. If we didn't have finite lifespans, destroying something a person made wouldn't stop them from making it again. And so on. By contrast, if we were still mortal but there were no evil, the human condition would be better but still far from good.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
It's true, evil wouldn't be so rotten if we weren't mortal. Though there's still ample room for vileness to affect us. Hatred would take different forms than murder-- the world would shape itself much differently. We wouldn't kill the ones we hate so much as bury them alive, or lock them up forever, or commit horrible deeds to them that would hurt their mental or emotional state. There's still hate and anger breeding depression and sorrow, disparaging, ridicule, ostracizing, even if we wouldn't die from it.
Certainly I cannot say that all people would prefer to live in a world full of death and empty of evil, as opposed to a world empty of death but with evil intact. I would, though.
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Hmm… I guess it would be wise of an immortal population to put tracking devices inside everybody so they couldn't be hidden in secret prisons. Then again, an adversary could assumedly remove the devices. Which brings up the question of how surgery works on immortal people. I think I'd prefer mind upload to immortal corporeality. Fortunately, mind upload is a lot more plausible.
A science-fiction book pitting an immortal society against a perfectly moral society would be cool, though.
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One man's converging evidence is another man's pilpul.
I was actually thinking the same thing. It's an incredibly interesting hypothetical world.
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>_>
Seriously?
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mobilemith
Topic matter or hypothetical world?
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