A rchive Date
[ 01-01-2005 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/London/Nicole_Langlois/2005/01/01/803674.html
How we look on suffering
Nicole Langlois, For the London Free Press
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
--from Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
About suffering, Auden said, the Old Masters were never wrong. They knew that human suffering "takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."
The banality of our response to great suffering has been everywhere evident this past week. We watched the news, felt horror and sadness, even made contributions to relief efforts in Asia. But we also went on with the small matters that make up our lives. The telephone rang, the stomach rumbled, the Boxing Week sales enticed.
When devastation occurs on a massive scale, it is hard to see how we are individually implicated or how we should respond. It's also hard, at such a time, to see the "perfection" in nature's ways. Yet it might be possible to say that a "fearful symmetry" obtains: At the same moment that news of the Asian disaster filled our public and private discourse, we heard that Susan Sontag had died.
Why is this confluence significant? Because Sontag -- writer, intellectual, activist -- had enlightening things to say about suffering. Her death reminds us of them, and perhaps points us in right directions as we try to respond adequately to this tragedy.
One of Sontag's most important works is Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which elaborated on the ideas she first proposed in 1977 with On Photography. That early essay, with its accusation that photographs can distance the viewer rather than bringing him closer to the subject of the image, is widely considered to be a seminal work of photography criticism.
When we become image-saturated, Sontag believed, we tune out: The suffering before us becomes just another image, rather than a real person experiencing terrible pain or loss.
What do we feel, for instance, when we see a man holding his dead child, arms and legs dangling limply in the father's embrace? Can we credit his grief with the same legitimacy as ours would have? Do we become numb after seeing too many of these images? And even if we remain truly "present" to his suffering, is that enough?
No, said Sontag: Witnessing and sympathizing with loss should only be the beginning.
"So far as we feel sympathy," Sontag wrote, "we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an inappropriate response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others . . . for a consideration of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may -- in ways that we prefer not to imagine -- be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only the initial spark."
Rather than make the quick leap from sympathy to powerlessness, how do we locate ourselves in a place of responsibility and action?
First of all, it's vital to recognize that the disaster in Asia, while the result of natural causes, reached such devastating proportions precisely because it occurred in a part of the world where governments do not allocate their scarce resources to "frills" such as early-warning systems.
To quote Rex Murphy from a CBC broadcast this week, being born in the West "means that we've already won the only lottery that really matters." Ironically, with unfathomable privilege, we feel impotent to effect the kinds of change that might correct the imbalance between the haves and the have-nots.
Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, whose wax wings melted and sent him to a watery death, was among the legendary Greek heroes whose dramatic failings formed the basis of moral teachings for centuries of westerners.
Today, we watch the real-life dramas of disaster, war and disease in the so-called developing world, and see in them warnings that we use for our own benefit.
How long will we allow our Third World brothers and sisters to be exemplars for us, rather than allowing them the same degree of self-determination and safety that we would demand for ourselves?
Nicole Langlois is a freelance writer based in Embro. Her column appears Saturdays. Home Page
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