Is It Ethical To Repeatedly View Someone’s Worst Moments?
Even if someone is willing to share their suffering on social media, how ethical is it for us to devour it like any other media product?
Even before social media, mass media made it possible for new swaths of people to view horror. John Kennedy’s assassination was far from the first, but it was the first to be broadcast live to people’s living rooms. The Kennedy assassination still holds a special cultural status above the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., towering figures who were assassinated five years later.
Social media brought raw security and war footage to the masses. Even with content moderation policies in place, human rights abuses are a few taps away. Many online commentators care about seeing this footage. They seeing it equips them to make serious moral judgments and turn attention into alleviation.
Regarding the Pain of Others is a long essay by Susan Sontag that explores this difficult question. Sontag covers the roles that images play in bringing the personal experience of suffering to wider audiences. It’s a must-read in an era defined by images, especially gruesome ones.
Who Should Look at Horror?
Sontag doesn’t limit herself to modern image-capture. She considers why so many painters have depicted suffering.
“Torment, a canonical subject in art, is often represented in painting as a spectacle, something being watched (or ignored) by other people,” Sontag wrote. “The implication is: no, it cannot be stopped — and the mingling of inattentive with attentive onlookers underscores this.”
The mixture of people watching torture and people who seem oblivious to it is common. That ambivalence isn’t always captured in photographs of individual atrocities. But the attitude that allows people to torment one another maps well onto the real world. Many people are willing to allow powerful people to terrorize civilians if someone else’s suffering buys them safety.
These ruminations lead Sontag to wonder who should view widely available depictions of suffering:
“Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it — say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken — or those who could learn from it,” Sontag wrote. “The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”
That’s an important critique for anyone searching for war footage on X. However, museums also show images of gruesome suffering. Why would they display these images if only the powerful and capable could see them?
Some Things We Can Change
This essay was written in 2003, before the Legacy Museum opened in Montgomery, Alabama. The reluctance of the United States to open a museum was long-noticed. Sontag’s theory is that much American reluctance to confront slavery’s full history at once and in context stems from the memory Americans would like to have of their country:
“The Holocaust Memorial Museum and the future Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial are about what didn’t happen in America, so the memory-work doesn’t risk arousing an embittered domestic population against authority,” Sontag wrote. “To have a museum chronicling the great crime that was African slavery in the United States of America would be to acknowledge that the evil was here. Americans prefer to picture the evil that was there, and from which the United States…is exempt.”
When crimes against humanity are things that only happen in other places, then you don’t have to confront what people similar to you are capable of. The capacity for evil is uncomfortably universal. It transcends national and ethnic origins.
Fortunately, empathy is largely universal, too. It’s why so many of us are moved when we see photos of suffering from faraway places. The preference for viewing atrocities where we expect to see them doesn’t necessarily make us uncaring about the pictures’ subjects.
Those images could spur us to action, and make us long to hear the subjects’ stories. When we go to a museum and learn the context behind the images of suffering, we equip ourselves to personally change to make similar episodes less likely to happen. In changing ourselves, we safeguard society, and the images become useful.
“Harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock,” Sontag wrote. "But they are not much help if the task if to understand. Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.”
Our Suffering Is Unique to Us
We may be used to seeing the same committed repeatedly on our screens, but the people who survive the suffering want to be seen as unique sufferers.
For the survivor, the suffering was a uniquely bad experience. They’re the ones who felt the pain and loss. They’re the ones whose lives were changed. They can’t scroll to a new reality and forget what happened to them.
That doesn’t mean all sufferers want their suffering hidden. Many want it to be seen, as Sontag recounts from the civil war that slaughtered many in Sarajevo:
“…the Sarajevens did want their plight to be recorded in photographs: victims are interested in the representation of their own sufferings. But they want the suffering to be seen as unique.”
Sufferers who are willing to share their experiences have conditions. They want their suffering presented in a way that spotlights what they went through. Recalling a series of images that pulled from multiple atrocities, Sontag noticed how upset some of the sufferers were at what they felt was a work that diluted the unique horrors they experienced.
“It is intolerable to have one’s own sufferings twinned with anybody else’s,” Sontag wrote.
Sontag’s reflections offer important lessons for anyone set on consuming suffering. There’s no escaping the conflict between drawing attention to a cause and exploiting someone’s horror. However, anyone can learn to improve themselves in ways that prevent similar crimes. It’s why museums are so valuable.
Anyone can also be mindful of ensuring they respect the uniqueness of experiencing suffering. No one wants to see their worst traumas watered down as insignificant. In an age when have unlimited access to the best and worst moments in the world, these lessons are worth holding dear.