Gaza and Moral Clarity, through the Lens of Susan Sontag
Via Susan Sontag’s essays, "Tuesday and After: New Yorker writers respond to 9/11;" "On Photography;" and "Regarding the Pain of Others."
A previous essay inspired by Sontag’s On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others (with a nod to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism) can be found on my website, here.
ON MORAL CLARITY*
*This week’s essay is a two part series. The next part, ON RAGE, will be published tomorrow.
Shortly after September 11th, 2001, the New Yorker published eleven short and reflective essays titled “Tuesday, and After: New Yorker writers respond to 9/11.” Many of the succinct essays expressed terror in familiar terms: its abstract and surreal horror; the way it can induce both sorrow and indignation; its assault on “Western” freedom; how it can shatter a worldview by not just shifting the ground beneath but disintegrating it whole.
Few of the writers analyzed the attack for any deeper undercurrents. Jonathan Franzen (who inexplicably mentioned false reports of Palestinians “dancing in the street” post-attack) and Denis Johnson proposed their own explications, both acknowledging that terrorism doesn’t brew in a vacuum, that perhaps death and destruction arrived at our door due to a global perception of us as harbingers of destruction abroad; both stopped short of assigning blame. Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, a survivor of the Holocaust who has since passed, drew parallels to the “evil” Israel and the United States would now share: that of Arab terror. (He likewise did not assign any blame to Israel or America.) It was Amitav Ghosh who perhaps wrote the most suspending essay, the story of a married couple—parents of two, close friends of the writer—who worked in the South tower, the first to be hit. The couple were only a few floors below impact and became separated in the early moments of chaos. The father stayed behind to assist the injured and perished. The mother miraculously escaped down an intact stairwell and survived. The story is fraught with immediate grief, even 23 years later.
Susan Sontag’s essay, though, cut through any sulking sanctimony, took to task even her fellow writers. In Sontag fashion, she did not mince words. She did not write of terror in abstract terms. She grounded it in reality, history, and context. She went so far as to assign blame. She pointed a finger, not at the terrorists, but into our own rib. She blamed us, the victims! We, the United States of America! She wrote, in part,
The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing.
She reminded us that America has killed—continues to kill—more innocents abroad with impunity, and derided our media’s propensity to consistently posit the West as omni-moral, absolved of all sin, pure
Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
For the simple minded, this was an excusing of American death, a bold justifying that caused immediate fury. Letters of wrath from editors and readers alike proliferated online and in print (one can still find them). America was reeling in deep and unbearable grief. Most of the dead were still missing, buried beneath the rubble, some as only dust. That a writer would so swiftly absolve the perpetrators, the terrorists, of such unfathomable crimes, even a little bit, was seen as callous, cruel, radical, unhinged.
***
Much has been written about the organized protests for Palestine that have erupted on city streets and college campuses across America. These protests—particularly on campus—have been portrayed by the media as nothing more than hotbeds of extremism, privileged students being sensitive or violent students being antisemitic. Their communal organization and deep research, their focus on specific and effective demands, have all been demeaned if not denied. Students willing to sacrifice nearly everything—their reputations, their careers, perhaps even their lives—for the freedom of others have been distorted as selfish, hateful, and ineffective, rather than lauded for their more evident motives of selfless passion and conviction.
Our government has sought to quell these protests—annoying interruptions, as they seem to regard them— through a series of debased pressers and condescending admonitions. But nothing has been more shocking than their attempts to stifle by law—passing bills to limit speech and seeking to ban certain online platforms (rather than regulating these platforms to be healthier, nonaddictive, and free from data-driven consumer algorithms). Of course, contrary to the overarching narrative, most of these young protestors yearn—strive, even—for peace. Anyone who has devoted time and energy to speaking about Palestine—myself included—would probably rather talk, write, or think about anything else, would rather this not be happening at all, would rather not be witness to mass death and oppression, would rather not be sleeping in tents on campus.
In much of her writing, Sontag found naivety unacceptable, an ignorance wrapped in delusion society couldn’t afford. In perhaps her most famous essay, On Photography, she wrote, “Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.” In Regarding the Pain of Others—a later essay she penned in response to On Photography—she concluded the only real moral option we hold is to bear witness to suffering, through our only available vantage: images. Though she conceded a photograph (or more commonly now, a video) could never wholly recreate the experience of war—a singular, unparalleled event—she found no ethical alternative.
It would seem, then, that a potential effect of becoming witness to mass death and war is a transformative sense of moral clarity. During a moment of unbearable violence and cruelty, we have observed others act so staunchly in alignment with their ethical position, their chosen value system, that they possess the courage to adhere to their beliefs no matter the cost. We have witnessed this in the student protestors who have placed their futures and more acutely, their physical bodies, on the line—only to be brutally beaten, teargassed, and arrested by police called in by their own administrations (those tasked with keeping students safe). Sontag claimed courage “a neutral virtue,” reflected on the differing language the media often uses for “terrorists” who clearly hold a certain fortitude, whether it be right or wrong, to sacrifice their life for a belief. In comparison, our own military enacts mass carnage from the protection of distance, often from above. She said:
Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
We often call it “brave” when one sacrifices their life for another—a most epic act of selflessness. Yet when active-duty Air Force member Aaron Bushnell publicly lit himself on fire while proclaiming, “Free Palestine!” outside the Israeli embassy in DC, the Boston Globe rebuked, “There was nothing heroic about Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation.” In an op-ed for the Washington Post, writer Shadi Hamid pushed back on his fellow journalists’ proclivity to chastise those who dare eulogize Bushnell. He noted that a similar act of self-immolation, by Mohamed Bouazizi—different country, different cause, widely considered catalyst for the Arab Spring—was overwhelmingly hailed by many including President Obama as “heroic.” The only difference, it would seem, is who is doing the sacrificing and for what purpose, and whether our own government might benefit from it at all, politically speaking. Is the moniker of “brave” only bestowed upon those who serve a narrow Western interest?
In her work, Sontag continuously challenged readers through a philosophical and uncomfortable prodding. She questioned our worldview often. I imagine now, she would ask of us to interrogate our own ethics, as well our country’s. Do our principles hold up if we are unable to apply them to the rest of the world and vice versa? Who do we elevate in society as courageous and why? Who do we (and the media) position as victims worthy of sympathy, and likewise adversaries worthy of condemnation? How can we call another a terrorist and retain any dignity while supporting, allowing, or worse, ignoring a brutal bombardment of innocent children elsewhere?
Certainly, we can’t look to our politicians for clarity, those who are paid by lobbyists and donors to rationalize, excuse, and support a continuous, brutal, and repulsive murder of innocents abroad. Nor can we look to the media, who likewise have used false and manipulative frameworks to hold some ethnicities accountable for crimes and others only passively and unfortunately so.
Moral clarity does not, in fact, hold arrogance. It is not a moral high ground. It functions just as the name implies: it allows one to move through the world, particularly one muddied in bias and injustice, with profound clarity and conviction. Moral clarity might be considered a transcendent state, not because of its metaphysical nature but because it is so grounded, a state of complete self-possession. Such clarity is often met by witnessing something extreme—a genocide, for example. It is important to reconsider, then, a culture that drives clear-headed individuals toward sacrifice— most extremely, of their own life—to be heard.
Sources:
Tuesday and After: New Yorker writers respond to 9/11. The New Yorker, September 16, 2001 issue.
On Photography, Susan Sontag.
Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag.