Beyond Rivalry

On Oprah today, regular guest and cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz and neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor will be talking about what a stroke feels like and what's happening in your brain when you have a stroke. Taylor's book about her stroke is My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey (2008). You can watch her TED talk about her stroke online.

 

Dr. Taylor offers a few exercises to help us make the choice to be peaceful and joyful. Here are two:

 

>> Pay attention to the energy that other people bring to you. Realize that you can observe other people and interact with them without engaging with their energy. Write about a time when someone else's energy affected you in a negative way. Consider how different the situation might have turned out if you had chosen to observe rather than be engaged and swept away by their energy. How might you approach the exact same situation in the future?

 

>> Brain circuits are very predictable and consistent entities. The more time you spend thinking a thought, then the stronger that circuit becomes and the less outside energy it takes for that circuit to run. As a result, for many of us, our brains run constantly with brain chatter,  and loops of thoughts go around and around in our minds. Pay attention to what is going on inside your brain. Journal about the thoughts that seem to go around and around that make you unhappy, angry or uncomfortable. Recognize that you have the power to choose not to think these thoughts by choosing to think about other things.

Identify something that your mind obsesses about that you would rather not spend so much time thinking about and document three different things that you can purposefully choose to replace in your mind when those thoughts come up. Create this list for yourself so you can arm yourself with alternative circuits to run in your mind when the time arises. Learn to 'tend the garden' of your mind in this way.

 

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

 

 

 

 

Explore until someone yells at you.

 

- Dr. David L. Hall, (dean, Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology)

 

***

 

Prudence prevents us from following our passions, overruns our intuition, and gives us the illusion of being virtuous when life is asking us to explore territory lying beneath the horizon of virtue.

 

-- Thomas Moore

 

Has it?

 

(fmi)

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, here, and here.)

 

The focus of Chapter 5, Method, Evidence and Truth, is evidence, and what kind of evidence or proof is needed for mimetic theory. If you are already convinced that mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism operate basically as Girard has posited, then this chapter is probably skippable. Otherwise, it's interesting for its exploration of 'detective novel' evidence -- indirect, and often hidden or muddied by the perpetrator -- and its suggested similarity to Girard's evidence.

 

The Darwin quote that introduces the chapter speaks for my response to mimetic theory:

"What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained." (in Darwin's Autobiography)

 

 

** Concerning evidence and proof:

 

For Girard, it is the "multiplicity of consistent elements that constitutes proof."

 

I would say that a preponderance of consistent indirect evidence may not prove a theory (though it can convict a person in a court of law) but it is highly suggestive and should be taken seriously.

 

Girard seems both baffled and irritated that "modern intellectuals" either don't grasp, don't take seriously, or don't accept mimetic theory even as a hypothesis to be proved or disproven:

 

"Practically every story of origin or foundational myth states that society was founded upon a murder. One has the same plot in the Bible with Cane (Genesis 4) or in Livy's account of the origins of Rome. Mircea Eliade talks about what he calls the 'creative murder,' which can be found in myths from the Middle East, as well as from China and beyond. However, so far as my work is concerned, I am still accused of simply rehashing an old Freudian idea. It seems that some scholars aren't able to see how overwhelming the evidence is! ... Why do so many scholars dismiss the founding murder as insanity, instead of accepting it at least a hypothesis?" 

 

Anthropologist A.M. Hocart's work, Kings and Councillors (1936), is invoked and discussed quite a bit. Girard says, "According to [Hocart], anthropological evidence is always indirect, circumstantial, like a clue in a detective story. If we isolate these clues, we cannot reach any final verdict, but they are so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears."

 

Hocart also speaks of Darwin's evolution theory: "[H]aving been converted by comparative evidence, they set out to find direct evidence in order to confirm their deductions ...."

 

Girard comments on this, saying that this passage (of which I've selected only a sentence) "shows that in the theory of evolution, not only was the circumstantial evidence decisive but it also allowed the finding of the direct evidence, which now seems essential. The same thing happens with mimetic theory. There is no direct evidence for the apparently fantastic claim that the foundational murder is real and universal." Several times in the book, Girard encourages forensic anthropologists to find direct evidence of his theory.

 

On the same theme of the reluctance of most scholars to even entertain mimetic theory, Girard suggests that "the real obstacle in the case of the mimetic theory hasn't simply been the incompleteness of the record but the unwillingness an inability of our world to question its own fundamental assumptions."

 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he says, "the general ambition, apart from a few exceptions, was to show that Christianity was a myth like any other. In a way, we could say that I renew that project. However, I do in reverse, because I realize that it is Christianity that reads mythology better than any anthropologist, and allows us for the first time to unmask the mimetic mechanism and, particularly, the nature of the scapegoat murder."

 

Asked a bit later if he's saying that to understand mimetic theory we have to acknowledge our own mimetism, he responds, "Yes.  There cannot be any positivistic separation between observer and the object of observation: we are all implicated in the mechanism. The mimetic theory demands an 'existential understanding' to be fully grasped."

 

Further: "Borrowing from Freud's terminology, I would say that the mimetic theory is a 'narcissistic wound.' It is a wound to narcissism per se, for it shows that one's desire isn't as free as modern individualism would like it to be; and it is also a wound to the traditional theories of culture, for it clearly states that the beginnings of human culture were grounded in a founding murder."

 

"In this context, conversion means accepting the mimetic nature of desire. Otherwise, one would fall back on the old authentic/inauthentic binary opposition, which is the perspective of mimetic desire that hasn't been acknowledged as such. The 'inauthentic' person is the one who follows directives from others, whereas the 'authentic' is the person who desires autonomously. We have already seen how misleading and illusory this sort of individualism is. The only way to overcome it is through a conversion, which ultimately leads to a revision of one's own religious belief."

 

Girard suggests that "one of the reasons it's so hard to present evidence is mimetic theory" is that "evidence is hidden through the unconsciousness," yet "the fact that evidence has been erased may work as a super-proof, a meta-evidence because it shows the crucial importance of the element that has been erased. If someone removes the traces of a murder, it means he is strongly implicated in it. ... I'm convinced that there is a real event, which is hidden, covered up, traces of which are erased. Nonetheless, in a Freudian sense, this erasing of the traces isn't itself without traces."

 

Girard agrees with his questioners that "misrecognition in modern times" may be a defence against "the threat of overt self-criticism that would bring about the collapse of the individual identity and its convictions." He says, "I think you are right, because so much effort goes into preserving concepts such as individualism and the autonomy of desire."

 

 

** Religion is rational:

 

Girard sees religion as very rational: "In sociobiological terms, it has an extremely powerful adaptive value."

 

 

** Literature v. Science

 

There's some mention of the 'two cultures' of literature and science -- it's suggested that Girard "transformed literature into a scientific instrument of enquiry" -- and of which has primacy in describing human relationships. That reminded me of this NPR story over the weekend about Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, titled "Virginia Woolf at the intersection of science and art." It's very pertinent to the discussion.

 

 

** Speaking of the 'truth of texts':

 

"I do believe in the truth of the text. I do not think all texts are truthful, but I believe, exactly like Freud, that ritual necessarily imitates an event which actually occurred. In its narrative, myth necessarily distorts that same event, but in such a way that the principle of the distortion can be discovered. To say that I simply mistake ritual and myth for the truth is a gross simplification of my work. I'm not talking about an absolute truth of the text, and I'm only saying that there is something hidden in the text, which refers to an actual event: the scapegoat mechanism."

 

 

Next: Chapter 6, The Scandal of Christianity

 

 

(Previous posts on this topic: here, here, and here.)

 

Chapter 4, Dialogues and Criticism: From Frazier to Lévi-Strauss, is the shortest chapter. It's primarily a clarification of Girard's influences and a discussion of religion vs. science or scientific method.

 

Among possible influences mentioned (and mostly discarded) are anthropologist and myth researcher James Frazer, sociologist Gabriel Tarde, sociologist and philosopher Émile Durkheim, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, classics scholar Walter Burkert, and Christian philosopher and activist Simone Weil.

 

My notes:

 

** Political Correctness and Bias (more on this in the next chapter as well)

"The main difference between contemporary anthropology and my work is that I claim that all cultures scapegoat and victimize someone, while it is fashionable to say that only Western culture did that. If one talks about ritual killing in the Amazon, it is seen as a pure fancy of Western prejudice."

 

 

** What I see as the craziness of academic bickering: Scapegoating the object!

Girard is asked how he responds to  Bruno Latour, who "claims that you are doing away with the object and in some sense you are 'scapegoating' it. He answers, "Latour wants to make me anti-objectal..."  Anti-objectal? LOL   Anyway, his answer is that it's only during the peak of the escalation of mimetic crisis that the object disappears; "otherwise it is always there."

 

 

** Some people have wondered how Girard can believe both in God and in science. Girard responds:

 

"I do not see why God cannot be compatible with science. If one believes in God, one also believes in objectivity. A traditional belief in God makes one a believer in the objectivity of the world.  ... I still operate within a traditional epistomology, which considers things as real and sees God as the guarantor of that reality. Therefore, I do not understand why it should pose a problem to discuss my theory within a scientific framework." 

 

He says a bit later that "Readers do not realize how unphilosophical I am, and [they don't realise] the fact that I have been guided by the idea of contributing to ... a science of human relationships, always starting from actual and real human relationships, moving away from the 'myth' of the all-powerful subject."

 

Others have criticised Girard for not writing simply as a Christian apologist rather than within the methodology of social science. He feels, rightly I think, that "to postulate the a priori truth of religion from the start, your reasoning would have a far weaker apologetic value. The mimetic theory has an apologetic value in terms of Christianity only if you assume all restrictions of knowledge of the scientific attitude."

 

Still, I think the question of bias will always remain, because Girard is a Christian. What he's trying to do seems akin to journalists, who of course have their own opinions, trying to report objectively what they observe, or for that matter like the task of all scientists, who also have their own beliefs about how things work, why and how they're here, and so on, and who nonetheless experiment and analyse experiment results with as much objectivity as they can muster (helped by critique, peer review, etc.). We are all to some extent subjects, exerting subjective influence on what we hypothesise, study, conclude, etc. 

 

Related to this is the final question in this chapter, about Michael Serres' view that critical thinking is shot through with violence: "In his view we have to renounce the inner violence of cultural progress as conceived in modern Western philosophy. To 'criticize' and to 'discriminate' are acts of expulsion, of division, of scapegoating."

 

Girard, while sympathetic to this rendering of mimetic theory, doesn't feel the same. He says that "there should be some critique of the subject: it does not have to be total negation. ... I have to say that, personally, polemic does not trouble me much. If I am treated polemically, I will respond accordingly. It is true that it is a phenomenon of doubles, but I think it preferable to total silence. If you do not discriminate, you cannot distinguish, and to start thinking, you have to learn to distinguish. ... The more we speak about dialogue in our time, the less we seem to practise it. Being polemical means acknolwedging the existence of the other as one who does not think like me. But going back to Serres' position: it is clear that we are still in a critical world. There are aspects of our culture that we cannot transcend; we are circumscribed by our limitations. But, ultimately, I don't see this as an issue of great importance."

 

My position is somewhat in between Serres', as represented here, and Girard's (also as represented here).  "Polemic" is derived from the Greek word polemos, or war, and it speaks of a hostile attack or refutation of another. By that definition, I think it may be better to keep silence than to speak in this way. To adopt a cliche, "Ideas don't attack, people do," which is to say that a nasty personal attack can be cloaked as simply a 'difference of opinion,' accompanied by contempt and derision. Defending a belief position with persistence and tenacity may be warranted at times; defending it with hostility, or attacking another in order to defend it, seems to imply a kind of egotism, as well as an unawareness of the doubles phenomenon Girard speaks of.

 

Another understanding of polemic, though, is "the art or practice of disputation or controversy;" speaking and acting in a controversial manner at times seems to me part and parcel of living, conversing, thinking, feeling passionately. I disagree with Serres that criticism and discrimination are in themselves acts of expulsion, division, or scapegoating, but I think they often can be used for this purpose. On the other hand, I like what Girard says about argument as an acknowledgement of the other who is not me and who doesn't agree with me, and I think that signal has tremendous potential for openness and learning.

 

This all reminds me of the tension I feel in Buddhism concerning 'opinion' and 'belief'  -- on the one hand, as Pema Chödrön has said, "holding on to beliefs [or opinions] limits our experience of life. That doesn't mean that beliefs or ideas or thinking is a problem; the stubborn attitude of having to have things be a particular way, grasping on to our beliefs and thoughts, all these cause the problems" and on the other hand, Buddhists from the Dalai Lama to Chödrön to the Buddhist-on-the-street continue to strongly hold opinions, act on them, and express them with vigor and enthusiasm to others. 

 

The NYT Magazine is running an article this weekend titled "Malwebolence," about internet 'trolls' who enjoy causing harm to others, either because it's just fun -- they speak of "the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium" while "you chat with friends and laugh" -- or perhaps because they have the notion that they are helping others learn how to handle explosives by blowing them up in their faces. One troll says his passion is 'pushing peoples' buttons' and he "frames his acts of trolling as ... sociological inquiries into human behavior." He also says: "'It's not that I do this because I hate them. I do this because I'm trying to save them.'" It seems fairly obvious through the article that this particular troll is trying to save himself, as well, though it may be too late: "'Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone's life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I've been through horrible stuff, too.' 'Like what?' I asked. Sexual abuse, [he] said." At age 5 he was molested by his grandfather [his mother confirms this] and three other relatives.

 

The article's author, Mattathias Schwartz, asks his readers at one point:

 

"Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying 'uncle'? Is the effort to control what's said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?"

 

Free speech may be one issue to consider; it's not what immediately interests me reading this article. My interest is primarily in the proliferation (or so it's asserted) of mob violence online, what motivates and triggers it, and how it proceeds. As Schwartz says, attempting to respond to his own free speech query:

 

"Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It's tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. ... But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly -- a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that's a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There's a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well."

 

Online mob violence, imo, is no different from in-your-face mob violence except perhaps, as Schwartz points out, it's considerably facilitated by anonymity and breadth of coverage. But the motivations, the triggers, and the process are the same in either case.

 

That 'trolling' is highly mimetic and is often mob violence is evidenced several times in the article:

 

• The Internet is "a mass medium for defining who we are to ourselves and to others." Yet another way to explore and  express who we are, vs. everyone else, through blogging perhaps more than through message boards, at least as the boards are used by most people.

 

• "Trolling has evolved [perhaps the wrong term] from ironic solo skit to vicious group hunt." "Technology, apparently, does more than harness the wisdom of the crowd. It can intensify its hatred as well."

 

• The victims are seem as utterly deserving of their fate, complicit in it, inviting it -- "You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you" -- as is shown in this interchange between a troll and Schwartz:
  

 

"'You have green hair,' he told me. 'Did you know that?'
"'No,' I said.
"'Why not?'
"'I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.'
"'That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you're a terrible reporter.'
"'What do you mean? What did I do?'
"'That's a very interesting reaction,' [he] said. 'Why didn't you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?' "
If I were certain that I wasn't a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling 'victims' to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it."  

 

Another troll put it even more bluntly and graphically:

 

"'Trolling is basically Internet eugenics. ... I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. ... We need to put these people in the oven!'"

 

No one else is seen as innocent, therefore no one else is seen as a true victim and no one is seen as a perpetrator. Everyone else is seen as deserving of destruction at the hands of trolls, who, in some cases, see themselves as performing a meritorious service.

 

• That same troll implied that the mob (or a segment of it) is ripe for a leader and is waiting for a sign:

"'We're waiting,' [he] said. 'We need someone to show us the way. The messiah.'
"'How do you know it's not you?' I asked.
"'If it were me, I would know,' he said. 'I would receive a sign.'
"Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, [he] said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction." 

 

 

Beyond the indications of mob violence and mimesis, there's also an indication of antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy) -- an individual personality disorder, quite apart from the group phenomenon of mob violence -- in some of their comments about what's right and wrong, though even these might be echoed (often not out loud) by 'normal' people. It's the rationale, the feelings (or lack thereof) and the destructive actions, unchecked by any sense of true compassion for others, that together paint a particularly disturbing and illuminating picture:

 

"I asked [one troll] whether a person is obliged to give food to a starving stranger. No, [he] argued; no one is entitled to our sympathy or empathy. We can choose to give or withhold them as we see fit. 'I can't push you into the fire,' he explained, 'but I can look at you while you're burning in the fire and not be required to help.' [Metaphorically, though, according to this article some trolls have pushed some people into the fire -- their actions, usually en masse, have contributed to the deaths, job losses and relationship losses of others. They haven't simply sat passively by. They've set the fire, fanned it and then watched others struggle and writhe. Examples in the article.]

 

Asked "Is there anything that can be done on the Internet that shouldn't be done?," he didn't have an answer.

 

Another troll justified his desire to "kill four [billion] of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible" with his fear that "we are headed for a Malthusian crisis."  (He's the one who said he's waiting for a messiah.)

 

Schwartz ends the article by quoting some message board commenters trying to discern what makes people bad or good. "Finally," he says, someone types: "'I'd say empathy is probably a factor.'" 

   

On the heels of research indicating that we're more lenient on ourselves than on others when it comes to assigning tasks and judging fairness, there comes this report:

 

"In a report titled 'Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,' which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces."

 

 

 

Stuart Buck at Overcoming Bias looks at the overarching theme of bias in Gary Taubes' book Good Calories, Bad Calories [published as The Diet Delusion in the UK], "a book of some 600 pages (nearly 70 of which are the bibliography). ...

 

"Why is Taubes so interested in bias?  For several decades, it has been the conventional wisdom that dietary fat (and especially saturated fat) contributes to obesity, heart disease, and cancer.  Judging from Taubes' exhaustive research -- indeed, I'd be surprised if any other book examined bias within a particular scientific field in such detail -- the conventional wisdom was based on unreliable and slender evidence that, once established and institutionalized in government funding, set a pattern of confirmation bias by which further research was judged (or ignored)."

 

Examples follow, including that dietary researchers ignored or suppressed "studies showing that diet, cholesterol, and heart disease were not even correlated ... or even that low cholesterol raises other risks of death."

 

Taubes' contention, by the way, is that heart disease and other "diseases of civilization" are more likely caused by high triglyceride levels, which are elevated by eating refined carbohydrates.

 

In a January 2008 interview with the Telegraph, he admits "that he himself might be biased: 'What are the chances of writing an article that says the entire medical establishment is wrong, and them going, "Good point, thank you, Gary. Can we give you an award?" When people challenge the establishment, 99.9 per cent of the time they are wrong. If I was writing about me, I'd begin from the assumption that I am both wrong and a quack.' ... 'I have a friend who says that, if I'm wrong, I will have to live in Argentina with all the other mass murderers."

 

(Is that a real cat in the photo??)

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

 

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008): 

 

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony....  [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

 

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years. 

 

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

 

 

>> Impossible Experiments  (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes."  (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?)  Other never-done experiments.

 

 

>>  "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

 

 

>>  Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?"  Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

 

 

>>  "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too.  Full study (7 pages, PDF).

 

 

>>  "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

 

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

 

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should. 

 

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

 

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)