Photos of The Dead

In the wake of Uvalde, we're seeing journalist after journalist grinding out some think piece about whether or not We The Public should see photos of shot-up dead kids. They all cover the same ground "ethically so complex" and they all make the same remarks "sometimes a photo or photos seems to produce some kind of action, and yet, other times not so much. What a mystery!"

Notably, at least to me, none of them seem to cite Sontag's Regarding the Pain Of Others which you'd think would be required reading here, even though it doesn't actually make any more sense of the issue than the current think pieces.

It is clear that this is something journalists have latched on to this week as an easy way to produce some clickable content. Even the content mills have gotten into the game, and boy, does it produce engagement. It's all gun-control engagement, indistinguishable from BBS fights from 1985, but it probably sells ads the same. Anyway, let's dig into it a bit.

In broad strokes much of the underlying discussion is "does repeated exposure to photos induce numbness, or action?" and the answer is not actually "what a mystery!" but "yes to both, and it depends on the circumstances."

All photos produce an attenuated sense of presence. Pornography produces an attenuated sense that you're in the presence of hot people fucking, photos of a shot-up child's body produce an attenuated sense of being there, of looking at the body. That's how photos work, that's what photos do (I claim.) Consequently, we can ask not what exposure to photos do, but rather what exposure to the real thing does.

We pretty much know what the experience of being around a lot of shot-up corpses is like. We have lots of soldiers and ex-soldiers around. The answer is that it's shocking at first, and becomes while not normal, at any rate in some sense not surprising. It never becomes fun, or positive. I do not think normal soldiers ever entirely suppress their reaction. The body adapts, though, the shock wears off, and it becomes merely exhausting, it becomes long-term trauma of some kind.

It's not fair to describe it as normalized, it's not fair to say one becomes uncaring. It remains abnormal, it remains something to care about.

The emotional reaction remains, I think. The reaction becomes less violent, more internal, more quiet. That might be "numb" I suppose, but "numb" seems too-simple a word for the effect.

In the same way, pornography ceases to be surprising, ceases to be shocking. As a rule, though, it does not stop being arousing. The surprise, the "holy shit am I actually seeing this?" vanishes, and it becomes (again) not exactly normal, but also not surprising. We don't expect pornography to be present during majority of our lives, while we're eating lunch, brushing our teeth, etc. It's not "normal" in that sense. And yet, in those times when pornography might reasonably be expected to heave into view, we're in no way taken aback. We are, if things are working right, aroused.

Photos of violence, and of the results of violence, are shocking when we see them at first. We're appalled, we rend our clothing, we weep.

If we were exposed to them routinely, we would likely cease to react as vigorously. We would feel less intensely. Presumably, though, we would continue to feel sorrow, regret, worry, fear, anguish.

Our sense of the world would likely shift, we would likely internalize more viscerally a sense of the world as a profoundly violent place. We know this already, but here in the West, we often know it more or less intellectually rather than viscerally. We would collectively, I suspect, develop a more somatic sense of the violence of the world.

A regular diet of shooting victim photos would leave us routinely, viscerally, sorrowful and anguished about this victim or that, in a world we understand more deeply, viscerally, as a violent place. We would be, I suppose, sadder and more afraid.

Will our newly visceral sympathy and fear change our attitudes? Will the pro-gun people see this as proof that everyone needs a gun for defense in this dangerous world? Will anti-gun people see this as proof that we need to ban guns, especially the black ones? Fear makes people hunker down and hold harder to their ideas, while empathy has a chance to shift them to a new idea.

If we want changed attitudes, I submit that we should aim for sympathy, for empathy, for love; we should shy away from fear. I don't know how to do that. I don't know what photos would produce more empathy and less fear.

Would any of this translate into action? And if so, which actions?

As noted in my previous remarks, nothing happens until the circumstances of the real world open a path to action. Until there is something concrete that we can collectively do which will actually affect the real world, all the gruesome photos in the world won't change a thing except our emotional state. We cannot really predict what the actions that actually occur will be, or what results those actions will produce.

Will we vote for more cops, leading to a hiring frenzy, resulting in hiring of terrible barrel-bottom losers as cops, producing more violence?

Will we protest for and then pass gun-control legislation? If so, will that legislation have any effect?

I have argued in the past that the American gun-violence problem is rooted in American tradition. This doesn't mean that banning AR-15s or whatever wouldn't have an effect, I simply have no idea. I do think I know where the root cause is, and it's inside us. To truly repair the gun violence problem, I believe we have to change the psyche of the nation, to shift it away from the idea that guns are a great solution to a broad class of problems.

I don't know how to do that. I am not convinced that publishing photos dead kids is going to do it, though, and I am having trouble imagining a path where is even might.

I see how a steady diet of such photographs would shape the national psyche, but I can only trace the path as far as "viscerally: more anguish and sorrow, together with more fear" which does not strike me as pointing to "guns are a bad tool for most problems."

I don't have the answers, I'm just trying to get a little further down the road of understanding, perhaps a few steps closer to the country of answers. Wiser heads than mine, perhaps...