Terrorism, Imagination and Being-With-Others

Fierce comments at Crooked Timber (via Bitch, Ph.D) on a post about the hostage-taking in Beslan have given me some food for thought about what many of the commenters confront or allude to: how to write about terror. Much of the debate in the comments thread concerns whether an academic/political blog such as CT is obliged to comment on and analyse such events. At the same time, a discussion arises–with some acrimony–concerning what is the most appropriate way to imagine the people who commit acts of terror, including whether it is necessary to consider their context (sociocultural and historical) simultaneous to their actions, and what the political implications of this might be. Commenters variously warn against excusing the terrorists by analysing their actions, or excusing ourselves by analysing any continuity between their context and ours (“ours” being that of people who do not commit acts of terror). Of course, there is a considerable political gap between these two statements, and much of the bitterness in the comments arises from the writers’ perceptions of opposing views held by others.Even though weblogs are an opinion-based forum, they are also a public forum, and I feel in this case a moral obligation to contribute what I can. The comments at Crooked Timber make me think of two questions that have been on my mind more generally lately, namely, how do I imagine people who commit acts of terror, and what is an appropriate way to acknowledge the suffering of others? I think my answers to these two questions are connected, and I will do my best to explain how.

It’s interesting that the very first comment at the Crooked Timber post says “And lets not forget Darfur either!”, and that it is pretty much ignored throughout what follows. It seems as if, for some thinkers, paying attention (especially when the news media pay attention) to one horror politically implicates people in their failure to feel the suffering of another horror. In this case, an admonishment that feeling and focusing on the horror at Beslan says something about our (alleged) indifference to the horror in Darfur. This is an argument that’s been used many times before: from those who noted that more civilians were killed in the US military action in Afghanistan that responded to the terrorist attacks on New York than were killed in those attacks themselves, to my own support, as a fifteen-year-old in 1990, of the idea that the looming first Gulf War was a moral injustice since the people of East Timor had suffered under invasion and occupation far longer than those in occupied Kuwait. So the suffering in Darfur is understood as another example of the west’s indifference to suffering in Africa (or perhaps suffering among poor Muslim populations, remembering Bosnia), and is constrasted in the poster’s comment with people’s attentiveness to the hostage-taking in Beslan.

Plenty of arguments concerning why we attend to some crises and pay little attention to others have already been offered in many fora, with suggestions including grounds of ethnic or religious likeness to a particular anxiety about terrorism in western cultures at the moment. I think an understanding of the way in which this works can be contributed to by considering something I’ve recently read. In “The Cries of Others”, an essay in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust (eds. Milchman & Rosenberg, 1996), Robert John Sheffler Manning reconsiders Heidegger’s “Agriculture Remark” in terms of the indifference it suggests to the annihilation of European Jews in the Holocaust, and, once again, what this suggests both for our understanding of Heidegger’s thought and more generally. Noting that “[n]early everyone who has written on the Heidegger controversy has condemned this statement [the agriculture remark] in the harshest terms” (20), Manning goes on to reframe the extent of the indifference to the suffering of others that many have taken this remark to signify. His argument is that Heidegger was not so much a monster as a man who drew very narrowly those boundaries within which he was prepared to, and therefore able to, feel empathy for other people. Manning’s point is that this is more of a universal condition than we would like to think.

The problem for us with Heidegger’s thought is that its inscription of “those others from whom one is not distinct” excluded, literally, millions, as his analogising of the “essence” of mechanised agricultre with “the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and the death camps” (cited in Manning, 20), showed. What Manning draws our attention to, at the same time as acknowledging that this cannot “remove the scandal from Heidegger’s remark” (33), is that “the fact is that as humans we do feel closer to, more connected with, more concerned about those who are near and who are like us. This is natural. To live like this is to live inside our essence” (32). It is in light of this that Heidegger’s passing mention of the Holocaust presents both a reminder and a challenge: “The remark remains, of course, monstrous … Yet, in the baldness of the remark is an honesty. Most of us don’t really feel the pain of others we don’t know and aren’t concerned with” (32). In light of this, what distinguishes an event like the hostage-taking at Beslan is that we do feel some small part of it–the horror, the helplessness–our empathy activated by the children and their families and their context, which we perceive to be like our own. For some people–like the commenter at CT–this then activates an awareness of the suffering and horror at which we apparently don’t feel the same empathy, with the fact that such events have even arisen standing as a kind of evidence that other nations, other cultures, failed to care about what was happening.

Manning seems to be suggesting that this is the way that humans are–that we feel the sufferings of “like” more than “unlike”–and that Heidegger was an extreme example (in a context of intellectuals) of how this might work in practice. How then do we avoid the failure of empathy, especially if, as some writers of the left imply, it is the failure of such empathy that contributes to the unchecked horrors of regions like Darfur? I think that taking on board Manning’s reading of Heidegger and the model that arises is probably of some help in this regard. Each of us has considerable feeling for the group of people we feel “closer to” and “connected with” by virtue of their being “near and … like us” (32). The task, then, must be to consciously, mindfully, extend the parameters of this group in a way that means we can keep this up for our whole life, at the same time as recognising that it is likely a commitment with little return, that if we do it for others it doesn’t mean they will do it for us. This meta-awareness perhaps provides the check and balance against emotional incomprehension or exhausation, such as that both the original Crooked Timber post and Bitch PhD cite, since to feel all at once even part of the world’s suffering would demand that we go mad.

If I say that terrorists or civil warriors themselves (I’m coining the latter term to describe those who fight in civil or ethnic conflicts such as the splitting of the Sudan and like events in Rwanda/Burundi or Bosnia) are people who for reasons and contexts which, while they may be identified, are much less easy to comprehend, are subject to an extreme version of the same limiting of Being-With-Others that Manning suggests applies to all of us, that doesn’t mean I’m proposing a model that suggests we are all culpable for their actions, as some commenters at Crooked Timber accuse others of doing. The limiting of human empathy required to humiliate, hurt and kill others in this way seems both remarkable and baffling, both because it seems so radical and so widespread. And yet, at some time in the lives of each of the hostage-takers in Beslan (for example) must have arisen the decision or rather the irrefutable feeling that this would be the way it is, that other people would become resources in a struggle whose moral precedence, though limited to a few, was to be lived as if universal. I don’t think such a worldview can arise from thought alone, except as sociopathy or psychopathy. I take it to be a decision of the emotions to sustain to the end of life the fury of a single moment, as in the story of the Chechen Black Widow suicide bombers, for example. Which means we are talking about Vengeance, which is not a new notion.

I doubt the question of how to think about, and how to respond to, acts of violence and acts of terror, can ever be answered in a way that satisfies or convinces even a majority of those who are asking the questions. But I do think that being aware of both the fact that our empathy, as a product of Being-With-Others, has natural (in the sense of existing) limits, but that these limits are by no means fixed (as the existence of terrorists themselves shows; one is not born a terrorist) gives us a way both to honour our emotional reactions (as observers or even survivors) to such events as they do occur and to scrutinise their limits, with the commitment that such scrutiny then lead us to the kind of wilful extension of thought and feeling towards others that Heidegger, for all his schema, failed to make.