Written by E. D. Parish
I see the news (hopefully less than I used to), and I worry that I don’t respond the right way.
More specifically, I fear that I don’t feel things as deeply as I ought to.
I want to watch less news because I feel as though the news is all just content. A constant stream of stimulation. Sound and fury signifying nothing. And while I maintain that this is the fact of the matter—that the news exists more to rile you up than to inform you or to challenge institutions—the people who are genuinely affected by the events on the screen don’t deserve to be treated thus—they are being wronged insofar as they are objectified and harvested for mindless clicks.
I have friends who attended the March For Life, but I don’t really feel like abortion kills unborn babies. Campus has been riddled with pro-Palestinian protests, but I don’t really feel like thousands of innocent civilians have been killed. (Repeat this exercise for any news story which is especially salient for you.) If I really felt this way—if these claims struck me with the force that they strike so many others—shouldn’t I respond more drastically?
So often we herald the value of reasonable and considerate dialogue, but it’s truly a miracle that protestors—if they truly believe everything they say they believe—aren’t more extreme.
As alluded to above, a supermajority of politically-engaged citizens believes that their government is actively funding the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents. Isn’t that weird? What am I supposed to do with this information?
As Jonathan Lear explains in his work A Case for Irony, Socrates would employ irony to help people realize that a situation or concept was more complicated than his interlocutor realized. In a particularly pertinent example, Kierkegaard, in his private journal, employing his own Socratic irony, asks whether there is a single Christian in all of Christendom.
A plain reading of the question strikes us as an absurdity. Of course, in Christendom—the place where all the Christians are—there is at least one Christian. And yet we understand the question is not merely not absurd but richly saturated with meaning. Kierkegaard is asking us if we really know what it means to be a Christian. He is shaking us out of our habit-induced stupor.
What does it really mean to know that most Americans believe their government supports the slaughter of innocents?
Intimate friends of mine will know that I love this short story called The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. There’s this one scene in particular, wherein the narrator, Pozdnyshev, a despicable yet sympathetic character, expresses that he can’t listen to music because every time he does, he’s so overwhelmed by the foreign emotions overtaking his body. I, by contrast, leave my earbuds in 24/7 in order to make the world just a little more stimulating. It’s difficult to imagine feeling things as deeply as Pozdnyshev did.
I wish I could.