War, Violence, and the Psychology of Indifference: Final Thoughts

Part I: Only Americans Matter
Part II: We Draw Our Circle too Small
Part III: Patriotic Fixations
Part IV: Media Violence and the Ease of Abstraction

I suppose it’s time to wrap this series up.  It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted on this topic, so let’s revisit a few things.

In Part one, I introduced the overall thrust of my thought: in the western world — particularly in the US — nations tend to suppress, ignore, and even omit non-domestic acts of war, violence and terrorism.  The most obvious and visceral example for me as American — there are of course numerous such examples, too many to recount in a single post really — is the recent and ongoing lack of coverage and general unconcern en masse about the occupation of Iraq.

I went on over the course of several posts to list three reasons that I believe are responsible for this phenomenon.  I’m sure there are more and, after reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death this week, I’m convinced that even the reasons I have listed deserve more attention — this is a blog, I wouldn’t want to get too boring would I? — more on that in minute.

1. Drawing from a quote credited to Mother Teresa, I stated in part two that we draw the circle of our family too small.  Simply put, we don’t really care much about violence unless it directly effects us and because of our geopolitics that means someone from our “nation” or our “country” (e.g. an American) must be involved.  But instead of narrowing our family circle to any particular nationality or ethnicity we must expand it to exclude include all of humanity.
2. The point in part three naturally follows part two.  Patriotism — in the United States at least — has become virtually indistinguishable from nationalism and ethnocentrism both of which serve as handmaidens to the bigger monsters of imperialism and colonialism.  Therefore a populace’s “patriotic fixations” allow it to glorify it’s own — and only it’s own — citizens at expense of others, who, in this view, are reduced to mere objects of conquest to expand the imperial citizenship.
3. Finally, part four deals with the much more subtle process of abstraction by which television, film and other forms of visual media desensitize persons to acts of violence.  The constant exposure to violence, and, even more unnoticed, the process by which the medium itself devalues and removes the horror of violence by reducing it to amusing entertainment surrounded by other amusing sources of entertainment, transforms violence into a detached phenomenon to which the general public has virtually no reaction when confronted with actual events of violence in reality.  As I mentioned earlier, Postman’s book is devoted entirely to this process and is well worth a read.

I think the best remedy to all of this consists in part of what Walter Brueggemann calls “the prophetic imagination” (also the title of a book of his incidentally) that is an alternative consciousness that seeks to dismantle the ethos of the dominant culture  (in this case the exclusion of other human beings by order of the empire) and refuse to play by the rules set by the empire.  This alternative consciousness holds in dialectic, imaginative tension the the needs to criticize the dominant frame of thought and to energize authentic, participatory communities for local and global transformation — transformtion that demands justice.

Thoughts?