I’m a very happy subscriber to Vox’s Future Perfect email newsletter, and the advice column written by Sigal Samuel is one of the best parts of it. Each column, she gives practical ethical advice for the kinds of questions facing people today.
This question, whether or not it’s morally acceptable to ignore the news, comes up often with friends and students. Sigal’s answer is rich and thoughtful.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil wrote. She argued that it’s only by deeply paying attention to others that we can develop the capacity to understand what it’s really like to be them. That allows us to feel compassion, and compassion drives us to action.
Truly paying attention is incredibly hard, Weil says, because it requires you to see a suffering person not just as “a specimen from the social category labeled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.” In other words, you don’t get “the pleasure of feeling the distance between him and oneself” — you have to recognize that you’re a vulnerable creature, too, and tragedy could befall you just as easily as it’s befallen the suffering person in front of you.
So, when you “pay attention,” you really are paying something. You pay with your own sense of invulnerability. Engaging this way costs you dearly — that’s why it’s the “purest form of generosity.”
Doing this is hard enough even in the best of circumstances. But nowadays, we live in an era when our capacity for attention is under attack.