There is a moral element to all this fear-mongering about concentration. How long can we humans really worry about atrocities? How does the relative length of our persecution reflect our collective moral strengths and weaknesses?
In a previous column about Kirk, I asked what Kent State what it would look like in 2025. The single photograph of that day in 1970 when four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard is so powerful that whenever I hear any mention of Kent State—its basketball team or its engineering program—that image flashes in my mind. I'm sure I'm not alone. Can the public thus unite around a single image of disaster? Or will we all today see hundreds of chaotic photos taken with cell phone cameras by people at the scene and uploaded directly to their feeds? Kent State was reduced to a single photograph because the press at the time was much more centralized and had the power and influence to edit, curate and promote a particular version of an event.
The media still tries to get our attention this way. As the war in the Gaza Strip neared the end of its first year, several major news outlets published compilations of images they believed captured the tragedy so far. Even more were published after two years. I'm guessing you didn't notice these collections, and I'm pretty sure you have little idea what kind of photographs were collected.
What images of the Gaza war will you never forget? A photo of six dead children hidden under a sheet? Footage of a father stumbling and carrying the headless body of his child? Photos of the bloody aftermath in kibbutz kitchens? Do you know which images I'm referring to? Do you have your own list of images that I will need for Google? And even if we are both horrified by the carnage, does the fact that we each have our own horror movie mean that we will forget what we saw more quickly because our memories will not be refreshed by the repetition of a single image? Will we trust our memories less, because we are no longer sure that photographs and even a video Is what we see real?
I'm not worried about my children's attention span. But I worry about what will happen when every image becomes the subject of controversy; when the rare sights that we all see together, joyful or devastating, quickly disintegrate into thousands, even millions of threads, each of which holds reality in its own way. When historians look back on our era, they will find atrocities that have been documented in more detail than in any other period in history; they will see thousands of corpses; and they will find millions of hours of comments. What they won't find is a coherent narrative describing these images as they occurred. Consensus about why and how things happened can, of course, be used to exert terrible will, and so perhaps there is some potential good to be found in all this chaos. But how do you build a community if no one can form any vision or even interpretation of what happened together?
To complete the thought, Kent State may not be remembered without this one photo. When we say that the public can no longer remember anything, due to shortened attention spans or whatever, what we are really describing, at least to a large extent, is the absence of a collective memory formed by the iconic images that bind us. This is the cry of the lonely: those who understand that some unctuous new consciousness is being born that will shape the attitude of their children to a suffering world, but cannot understand what it looks like. ♦
