A decent impulse is to look away and to insist that such deaths and traumas are simply too sad and too private to be subjected to a stranger’s gaze. Any curiosity seems, from this perspective, to be a particularly shameful and modern kind of pathology.
Motivated by fears of intrusion, the more serious news organizations typically adopt a reserved tone in their reports on the sorts of events that severely test any faith one might still have in the reasonableness and decency of mankind.
They leave it to their less dignified colleagues, unfettered by scruples, to evoke the truly vivid details of the latest outrages: to give us a close-up view of the body after it fell from the balcony, the bedroom where the little child was tied up or the carving knife with the spouse’s blood still on its blade. Their reward for being willing to undertake such investigations is the occasionally guilty but concerted and lucrative interest of many millions of readers and viewers.
2.
IT ISN’T HARD to characterize the interest of the public in horror stories as tasteless and unproductive. But beneath the surface banality, we should allow that we are often – in confused and inarticulate ways – attempting to get at something important. When immersing ourselves in blood-soaked narratives, we are not always solely in search of entertainment or distraction; we are not always being merely prurient or callously appropriating intensities of feeling that our own lives have failed to provide.
We may also be looking to expose ourselves to barbaric tales to help us retain a tighter hold on our more civilized selves – and in particular, to nurture our always ephemeral reserves of patience, self-control, forgiveness and empathy.
Rather than just inveigh moralistically against our fascination with heinous events, the challenge should be to tweak how they are reported – in order that they better release their important, yet too often latent, emotional and societal benefits.
3.
EVERY YEAR, AT the end of March, the citizens of ancient Athens would gather under open skies on the southern slopes of the Acropolis in the Theatre of Dionysus and there listen to the latest works by the great tragedians of their city. The plot lines of these plays were unmitigatingly macabre, easily matching anything our own news could provide: a man kills his father, marries his mother and gouges out his own eyes (Oedipus Rex); a man has his daughter murdered as part of a plan to revenge the infidelity of his brother’s wife (Iphigenia); a mother murders her two children to spoil her unfaithful husband’s plans to start a new family with another woman (Medea).
Rather than regarding these stories as grotesque spectacles that all right-minded people should avoid, in his Poetics of c. 335 BC, the philosopher Aristotle looked generously upon the human fascination with them. He proposed that, when they are well written and artfully staged, such stories can become crucial resources for the emotional and moral education of a whole society. Despite the barbarity they describe, they themselves can function as civilizing forces.
But in order for this to happen, in order for a horror (a meaningless narration of revolting events) to turn into what Aristotle called a tragedy (an educative tale fashioned from abominations), the philosopher thought it was vital that the plot should be well arranged and the motives and the personalities of the characters properly outlined to us. Extreme dramatic skill would be required in order for the audience to spontaneously reach a point at which it recognized that the apparently unhinged protagonist of the story, who had acted impetuously, arrogantly and blindly, who had perhaps killed others and destroyed his own reputation and life, the person whom one might at first (had one come across the story in the news) dismissed as nothing but a maniac, was, in the final analysis, rather like us in certain key ways. A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero’s ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: ‘How easily I, too, might have done the same.’ Tragedy’s task was to demonstrate the ease with which an essentially decent and likeable person could end up generating hell.
If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people’s tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us. While we circle gruesome stories in the media, we may at a highly unconscious level be exploring shocking but important questions: ‘If things got really out of hand late one night, and I was feeling wound up and tired and insecure, might I be capable of killing my partner?’ ‘If I was divorced and my spouse was keeping my children from me, would I ever be able to kill them in a form of twisted revenge?’ ‘Could I ever start chatting with a minor on the Internet and, without quite realizing the enormity of what I was doing, end up trying to seduce him or her?’
A man drives into his family home to punish his wife, Manchester, 2012.
(picture credit 15.1)
Medea kills her son to punish her husband, Greek jar, c. 330 BC.
(picture credit 15.2)
Our fascination with crimes may be part of an unconscious effort to make sure we never commit them.
For civilization to proceed, we naturally need the answers to be a firm no in all cases. There is a serious task for the news here: the disasters we are introduced to should be framed in order to give us the maximum encouragement to practise not doing the things that the more chaotic parts of us would – under extreme circumstances – be attracted to exploring. We may never actually fling our children off a bridge at the end of our access day or shoot our partner dead during an argument, but we are all, at times, emotionally in the space where these sorts of things can happen. Tragedies remind us how badly we need to keep controlling ourselves by showing us what happens when people don’t.
4.
TRAGEDIES SHOULDN’T ONLY help us to be good, they should also prompt us to be kind. How likely we are to be sympathetic to someone who kills their spouse or children depends in large part on how their story happens to be told to us: what information we are given about them, how we are introduced to their motives and with what degree of insight and complexity their psyches are laid before us.
In Greek tragedies, a Chorus regularly interrupts events to direct sentiments and richly contextualize characters’ actions. It tends to speak with solemn respect about the protagonists, whatever the sins they have committed. Such sensitivity ensures that few audience members are likely to leave a performance of Oedipus Rex dismissing the unfortunate central character as a ‘loser’ or ‘psycho’.
The news is less careful in its narrations; and our judgements are – as a result – far more intemperate and nastier.
A Teesside doctor who downloaded more than 1,300 child porn images, including scenes of torture, has been jailed. Police found the ‘sickening’ images on the laptop of James Taylor, 31, from Wensleydale Gardens, Thornaby. The doctor, who worked at Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield, earlier admitted looking at indecent images of children. Taylor was sentenced to a year and a day in prison by a judge at Teesside Crown Court on Friday and was banned from working with children for life.
BBC
At first glance, the doctor seems to deserve no sympathy whatsoever. But our decision about how we consider him is crucially dependent on how the facts of his case are presented to us. We could sympathize with more or less anyone if their story was told to us in a certain way – and we wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to do so (as Dostoevsky or Jesus would have reminded us).