Not long ago, the Western media was showing videos of people being ruthlessly killed. They were recordings of beheadings by jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The first of them was posted online in 2014. More followed soon after. They were shown at every news cycle on almost every news channel. Naturally, CNN, the BBC, Euronews and the rest wouldn’t show the entire clip. The videos were edited. Still, just enough was shown — enough to get the reaction they wanted to elicit from their audience.
The common wisdom is that such clips desensitise the viewer to the loss of a human life. The truth is that they have a hypnotic effect on the mind. You cannot help watching what’s unfolding in front of you even though you’ve watched the video a thousand times and you know exactly what will happen next and the images have made you sick every time.
Why is watching someone getting killed so shocking, at times even traumatising? It wasn’t always so. I’m not saying that humans were less sensitive to murder in the past because they were more used to it. My point is that a human life represents something else today and that its loss is felt differently as a result. What does murder represent for us today?
For the majority of people today, murder represents the desecration of a superlative value. In modern society, a human life is sacrosanct. The belief is that it possesses dignity. If you kill a person, you violate something sacred and eternal.
This has been the common opinion in the West since the last quarter of the 18th century. The 1776 text of the American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen elevate a human life to the rank of something with inviolable rights which must be protected by law and government. The former says that “all men are created equal”. Article 1 of the latter says that, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights makes explicit what remains implicit in the first two texts. “All human beings are born free and [are] equal in dignity and rights.”
Note that it speaks of humanity not as a species but as disunited into citizens and members of a political association. The attribution of sacrality depends on this limitation. It is not as an animal that a human being has dignity, but as a being that secures its rights by instituting government, by forming a political association, i.e. a people or nation.
Everything leads us to suppose that the dignity of man derives from the supreme power accorded the nation. Article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.”
The American Declaration of Independence speaks of the powers of government deriving from the consent of the governed. The sovereignty of the people or nation is absolute, indivisible, unconditional. We have a formidable metaphysical predicate in a political text that turns man the citizen into a political monster, a being with unlimited power. Is it any wonder that modernity is the age of man’s dominion over the earth, an anthropo-cene?
It is in any case why we hear the same refrain from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Immanuel Kant: do not use a human being merely as a means but only as an end in itself. A man is not a thing to be enjoyed but a person that is owed respect. When people see someone being humiliated by having their dignity trampled on, the response is usually swift and violent. The time for talking is over. It is time to act.
Let me illustrate this last point with the following example. The latest war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza began on 7 October 2023. The left was outraged by the loss of Palestinian lives at the hands of the Israeli army, but less by the loss of life on the other side, let alone by the kidnapping of 250 Israeli citizens. The left accords full moral status to Palestinians but almost none to Israelis. That is why it felt the loss of the former so much more strongly than the loss of the latter.
Students protesting in the US went on marches. They occupied university campuses and put up tents everywhere. They raised blockades on bridges and highways. The time for talking was over.
Conversely, the right accords full moral status to Israelis but almost none to Palestinians. It was outraged by the massacre of 1 200 Israelis on 7 October but almost not at all by the loss of Palestinian lives in the months that followed.
The left and right share a belief in the dignity of a human life. For both, a human life has value in itself. The reason they are locked in an insurmountable battle to the point that they are incapable of hearing each other out is because of their additional belief that the members of one nation are full-blooded humans, whereas the members of the other are “humans” in name only.
What does this example tell us? Perhaps most strikingly the fact that the moral worth we attribute to people depends on our political leaning and on our identification with the left or right. Our politics dictates our perception of who is and isn’t human, whose loss we should mourn and whose loss we can safely ignore.
The other thing it demonstrates is the fact that we have an emotive attachment to values and not, as Kant believes, a rational one. Our perception of a murder testifies to the fact that humans are wedded to their values emotively rather than rationally, that they have an unconscious attachment to them instead of being persuaded of their truth.
Imagine someone trampling on your values in front of you. The scene would fill you with disdain and horror. The reaction by liberals is the illiberal one where, instead of hearing out what the violator has to say and what his reasons are for doing what he did, the liberal wants to see him crushed.
Allow me to cite another example, the violent protests by Muslims around the world at the French weekly Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the prophet Mohamed in January 2015, which led to the death of 8 of its staff. The outrage was caused by two factors. First, the cartoons violated a taboo. They depicted the prophet, which is haraam. Second, as is generally the purpose of caricatures, they mocked and ridiculed him. Someone deemed holy by 1.8 billion people was made to look grotesque.
The response by the French Muslim protesters made one thing clear. Up until then, the French believed that every citizen, though he may be opposed to others in virtue of his faith, nevertheless has enough in common with the rest to consider himself part of the same national community. The protests showed that this appearance of belonging is just that, an appearance. Satire is an integral part of French political culture. It is unthinkable without it. But it is anathema to Islam. The two are irreconcilable to the point that one has to give way to the other or reprisals follow.
This raises two difficult questions. The first is: how can cultures with competing values coexist in the same society? Isn’t it necessary for one of them to give way to the other? even in a democracy? Or does this show the impossibility of multiculturalism? The alternative, naturally, is to take one’s values less seriously or with a greater dose of irony. But is irony, satire, mockery and the rest possible in an age dominated by sincerity of belief and conviction, i.e. by wokism?
I cannot offer an answer to the first question here. As for the second, it is certainly true that were the left and the right capable of taking themselves or their values with a greater dose of irony, that would make for a healthier civilisation. Sadly, the importance they both attach to identity, and to identity politics in particular, makes that impossible. The golden age of satire and mockery — i.e. from the late 1960s to the early 2000s – is long over.
Rafael Winkler is a professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.