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Michael Ignatieff
Is Nothing Sacred?
The Ethics of Television
The British nurse was picking her way through the mass
of women and children squatting in the dust at the entrance to
the field hospital of the refugee camp at Korem in Ethiopia.
She was selecting which children could still be helped. She was
choosing who would live and who would die. A television crew
trailed behind her, moving its way among the starving. A television
reporter approached with a mike and asked her how she felt about
what she was doing. It was not a question she felt capable of
answering. The look she gave the camera came from very far away.
It is in scenes like this one, with questions like this, that television
confronts consciences of the West with suffering in the Third World.
57
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5 8 Michael Ignatieff
alone, more than ?60 million was donated to famine relief agencies in
the months since the Ethiopian footage was first shown in October
1984. For the first time since Biafra, governments throughout Europe
The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life
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II
Television images, as Jonathan Miller says elsewhere in this volume,
cannot assert anything; they can only instantiate something. The
images from Ethiopia do not assert their own meaning; they can only
instantiate a moral claim if those who watch understand themselves
treatment; or, more positively, that human needs and pain are
universally the same, and that we may be obliged to help those to
whom we are unrelated by birth or citizenship, race or geographic
proximity.
The Christian promise of the universality of salvation was the first
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6o Michael Ignatieff
and their captors or rescuers. Much of this struggle to define and
defend the rights of a universal subject went on against a somber and
also insisted that, given the shared human ignorance about the
ultimate metaphysical foundations of the world, all human creatures
and equality.
All of this applied, of course, only to white males within the
European world, but its application to the non-white peoples encoun
tered on the frontier of the European penetration of North and South
America was only too apparent to figures like Montaigne and Las
Casas. If their pens were unable to halt or delay the decimation that
accompanied European imperialism, they helped to create that sense
of guilt, that sense of conscience betrayed, that is as much at the heart
the successful campaign against the slave trade, and then against
slavery itself, from 1750 to 1850.6 Certainly, the intentions at work
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issue of famine. From the time of the early Church fathers, the
question of whether the duty to relieve the needs of the poor was a
compulsory obligation or a voluntary one was central in the debate
about the public ethics of a Christian person. If the obligation was
one of justice, the needs of the poor might be said to give them a right
an obligation to help the poor which was merely one of charity might
result in the starvation of many in times of famine. The history of
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6 z Michael Ignatieff
the awareness of those it exploits?the exploitation and inequality
integral to the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Marxists
have also argued that the doctrine of the natural inviolability of all
individuals as rights-bearing creatures could only become a reality in
societies that do away with capitalist and imperialist social relations.8
revolution.9
the Ethiopian images would lie not in what they show, but in what
they suppress. The culture of the visual image, so a Marxist would
argue, moralizes the relation between viewer and sufferer as an
eternal moment of empathy outside history. Television mediates
economic and political relations as human relations, and asserts a
connection between the Western conscience and the needs of the
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the case that pictures of the famine have suppressed analysis of its
causes. Every structural feature of the crisis?the arms race in the
Horn of Africa, the injustices of the world commodity price system,
the failure of Western development agencies to invest sufficiently in
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64 Michael Ignatieff
own: that full moral empathy?full "suffering with," based on
commonality of experience?is possible only among persons who
share the same social identity, for example, the same class. Class
identity, however, is no less mythic, no less imagined, than universal
human brotherhood. The ethics that derive from it must divide the
world into us and them, friends and enemies. The moral internation
comrades against the common class enemy. "Weeding out the class
enemy" has been the moral mot d'ordre for the atrocities committed
in the van of the Soviet and partisan armies after World War II, not
to mention in the rice paddies of Kampuchea. If the fragile interna
tionalism of the myth of human brotherhood has returned as a moral
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saved at all, they must put their faith in that most fearful of
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66 Michael Ignatieff
saving a person have been destroyed. In this sense, human brother
hood is a myth made actual and concrete by the history of twentieth
century horror: it is a myth with a history, a necessity only history
can give. It is a moral truism, put to the test in the twentieth century
on a scale never before imagined, that there is no such thing as love
of the human race, only love of this person for that, in this time and
place. Obligations, it is always said, are social, contextual, relational,
and historical. But what then is to be done for those whose social and
Ill
Television is also the instrument of a new kind of politics. Since 1945,
affluence and idealism have made possible the emergence of a host of
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American-style freedom.14
Television is particularly well-suited to certain features of this kind
the Right, and who learns in the end to pay attention only to the
victims. Don McCullin, the British war photographer, voiced this
ethic in his introduction to a collection of some of his photographs of
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68 Michael Ignatieff
But what are my politics? I certainly take the side of the underprivileged. I
could never say I was politically neutral. But whether I'm of the Right or the
Left?I can't say. I feel I'm trapped by my background, my inability to retain
I've experienced too much suffering. I feel, in my guts, at one with the
victims. And I find there's integrity in that stance.15
upon by Right and Left in equal measure. But now that a North
Vietnamese victory has been followed with further wars of aggran
dizement, a moral position that assesses ideologies by the victims they
leave behind has gained the right to be heard above the righteous din.
Night after night, audiences around the world have watched Chris
tians, Moslems, Jews, Palestinians, Falangists, Shiites, Marxists,
anti-Marxists engaged in a seemingly endless cycle of massacre,
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spiral, each with fine reasons for killing each other, each reason as
insane as the other. The nightly corpses encouraged a misanthropic
retreat from the attempt to understand. One sign of this withdrawal
It is not only the victims whose world one has to enter, if one
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7o Michael Ignatieff
IV
Thus far I have made the following arguments: the moral empathy
mediated by television has a history?the emergence of moral uni
versalism in the Western conscience; this universalism has always
been in conflict with the intuition that kith and kin have a moral
priority over strangers; the twentieth-century inflection of moral
old, and novelty itself may explain why its codes tend to register
subliminally. With increasing familiarity, however, these codes tend
to become more evident, more a matter of cultural discussion and
interrogation. News is a genre as much as fiction or drama: it is a
regime of visual authority, a coercive organization of images accord
ing to a stopwatch. Many conventions of television news are taken
over from newspapers and radio: the convention that home news is
more important than foreign news; that news is about what hap
pened to "the nation" and "the world" in one day; that yesterday's
news?yesterday's famine?is no longer news; that some news has to
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national society and as citizens of one world. The media now play the
decisive role in constituting the "imagined community" of nation and
globe, the myth that millions of separate "I"s find common identity
in a "we." The fiction is that all the events depicted have somehow
happened to "us." News editors act as ventriloquists of this "we,"
serving up a diet of information that is legitimized as being what
"we" need to know; in fact, what we get to know is what fits the
visual and chronological constraints of the genre. In this circular
process, the news is validated as a system of authority, as a national
institution with a privileged role as purveyor of the nation's identity
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72 Michael Ignatieff
In the process, the rationale for news decisions has been put under an
intense degree of public scrutiny. Charges of bias are hurled from all
grain or cameras, and there are those who specialize in the produc
tion and distribution of such images. Moral intuition might lead one
to suppose that such a trade in images of suffering is immoral. There
are many goods that are not traded, even in a capitalist culture?
goods like health care, justice, and public office.17 Though many
societies have attempted to ban the traffic in images of degrading
sexuality, few have attempted to restrict the commerce in images of
human suffering. To ban a trade in images of suffering would be to
exclude not only disturbing and casual atrocity footage, but also
many of the masterpieces of Western art, including Goya's Horrors
of War, or Picasso's Guernica. As long as culture itself is a process of
market exchange between producers and consumers of images, and
as long as we think it wrong for anyone to have the right to dictate
the content of these images, then our culture will constantly have to
confront the moral ambiguity of making commodities out of other
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of one's own eyes and ears. The struggle to believe one's senses is at
the heart of the process of moving from voyeurism to commitment.
Visitors to the refugee camp at Korem have all insisted that, faced
with the testimony of their senses, they found themselves fleeing
mentally into the fantasy that what they were seeing was some
terrible nightmare from which they would awake.18 In the same way
There is no reason to suppose that the new media lack the same
capacity of representation to make the real truly real and to force the
eye to see, and the heart to recognize what it has seen. Yet the nightly
the clock, the news turns realities like Ethiopia into ninety-second
exercises in its own style of representation.
A dishonor is done when the flow of television news reduces all the
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74 Michael Ignatieff
impoverished in sacred ritual, this is not exactly the case. It certainly
any more violent, any more full of suffering, is, in the nature of
things, impossible to decide. What seems less disputable is that the
culture is less able to satisfy human needs for an account of our
Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. These are the sacred occasions of
modern secular culture, and television has devised its own rhetoric
and ritual to enfold viewers in a sense of the sacred importance of
these moments: the hushed voices of the commentators; cameras so
respectful of grief or majesty that they have the humility of pages;
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j6 Michael Ignatieff
ists will admit that if the general population were entirely dependent
on their nightly bulletin for their understanding of the world, they
to the images from the Ethiopia make plain, the medium itself is
helping to generate an international awareness that has less and less
patience with these kind of discriminations.
Utopian, no doubt. Yet let us at least be clear that the grounds for
wishing this utopia into existence are moral. Whether it wishes or
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how their fate and our obligations to them are represented in our
culture, then it is they?the victims on the screens?not us, who will
pay the heaviest price.
ENDNOTES
information on British response to the Ethiopian famine was provided by Oxfam's
public relations department, Derek Warren, in particular. I wish to acknowledge
their help in the preparation of this article.
2For an excellent study of television coverage of the Ethiopian famine, see William
Boot, "Ethiopia: Feasting on Famine," Columbia Journalism Review, March
3On European natural law, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations
1981).
4On the background to the rise of the idea of toleration, see Henry Kamen, The Rise
of Toleration (London: Methuen, 1967); see also the excellent study by Elisabeth
Labrousse, Bayle (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983); also the
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7 8 Michael Ignatieff
8See Karl Marx, "Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State," "A Contribution to the
theon, 1980).
11 On the background to the famine, see Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The
Ethiopian Revolution (London: Verso, 1983); see also the brilliant portrait of
1985).
12This theme is developed further in my own The Needs of Strangers (New York:
Viking, 1985).
1975).
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