Beauty and the afflicted

Most people suffer in silence and privately. (Was it Thoreau who said, “Most adults lead lives of quiet desperation”?) Our media, TV as well as newspapers, like to try and uncover that suffering. ‘Human interest stories’ appealing to our emotional voyeurism are good for the media business plan. So-called ‘reality TV’ programmes depend on participants’ willingness to put themselves in stressful situations when they will inevitably display emotion. Now the News of the World’s long running habit of feeding that voyeurism is about to end.
But we are addicted to pain. We enjoy it – especially if it’s someone else’s. We’ll find some other, hopefully more scrupulous, media outlet to satisfy our addiction.

Good journalism, on the other hand, also brings us another kind of silent but very public suffering: hidden only because it’s happening a long way away. Fortunately (if that’s the right word) the plight of perhaps 8 million people would be almost impossible to hide even if they all wished to avoid media attention. Even so I wince when the cameras focus on some emaciated woman cradling a dying child. Does she want that kind of intrusion? Did the reporter ask her permission before the cameras zoomed in? I don’t know but here I am a few thousand miles away in comfort unimaginable to her.

Who said,

“There is beauty and there are the afflicted and whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I wish to be unfaithful neither to the one nor to the other.”?

Google doesn’t recognise the quote as my memory has preserved it (I think it may have been a French philosopher. Anyone know?) Anyway, even if my memory is faulty it presents me with a valuable maxim. There’s a hell of a lot of human suffering around (including, I try to remind myself, the pain of News of the World reporters and executives). What can I do about it? Thanks to some reporters in Kenya I can donate to the Disasters Emergency Relief Fund. More generally I can refrain from adding to the sum total of human misery by dealing with my own so that it doesn’t spill out and infect those around me; so that I don’t satisfy my latent emotional voyeurism by buying newspapers which feed it. I can recognise my own addiction to pain and unhappiness and find beneath it the truth about myself and every other human being. You want me to spell that truth out? That’s what this blog keeps trying to do!