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No Compassion Fatigue – AT: Sontag
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No Compassion Fatigue – AT: SontagCompassion fatigue isn’t a thing – Sontag concludes aff Campbell, 12 David Campbell is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and the founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy. “The Myth of Compassion Fatigue” February 2012, http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/documents/DC_Myth_of_Compassion_Fatigue_Feb_2012.pdf Accessed 7/11/12 BJM It is worth undertaking a closer examination of Sontag’s reasoning in order to understand what the concept of compassion fatigue assumes. Sontag claims that familiarity with images is what determines the emotions people summon in response to photographs of suffering: Don McCullin’s photographs of emaciated Biafrans in the early 1970s [sic] had less impact for some people than Werner Bishchof’s photographs of Indian famine victims in the early 1950s because those images had become banal, and the photographs of Tuareg families dying of starvation in the sub-Sahara that appeared in magazines everywhere in 1973 must have seemed to many like an unbearable replay of a now familiar atrocity exhibition. 20 There is no supporting evidence for the vague claims that McCullin’s photographs “had less impact for some people” or that the images of dying Tuareg “must have seemed to many like an unbearable replay...”. While it would be wrong to insist on social scientific protocols for an interpretive essay, the insubstantial foundations on which this idea of repetition and familiarity leading to a failure of response has been built are revealed in these sentences. Sontag’s analysis was written between 1973 and 1977, and the grounds for this argument seem even weaker when we consider that no more than seven years later the world was moved to the largest charitable event ever by both still and moving pictures of mass famine in Ethiopia. So where does Sontag’s conviction that “the shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings” comes from? 21 Because she maintains that photographs of atrocity jolt viewers only because they offer them something novel, her conviction is founded on the “negative epiphany” arrived at in a “first encounter” with horrific pictures: For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen - in photographs or in real life - ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and afer, though it was several years before I fully understood what they were about. 22 Encountering photographs of the Nazi’s concentration camps for the first time is surely something that many of us can recall. However, a personal epiphany seems a weak basis on which to make absolute and universal claims about the power of photography, not least because each of us will experience our epiphanies on a timescale at variance with Sontag’s. What is repetitive for her will be novel for others. Who is to say that the millions moved to charitable action by Live Aid in 1984 were or were not familiar with either Bischof’s or McCullin’s famine photographs? Although Sontag’s articulation of the relationship between photography and compassion fatigue from the 1970s has been pivotal to the concept’s enduring power, thirty years later, in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag heavily qualified and largely retracted her earlier claims: As much as they create sympathy, I wrote [in On Photography], photographs shrivel sympathy. Is this true? I thought it was when I wrote it. I’m not so sure now. What is the evidence that photographs have a diminishing impact, that our culture of spectatorship neturalizes the moral force of photographs of atrocities? Not everything posited in On Photography is abandoned in Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag still operates in terms of assumptions about the scope and scale of our “incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again.” 23 Equally, she persists with the proposition that “as one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.” What changes is the fact that this condition is no longer a given: “there are cases where repeated exposure to what shocks, saddens, appalls does not use up a full-hearted response. Habituation is not automatic, for images…obey different rules than real life.” 24 Sontag’s increased attentiveness to contingency carries over into an appreciation of the different motivations of individuals and the different capacities of images. People, she writes, “can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid.” 25 Pictures of the atrocious, she concedes, “can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. to acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.” 26 But in her clearest reversal, Sontag concludes “harrowing photographs do not inevitably lose their power to shock.” 27 No Compassion Fatigue – AT: MoellerMoeller deploys compassion fatigue as an empty signifier, and multiple studies disprove her thesis Campbell, 12 David Campbell is the John Cardinal O'Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame and the founding director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy. “The Myth of Compassion Fatigue” February 2012, http://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/documents/DC_Myth_of_Compassion_Fatigue_Feb_2012.pdf Accessed 7/11/12 BJM In these moments, Moeller regards compassion fatigue not as a thing that acts, but the condiTion which results from acTion elsewhere: it is the unavoidable, inevitable consequence the public lapses into as a result of someone or something else’s fault. The many and varied ways in which Moeller articulates the idea of compassion fatigue and the causal relaTions associated with it demonstrate that the term is an empty signifier - it has no agreed meaning and lacks stable referents, instead funcTioning something like a cultural meme around which a host of concerns and criticisms swirl. This can be demonstrated further by considering those few moments in which Moeller offers some substantive evidence for her multiple posiTions. The informaTion in Moeller’s book is derived from interviews with, or quotes from, important figures in America’s mainstream press speaking about the intersecTion of poliBcs, media and internaTional events. Small anecdotes - such as the case of the Newsweek issue with a Luc Delahaye photo of an injured Bosnian child on the cover being one of the poorest selling weeks of all time - bear the weight of general arguments. 43 There are also limited references to newspaper stories on compassion fatigue, which offer up interviews from both citizens and sources like Neil Postman, who was quoted in a 1991 New York Times story proclaiming; the sheer abundance of images of suffering will tend to make people turn away...People respond when a little girl falls down a well. But if 70,000 people in Bangladesh are killed, of course people will say, 'Isn't that terrible' but I think the capacity for feeling is if not deadened, at least drugged. 44 13 The best way to consider the supports for Moeller’s argument is to examine her discussion of the US coverage and response to the Rwanda genocide. As with other chapters, the thorough analysis of the crisis in Rwanda is linked to a media critique via the occasional remarks of broadcasters, print journalists and editors, and buttressed by the odd quote from members of the public. 45 Citizens are cited for their complaints about the publicaTion of graphic pictures from photographers like Gilles Peress, Tom Stoddart and others, while reporters remark on the challenges of covering a story as large as the mass killings in 1994. Moeller’s central point is that when a naTion fails to act decisively in the face of incontrovertible evidence of genocide despite extensive media coverage it is evidence of compassion fatigue either on the part of media or the public or both. But part of her own narrative shows the problematic nature of compassion fatigue as a concept for the dynamics she wishes to examine. Using a Boston Globe report on the charitable response to Rwanda, Moeller makes much of the fact that during the weeks of the mass killings Oxfam America received no more than the normal number of phone calls from people offering donaTions. Her conclusion is that “the images of the genocide spurred few to donate money.” 46 However, after the killing ended and Rwanda became a refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands fleeing to Goma and suffering from cholera as a result, Oxfam received more than 1,000 calls in 24 hours with people willing to donate vast sums of money. According to the Boston Globe reporter, all attribute the sudden interest to news coverage of the cholera epidemic that in the past four days has killed 7,000 Rwandans who have fled to refugee camps in Zaire. The link is so direct, they say, that phone calls peak immediately after graphic reports of dying Rwandan refugees are broadcast on news reports...Many callers are crying on the phone. Some ask if they can adopt orphaned children, others want to fly to Rwanda to volunteer. 47 It is curious, to say the least, that an outpouring of compassion is mobilised as evidence for an argument about the pervasiveness of compassion fatigue. Furthermore, this report on the rise of compassion came just six weeks after the views in another American newspaper report are cited by Moeller as evidence for the claim that “the symptoms of compassion fatigue are getting worse”: ‘It wasn’t too long ago,’ wrote Richard O’Mara in The Baltimore Sun, ‘that the face of an African child, frightened and hungry, could draw out the sympathies of people in the richer countries and, more importantly, stimulate a reflex towards rescue. That face became emblematic of the 1980s. But with all symbols it soon list its human dimension, its link to the actual flesh-and-blood child. Now that face stirs few people. The child has fallen victim, this time to a syndrome described as “compassion fatigue”.’ 48 Considering these points together demonstrates Moeller’s rampant lack of clarity about what is or is not compassion fatigue. The compassionate response towards Rwandan refugees is taken as evidence of the absence of caring during the genocide. For Moeller, photography is indicted in the process: she contends that “in the case of Rwanda, clearly, the famine images [sic] touched people. The genocide pictures did not.” 49 Then, compassion fatigue is said to be getting 15worse and this is supported by an opinion which declares that the face of the child in distress no longer stirs people, when just six weeks later the graphic accounts of dying Rwandans are cited as the principal reason behind the massive jump in charitable giving for those refugees. The fact that ‘compassion fatigue’ can be mobilised as a concept when a surge in charitable compassion is being discussed demonstrates how empty it is as a signifier. Nonetheless, Moeller identifies something important with her general if unfocused concerns concerning the Rwanda case. While compassion was not diminished, let alone exhausted, in the cases she considers, it is certainly differential. That is, while compassion as a reservoir of public empathy remains in plentiful supply, it is clearly directed towards some issues and not others at some times and not others. What Moeller has seized upon is the way in which humanitarian emergencies solicit both public and policy responses more readily than political crises. Moeller works hard to indict either the media or the public or imagery (or some combinaTion of the three) as culpable for a response that was clearly inadequate to the Rwandan genocide when it was underway. That the internaTional response to the Rwandan genocide was, to put it mildly, insufficient, is by now well documented - as the Sarkozy photograph in the introducTion reminds us. 50 In the case of the United States government, the lack of acTion was the continuaTion of a century’s avoidance and indifference to some of humanity’s greatest crimes. 51 Moeller is thus undoubtedly correct to argue that “one difficulty in moving Americans toward engagement is that they consider few political themes or few internaTional conflicts compelling enough to galvanize a concerted response.” 52 However, the “Americans” who are most responsible in this formulaTion are the successive administraTions and policy makers who have regularly declined to support internaTional acTion on the grounds of the United States’ naTional interest. This is not to deny that the media and the public also bear some responsibility for America’s repeated failure to act, but it is clear that when the political leadership frames internaTional crises in ways that lessen the chance for a timely and robust response, this provides others with a powerful lead that further diminishes the likelihood of a timely and robust response. We saw this in the context of the Bosnian War, when both American and European leaders represented the conflict as a civil war leading to humanitarian emergency rather than a political concern. 53 And we have seen it in the context of the violence in Darfur, where a humanitarian script trumped the genocide narrative, and then only afer a United NaTions official declared that it was ‘‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis’’ which differed from the genocide in Rwanda only in terms of the numbers affected. 54 Moeller’s critique of American public and policy attitudes towards internaTional crises is persuasive in many respects, but it is not a critique that benefits from being conducted in terms of ‘compassion fatigue’. Indeed, the overriding problem with Moeller’s approach is the way ‘compassion fatigue’ becomes the alibi for a range of issues which, while related at some levels, demand specific investigaTions. In addiTion to the political critique, Moeller wants to argue that compassion fatigue is responsible for “much of the failure of internaTional reporting today,” “the media’s peripatetic journalism,” and “the media’s preoccupaTion with crisis coverage.” Moeller is correct that there are many areas of concern when it comes to internaTional journalism, but ‘compassion fatigue’ as a general concept offers little purchase on problems that include everything from news narraBves and television scheduling to the political economy of broadcasting, not least because the ecology of internaTional news has been radically transformed in the decade since her argument was published. 55 Finally, on top of the political and media critiques, Moeller deploys compassion fatigue as both a descripTion and explanaTion of the public’s allegedly “short attenTion span” and “boredom with internaTional news.” 56 Here, too, there are many quesTions to raise. We could point to the way these claims necessarily invoke a past golden age in which attenTion spans were supposedly long and nobody was bored. Or we could argue that these commonly repeated assumpTions about audience behaviour are contradicted by Pew Research Centre evidence which shows that “people are spending more time with news than ever before.” 57 Either way, these thoughts require us to ask: what, actually, is the evidence for the existence of compassion fatigue, where that term refers to popular desensitisaTion? Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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