It is a peculiar feature of the human situation that we are endlessly capable of not seeing what is directly before us. We live, most of us, in a condition of comfortable moral haze, and when the haze is penetrated by something sharp and undeniable, we tend not to examine the thing itself but rather to rearrange the haze. I have been sitting this morning with the news of the world spread before me like one of those complicated allegorical paintings in which every figure is engaged in some urgent action whose meaning remains, to the ordinary viewer, profoundly unclear.
Consider the case of Noelia Castillo, the young Spanish woman who this week died by euthanasia after a protracted legal battle with her own father. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in her favour, which is to say that the highest judicial authority on the continent affirmed her right to choose death. One might suppose that this settles the matter. It does not. What it does is open a window onto the terrible complexity of love and autonomy, of the claims that those who love us make upon our continued existence, and of the irreducible solitude in which each of us must finally face the question of what our life means. Her father wished her to live. She wished to die. Both positions were, in their way, expressions of something that deserves the name of moral seriousness. The tragedy is not that one of them was wrong but that the situation itself was one in which no outcome could be anything other than devastating.
This is a pattern that repeats itself across the surface of the day's events with an almost musical insistence. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán's government stands accused of mass voter intimidation ahead of the April elections. A film has emerged in which voters, mayors, and a police officer describe money and drugs being offered to pressure people into supporting the ruling party. Meanwhile, the government has opened an espionage case against a journalist. One must attend carefully here, because the mechanics of tyranny are always banal, always disappointing in their lack of grandeur. There is no magnificent evil at work, only the steady, grinding application of power to the task of eliminating inconvenient truth. The journalist who is charged with espionage for the crime of reporting is a figure we ought to recognise from the long history of states that have decided to make reality itself illegal. What Orbán's apparatus reveals is not the strength of authoritarianism but its fundamental nervousness, its perpetual need to control what people know because it cannot control what people think.
And yet alongside these familiar corruptions of power, there are stories that remind us of the sheer strangeness of moral life, of goodness appearing where we least expect it. Off the German coast near Lübeck Bay, rescuers are attempting to save a humpback whale stranded on a sandbank since Monday. I find myself peculiarly moved by this. The whale has no claim upon us. It cannot petition a court, cannot vote, cannot write a letter to the editor. It simply exists, enormous and helpless, on a sandbank in the wrong part of the sea, and human beings have decided that it matters. This is, I think, something close to what I would call genuine moral attention – the perception of a reality outside oneself that demands a response not because of any contractual obligation but because one has seen it, truly seen it, and cannot pretend otherwise.
The same quality of attention is what is so conspicuously absent in the reports from Cuba, where doctors describe patients dying because the American oil blockade has upended even basic medical care. Cuban health care was once, we are told, the pride of the island. Now people are dying for want of things that exist in abundance elsewhere. The moral arithmetic here is not complicated. What is complicated is the mechanism by which an entire nation's suffering can be treated as an acceptable by-product of geopolitical strategy. There is a kind of thinking that regards such suffering as abstract, as a regrettable but necessary cost of pursuing larger aims. This is precisely the kind of thinking that philosophy exists to challenge, because it depends upon not looking at the thing itself – not seeing the particular patient in the particular bed who will die today because a supply ship could not arrive.
The same willed blindness operates in the reports from Tehran, where first responders pull a man from a building struck by an air raid, and from Urmia, where the Red Crescent documents the aftermath of strikes on residential areas. These are not statistics. Each destroyed building was someone's address, someone's kitchen, the place where someone kept the particular cup from which they preferred to drink their tea. War is always, among other things, an assault on particularity, an insistence that individual human lives can be subsumed into categories – enemy, collateral, acceptable loss – that strip them of the very qualities that make them real.
In rural Ukraine, elderly people in isolated villages are going without medicine. One woman says she has not seen a doctor in four years. Four years. I try to imagine what that means in the concrete texture of a life – the accumulating aches, the uncertainty, the slow withdrawal of the world's care. Meanwhile, President Zelensky visits Saudi Arabia to discuss drone technology, and American officials extend deadlines and issue ultimatums about the Strait of Hormuz, and the great machinery of diplomacy and threat grinds on, and somewhere a woman in a Ukrainian village waits for a doctor who does not come.
There is a temptation, when confronted with suffering on this scale, to retreat into a kind of moral paralysis, to conclude that the world's problems are too vast and too interconnected for any individual response to matter. This is a temptation that must be resisted, because it is itself a form of the comfortable haze I mentioned at the outset. The monarch butterflies in Mexico, whose population has surged sixty-four percent this winter, do not know about geopolitics. They migrate, they reproduce, they continue. Their resurgence is not a lesson or a metaphor – or if it is, it is a metaphor for the stubborn persistence of life in conditions that ought, by any rational calculation, to have extinguished it. The endangered thing survives. One is permitted to notice this.
What I want to say, and what the events of this particular day seem to demand, is that moral life consists above all in the effort to see clearly. Not to judge, not to categorise, not to assign blame according to some predetermined scheme, but simply to attend to what is actually there. The father who does not want his daughter to die. The whale on the sandbank. The woman without a doctor. The journalist charged with espionage for telling the truth. Each of these situations is irreducibly particular, and each demands from us the difficult, unglamorous work of genuine perception. We are, most of us, not very good at this. We prefer our haze. But the news of the world, if we read it with something approaching real attention, will not let us rest there.
