New Ethics of Response

Grotesquery is almost more dangerous as spectacle than threat. Motorists gawk at traffic accidents like squalid peasants glimpsing an infanta; the evening news splashes murders across the television screen as if there were nothing in the world more natural than reveling in atrocity as postprandial entertainment. The reactions are not new. It is the scale of the calamities that has changed. Does a technologized world demand a new ethics? Is Christianity able to cope with this new proportion of evil, the industrialization of murder that, with the advent of the nuclear weapon, can wipe out whole populations in an instant? Or has quantity not changed quality, have the answers to the old questions of evil and justice and sin remained intact in the face of new gods like efficiency and scientific reductionism?

Walter Benjamin, himself a causality of the conflict in question, famously ended his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with the observation that “mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Both Niebuhr and Fosdick have understandable, if different, opinions as to what America, as a supposedly “Christian Nation,” should do in response to the world crisis then unfolding. I see no way to adjudicate between them without drawing in hindsight – a cruel thing to do to deliberation meant in earnest. At least both authors abstain from deriving aesthetic pleasure from the War, something someone should remind the ill-monikered “History Channel” of upon occasion. Or am I wrong? Is aesthetic appreciation the best way of comprehending the significance of World War II? Implicit in this question is the understanding that universal moral condemnation is far too blunt an instrument to apply to all the sides and shadings of the War and the varied responses to its provocations.