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The Daily Attentional
Vol. 1, Week 2: How to See Through Our Differences
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“Evil is the refusal to imagine the full humanity of other people.”
— Hannah Arendt
Both the political philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Spanish artist Francisco Goya used their work to explore human nature through the lens of war and violence. Their works frame a moral imperative for maintaining a just society.
Arendt’s analysis of evil written after the Holocaust is challenging and compelling. It collapses the moral distance between villains and bystanders. The greatest harms, she argued, are often committed not by hatred, but by the thoughtlessness of people who stop imagining how their actions and inactions register in the lives of others. “Evil is the refusal to imagine the full humanity of other people,” she wrote.
Working more than a century before, Goya's images anticipate Arendt's words. He produced "The Disasters of War" over the decade between 1810 and 1820. The series of eighty-two prints depict the cruel suppression of a civilian uprising against the French occupation of Madrid, and subsequent war. The prints reflect the debasement of violence. They are a discomforting response to a timeless human question: What happens when we lose sight of the objects of our actions?
Society relies on empathetic imagination — the capacity to grasp how our attention, beliefs and policies shape real lives beyond our immediate view. When that imagination contracts, people and systems harden. Categories replace judgment, and people become units of measure rather than fellow humans with lives and stories like our own.
Arendt warns us of the danger of ignoring the full humanity of others. Our abdication is not neutral. When we fail to recognize the human toll, we are participating in moral injury to others and ourselves. It sustains injustice by helping it become tolerable.
In this time of conflict and exile we cannot afford to look away.
- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem," (1963).
- Francisco Goya, "The Disasters of War," (1810–1820). The Arthur Ross Collection.
COMING TOMORROW: Seeing and Hearing Each Other
