Benjamin Saltzman
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah.
I mean, that's the interesting thing is that part of my understanding is that
Really, since the mid-20th century, the years after World War II and ever more since then, there has been a kind of discourse, a rhetoric around the moral obligation to pay attention, right?
We understand paying attention as a guardrail against atrocity, against violence, against suffering.
we're kind of constantly told, don't turn away, don't look away.
And the more that I've thought about it and the more that I've kind of looked at this gesture in a wide variety of contexts, I've come to realize that actually the act of turning away, the gesture of turning away is a deeply human act and experience.
And it's an act and a gesture that carries all kinds of meaning.
We do it in a
wide range of circumstances.
We do it when we feel disgusted, we do it when we feel shame, we do it when we grieve, we do it when we think or when we feel embarrassed or when we're confronting something sort of awful or even in some cases when we're playing.
And the more that I've realized the range and thought about the range of meaning in this gesture, the more I've come to think of it as kind of a
something important actually, right?
To do away with it entirely, to avoid turning away entirely is not only impossible, but it leaves out an opportunity to process, to reflect, to think, to grieve, to feel, right?
And yeah, I don't want to get rid of those things because I think they're important to how we relate to the world.
Yeah.
No, that's the dilemma.
And there are two things I guess I'd say about that.
One is you've probably noticed that if you encounter someone or something that provokes you to turn away, you may –
notice that you still kind of retain the memory of not only the thing you turned away from, but also the act of turning away.
So it, it stays with you, um, in some ways more powerfully than if you sort of go about kind of constantly paying attention, constantly attending to and looking at everything one after the one after the other.