Objectivity
Along with “the expert,” “the objective observer” ruled a very explicit modern roost. This person was able to explain what was happening in a dispassionate manner, much like a scientist reporting on the results of an experiment: this was how things were set up, this was how things were conducted, and this is how it turned out. The person doing the report was implicated to some degree by an inevitable human subjectivity but only to some degree. The emphasis was on balance, fairness, adherence to the facts. Opinions were for editorials.
This emphasis created an almost automatic margin of civility. There was space for acknowledging events in and of themselves. What people made of events—“That’s too bad that people keep doing whatever they are doing” or “Wish people did something else”—was another matter. The pose of objectivity offered an official guise for any human occasion. What, for instance, was wretched may not have felt quite so wretched. Objectivity offered the corporate executive or politician an attitude in which uncertainty could seem certainty and degradation not quite so degrading.
This attitude played a critical part in modern daily life. The emotionalism that earlier times had prized—the swooning and fainting that characterized female manners and the touchy honor that characterized male manners—was set aside for something brisker and more calculated. Sentimentality was not banished but did not have the cultural purchase among the educated it once held. There was a very long way from watching some maudlin confection in 1853 to watching the parody of briskness and calculation that was Waiting for Godot in 1953. The quickened pace of modern life, the relentless twining of commerce and technology, and the horror of mass deaths as evinced by WWI, along with subsequent horrors, all contributed to a sense of life that needed a degree of remoteness to steady itself. There came to be more and more spaces that were larger and longer than an arm’s length or a voice across a table. There came to be experiences that were barely communicable or not communicable at all.
Objectivity is not empathy. It does not cross over but stays where it is. It is “cool” in the sense of the on-going slang word. It will not get unduly involved but is going to note what is occurring. Suburb-like, it dwells on the outskirts of knowledge. Often, as a pose, it has a male inflection: this is how the real world works. Feelings are only going to gum things up. Objectivity is a respite and haven from the uncertainties of emotion. It is also a testament to alienation.
Being objective in the sense of fair-minded is laudable. One wants a fair-minded judge. Being objective may also mean wariness, indifference, tiredness, or sheer contempt. As modern times evolved from the maelstrom of WWI, there came to reside within the ballyhoo of progress a certain numbness. How could there be such suffering? The answers, such as they were, were old ones to be found, for instance, in both the Old and New Testament, but for those harassed by modern times the old answers might seem dubious at best. “Next question” was what the press secretary said to the group of reporters.
The inclination to get on with life was like a vast machine no one could stop. The mourning practices of the Victorians came to seem both pointless and elaborate in the face of the millions who died in what was called “The Great War.” Whole nations were thrown into mourning. Thousands upon thousands of bodies were never found and never properly buried. Flesh and bone became vapor. The sense of the individual succumbed to monstrous statistics. The surfeit of death rendered grief senseless. The blankness of disbelief took over and then a frenzy to escape that blankness. People danced themselves silly and drank themselves silly. Or people listened to speeches urging revenge against those who profiteered, who stabbed the nation in the back, who had taken away their nation’s greatness. They roared their agreement.
A lash from an overseer’s whip, a slap a libertine gave a prostitute, a spanking a parent gave a child, a bayonet in an enemy’s chest, these were all direct brutalities. Once death started to fall from the sky, once death came in a cloud of gas, once a submarine could blow up a ship without so much as surfacing, something new in the annals of insensitivity made itself known. This was hard to speak to because such remoteness had nothing to do with the intimate scale of misery. The response of the soldiers in the trenches in WWI was a ghastly weariness, life narrowed to a few muddy yards of hell, shell shock. From ghastly to ghostly was one mere vowel.
Objectivity banished ghosts or, at least, brushed them aside as relics of an earlier, superstitious era. There was so much palpability in modern times to lay hands on: to hold the steering wheel, to turn on the engine, to fly and look down at the clouds. To look down at the clouds! That was what angels did but, like ghosts, angels were impalpable and unverified. Those angels and ghosts once visited dreams where they cast enticements and admonitions. In modern times, however, such visitations came to seem more and more incredible. The great daylight of objective explanation easily routed the visions of night. Charles Lindbergh flew through the night into the day. The feat was mythic but each part of his flying machine was explicable.
Without the obeisance, however nominal, to objectivity, the vast bureaucracies that have been an essential part of modern times could not exist. I think of Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens pushing insurance papers around. Both men were signal adventurers of the imagination. To work in a bureaucracy was to be within another sort of imaginative haven, one where purpose existed in terms of goals and aims that subsumed the individual but, as they were part of the fabric of the society, reassured the individual. The distance that inhered in such an endeavor made all the vast modern enterprises possible—from making cars to running stock exchanges to “liquidating” entire populations. The distance was precise and pitiless.
This reminds me the heinous "fine people on both sides" quote from the orange putrescence. Creating false moral equivalence in the name of balance and objectivity is one of the worst abuses of ethics in modern times. Evil triumphs when good men say nothing in the name of appearing objective.