The Power of an Image

Lately, a word I’ve heard come up again and again regarding the televised murder of George Floyd is, “ugly”. All over the world people witnessed a policeman with his knee on this man’s neck and all over the world people protested. Throughout the media commentary many speakers denounce the appalling ugliness of the event and I’m reminded of something Alan Watts once said- that morality is the aesthetics of behavior. Our sense of beauty is connected to our sense of rightness. We recoil at ugliness. We don’t need a law to see that cold-hearted murder is hideous, that slow death through suffocation, like any other torture, is hideous. We understand meaning through imagery.  A knee on the neck is what oppression looks like.

Unity looks like the protests. The collective “NO!” joined people together all over the world, brought together to reject the ugliness of a power dynamic built on obedience. Erich Fromm wrote many essays where he distinguished between authoritarian ethics and humanitarian ethics. In the first, obedience is the only rule, all disobedience could get you shot for failure to obey a lawful order, especially if you are not white. Humanitarian ethics is based on the idea, existing in some form in every religion, that we should treat others like we would like to be treated. We are asked to imagine the other’s feelings through ours as the only rule we need. How could torture exist if people were raised on that model? This is the evolutionary step that needs to be taken.

Laws are the authoritarian cage that keeps us in place. We need to find more cooperative structures of order that respect individual judgment and context. A ‘sentinel’ in the Seattle Police-Free Zone emphasized that the first step was listening, not assuming you know what’s wrong. When a ranting man knocked over a trach can, rather than getting on his case, the sentinel stared picking up the trash, others joined in and the man eventually apologized. How we behave has more effect on people than what we tell them to do.

Crisis leads people to express their depths. This was beautifully expressed in an image from the protests that showed a heartfelt connection between an individual protestor and a police officer. The earnest request for understanding reaches toward our common humanity and demonstrates the beauty of common feeling.

The psychiatrist Alfred Adler understood the power of beautiful form in developing character. He advised having beautiful objects and art around the house, particularly when raising children explaining  that art educated our sense of value, our sense of proportion and harmony. It is a reservoir of common feeling that resonates without language. Concerned with the felt inner life, whatever feeling it stirs generate new thoughts in each individual. We all have the capacity to understand each other. Looking at art from other cultures probes what matters to them, what’s different enlarges our capacity for understanding.

Beauty is a larger concept than mere physical attractiveness. It is a sense that connects us to the world. I think of connecting as a spiritual impulse and disconnecting as a criminal impulse.

The horrible image of one man squeezing the life out of another shows a tragic level of disconnection We feel it like a blow to the gut, this demonstration of how criminal our authoritarian systems have become. The protests are a connecting force aimed at positive change. This is our opportunity to consider how systems are structured, where different kinds of expertise might be better suited to some situations, and needs are addressed rather than rules policed. Public order should be guided by harmony in the community, settling disputes and complaints as they arise and coming to agreements about what will best resolve it.