Public apathy characterises my own country, Australia, too on a host of levels most obviously in regard to Aboriginal Australians, asylum seekers, respect for the environment, and high abortion and increasingly-high incarceration rates, to name a few areas where the levels of publicly-available information is horribly unmatched by the levels of public concern, let alone levels of real shared pathos. For those of us who have invested most deeply in the modernity project, however, this logic becomes more difficult to maintain, particularly when we are talking about some of the most intellectually- and industrially-sophisticated societies in the world (e.g., Germany and Japan who are collectively responsible for the deaths of about 48 million people between 19, or the United States whose <5% of the world’s population owns roughly 35–50% of the world’s civilian-owned guns by which, on average, 32 people are murdered each day (67% of all homicides involve a gun), 8 of whom are under the age of 20), or when evil comes to visit our homes, or our bodies. Where such is acknowledged, it is often passed off, as Douglas John Hall observes, as ‘a consequence of human ignorance, indecisiveness, superstition, and lack of scientific knowledge, intuitive or resourcefulness’. One of the real challenges in teaching such a course to those of us who live in the so-called first world is the profound levels of apathy that exist towards the depths and breadth of suffering and evil in our world. This semester, I’m teaching a course titled Suffering, Faith, and Theodicy.

Sontag on photography