Photo: The author in Indonesia
I was on an surf island in Indonesia frequented by die-hard mainly Middle-aged surfers and populated by Indonesians who could trace their ancestors back to when they settled there.
One day a professional photographer one the island who needed a portfolio to gain credits for a further qualification asked if she might take some pics of me. You might know the beat — black and white, high contrast, moody.
Later she was showing the pics to some of the locals and one of them said “I love your wrinkles. That is a face that has lived”.
George Orwell, of 1984 and Big Brother fame, said “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves” implying that every frown, smile, and deep thought is etched onto our faces (of course, Orwell couldn’t have experienced the immobilisation faces today after of plastic surgery). Our autobiographies are etched onto our faces, and it takes three seconds to see if it’s the kind of autobiography we want to learn more about.
Popular Substack philosopher Jonny Wilkinson indirectly references the neuroscience research that argues that when you first meet someone, it takes mere seconds to figure out if you will like them. It might be the way they make eye contact, how easily they smile, or the tilt of their head. You can figure out if you’ll get on with someone in the time it takes to draw a breath.
Our brains have evolved to live within communities. All of the known higher primates live in social groups, and so there’s reproductive advantage to being able to read others’ moods, body language, and faces. It’s been suggested that the reason we have whites around our irises is specifically so we can see where other people are looking. We can trust people more if we can track their gaze.
One of the greatest casualties of communicating with people through email and text messages is that we miss their faces. How easy is it to misinterpret someone’s words over email or posted comments? How often do we assume a comment is nasty or mocking when it was never intended to be so? How disappointing it is when you must explain to people you were engaging in banter or being sarcastic?
We can understand people more if we can track the when, the where and how of their gaze. It allows us to understand each other.
Philosophically, the face has an interesting role in ethics. Why is it easier to be cruel to somebody in the comments section rather than to their face? Why do we prefer to have hard conversations over the phone or via text message? Because interacting with someone’s face is qualitatively different from just speaking past them or from behind the curtain of a screen.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said that when you truly stare into somebody’s face, you open a part of your being that you cannot ignore. You see their vulnerability. You see their mortality. You perceive their vitality.
In his book, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi describes how the SS guard at Auschwitz almost never looked the prisoners in the eye, because to look was to recognize their humanity. Levi writes about how the guard would look through them, around them, anywhere but at their faces, because their faces were the one thing the system couldn’t destroy.
We are living in a society in which many happily avoid the faces of those they interact with. We can send abuse to somebody without seeing their expression crumble. We can swipe past somebody on a dating app like they are an object in a catalogue. We can read about thousands of dead in a headline and feel nothing, because there is no face.
Levinas argued that every time we remove the face from our interactions, we remove the thing that makes us ethical. Lying on a voice only phone call is easier than in someone’s presence.
To bring this up to date, the most important ethical question of today is “Can we really trust the digitized, manipulated images of the faces that endlessly pervade our screens?”
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.