Lee Siegel suggests that, in the wake of news scandals such as the Woody Allen and Dylan Farrow case, “you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art … has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem”:
There are those events in which something unequivocally bad is claimed to have been done, but we cannot know what actually happened: Farrow and Allen. Then there are those in which we know that something happened but can’t decide if it was bad: Edward Snowden. Finally (though there are countless sub-categories), there are situations in which we know that something unequivocally bad happened, and we know who did it, but, because the law in these situations seems so weak, even perverse, we—society—do not know whether to blame the perpetrator, the victim, or the legal system: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin; the recent shooting over texting in the Florida movie theatre.
The confusion created by these mounting, everyday enigmas is so impenetrable that it is difficult to say whether this trend of being incapable of moral closure is itself good or bad. On the one hand, we are now able to talk about injuries and abuses that were formerly swept under the rug. Twenty years ago, adults who, as children, had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, or were the young victims of Jerry Sandusky, would not have come forward, for fear of being accused of mendacity or mental illness. On the other hand, our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees. As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life. Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period.
The Dish 