THE ETHICS OF ATTENTION TO SUFFERING: BETWEEN SILENCE AND NOISE

 

I am haunted by the deafening silence surrounding Iran, just as I am haunted by every silence where there should be outrage, and by every eruption of hysteria where there should, instead, be restraint and reflection. And this silence does not come from the uninformed. It comes from those who know.

Intellectuals, students, activists, political voices fully aware of what is unfolding; voices that in other circumstances would rush to indignation, even at the cost of simplification, now choose caution, restraint, or complete muteness in the face of Iran’s brutal repression.

The numbers alone should shatter complacency. Thousands have been killed. Arrests and executions have escalated. State censorship, communication blackouts, and the exclusion of independent observers make definitive counts impossible, but what is already known is enough to reveal the scale of the tragedy.

And yet this reality is met with a disturbing quiet. Many within the new left—so quick to condemn other states when the narrative suits—remain strangely silent before Iranian brutality. Some even relativize impositions such as compulsory veiling, condemning millions of women to a life of confinement beneath fabric, while ignoring the suffering they could name.

This is not mere case of cognitive dissonance. It is moral abdication: a conscience that adapts itself to selective outrage, preferring safe, performative causes while turning away, almost complicitly, from suffering that is real, documented, and ongoing.

Here emerges what might be called a conviction complex: an ideological rigidity in which moral certainty becomes a shield against reality. It is not ignorance, but excess certainty. A certainty that refuses confrontation when suffering does not fit the adopted political script. Its consequences are corrosive. Victims are hierarchized, indignation is managed, silence becomes normalized. Horror ceases to be absolute and becomes conditional. Solidarity becomes strategy.

Iran’s repression exposes not only the violence of a regime, but also the fragility of international attention, and the way human suffering becomes hostage to the logic of contemporary media.

Global coverage fluctuates. Stories appear briefly, focused on isolated episodes, diplomatic whispers and sanctions while daily violence on the ground fades into fragmentation. In much of today’s media economy, only the episodic and the spectacular endure. One day, headlines with vague numbers and the next day all is forgotten.

This volatility is not neutral. It shapes perception, dissolves ethical urgency, and determines the pressure institutions feel compelled to exert.

In this context, the role of the media becomes paradigmatic. Its silence carries serious moral responsibility. Journalism ought not be a spectator of power, nor a distributor of convenient indignation. Its ethical vocation is precisely to illuminate what regimes seek to obscure: to insist where violence demands silence, to give voice to those pushed into invisibility.

When the media chooses evasion, be it out of fear, ideological comfort, or editorial calculation, it becomes complicit in the machinery of erasure. And history has a habit of demanding accountability. One day the question will not only be why governments hesitated, or activists fell silent, but why so many newsrooms looked away.

A journalist recently remarked that the media is dying because its conduct has become suicidal: not only under external pressure, but through voluntary abdication, surrendering credibility omission after omission. In Iran’s case, silence turns atrocity into background noise, and human life into disposable abstraction.

The contrast is striking when one recalls the loud publicity surrounding symbolic actions such as the flotilla to Gaza, compared with the near-total silence on Iran. The flotilla dared to sail because its participants knew that they were safe: safe to provoke, safe to perform, safe to return home as moral heroes.

No flotilla will ever sail toward Iran. Not because the suffering is lesser, but because the risks are real and because the events in Iran disrupts the imposed narrative. What is revealed is a kind of courage that exists only where there is no danger, alongside the quiet collapse of many self-proclaimed heroes of resistance.

When suffering fails to mobilize because it is politically inconvenient, when solidarity depends on safety, when indignation is rationed according to ideological comfort, moral judgment gives way to moral management.

What remains is an unbearable ethical nausea, reminiscent of Sartre’s La Nausée, but displaced from the individual to the collective: a repulsion at how easily values are bent to fit interests, while suffering that could be named is ignored.

Meanwhile, Persians, men, women, children, continue to fall under the fire of the ayatollahs, while we deliberately turn our faces away.

This modus operandi is not new. Arendt warned that the greatest danger is not fanaticism, but the normalization of evil. Levinas reminds us that ethics dies when we stop responding to the face before us. Resisting the banalization of evil requires solitary courage, and here Ralph Waldo Emerson still speaks with unsettling clarity:

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion.
It is easy in solitude to live after our own.
But great is the man who in the midst of the crowd
keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Iran today stands at that intersection: a test not of information, but of integrity. Moral fidelity is almost always solitary. And for that very reason, it is the only kind worthy of the name.

Because silence is never empty. It is a choice. And in the face of atrocity, it becomes a language of consent. The world may look away for a day, for a week, for a season, but the dead do not disappear. And neither will the question.