Brief 22: From how far away is it ok to watch people dying?

I remember, at school, being shown Pathé footage of Sir Donald Campbell's Bluebird crashing on Coniston Water. It seemed odd to me at the time that we were being shown a man's death, but we were, at least, more than 20 years, 300 miles, a camera and a chassis away. We didn't see Donald Campbell dying, we saw Bluebird crashing, and Donald Campbell was long dead, long mourned, long celebrated.

Still, I thought it odd to be shown it.

It's possible to watch a lot of people dying these days, if one's so inclined, either from a distance or close up. When Saddam Hussein was executed in late-2006, it was still seen as shocking that people were able to, and chose to, watch footage of it online. It seemed an aberration.

Now, as one scrolls through twitter or facebook, or sometimes even on the mainstream news (with a warning attached), people will share death, and people will watch death.

I've found I don't want to watch death. I don't click on those videos. I don't particularly think that makes me better or wiser than other people. When the video of George Floyd's arrest and murder was widely circulating, it was seen in some quarters as almost a worthy ordeal to watch it, to confront that terrible reality, not to look away.

But I find I have no wish to watch death close-up, either the event itself, what precedes it or goes after it. No doubt, some people do get some kind of "thrill" from it - I'm not using the word in a fully pejorative sense. I watch a lot of boxing, so I am not immune to getting to the complexity of getting a thrill from violence and potential danger. I have, in the last few years, started to be very uncomfortable if a fight started to show the danger signs (long, attritional, close fought battles).

The question in my title is semi-serious and has no real answer. Death is freely available now in a way that it didn't used to be. There are some events, like 9-11, which normalised the widespread death from a distance. Different people will draw the line of what they are prepared to watch at a different point. 

Footage of disasters like the Beirut explosion, the California fires, will make the mainstream news, perhaps because our brains are capable of severing the direct connection with death. There are still many of us who turn away in horror when the camera gets a little closer, whereas some hold their gaze even more intently.

I don't think there is a straightforward moral position to be taken on it, apart from "don't judge other people's line and don't be a hypocrite" ... which is the most universal and most difficult position to maintain.