Like everyone, I’m shocked by the Epstein saga. I had no idea his reach was so extensive, and it’s this reach that disturbs me because it implicates our society as much as the people who knew him.
It’s got me thinking about Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic. The way we ‘attend’ to the world, she said, is not about how much effort we put into noticing things like the latest film or health advice, or how clever we are in understanding what is going on; it’s not even about avoiding distraction. It’s about our morality.
Attending to something is about how we hold ourselves in relation to reality. And genuine attention is rare because it is hard.
Most of the time, when we are dealing with people, we are impatiently waiting to give our opinion. We want to intervene or categorise; often we aren’t really listening at all because we’re preparing our response. This kind of attention helps us get things done; it moves the conversation on or closes it down altogether. It’s efficient but isn’t really just.
To truly attend means suspending our need to act, judge, fix something or move on. It’s more akin to waiting than doing. It’s more receptive than aggressive. It’s the willingness to sit through what is uncomfortable or unclear, and resisting the need to resolve it.
This makes it a moral action because it is not treating people as problems to be managed or ‘objects’ to be controlled. People get hurt when they are reduced to a stereotype or a statistic, or when they’re seen as pawns in someone else’s game.
For Simone Weil, the more fractured our attention, the easier it is for abuse to happen. When our attention is fragmented by work or the news or the notifications pinging on our phones, we lose the ability to truly see the suffering around us.
Epstein and the others like him were able to do what they did because of this failure of ‘attention’. Their victims’ experiences were minimised, ignored or treated as inconvenient. Their abusers (and other people too) let their attention be diverted towards power, prestige and money. Epstein would not have lasted so long had people not valued his position above the lives of the women he abused.
For years, credible reports of abuse were circulated but few people stayed with the whole truth long enough for things to change. The media moved on, institutions deferred responsibility, people got on with their lives. Attention came in flashes but never long enough for justice to win.
Some of this is our impatience. We don’t like complexity, or discomfort. We listen for a bit and then move on. It is always easier to dismiss or defer than to slow down and attend fully to what is going on.
And we shouldn’t forget that abuse deforms a person’s relationship with attention too. Weil said that to be deprived of attention is a kind of spiritual injury. We all wish to be seen for who we are, to be recognised and celebrated. When this is stolen from us, our humanity is stolen too, and we suffer deep spiritual harm. It is no surprise that one abiding truth about God is that God is fully and always attentive.
Our culture, however, rewards speed and constant motion. It also likes outrage. Outrage is a moral expression of alarm, but it can also be lazy because we replace ‘attention’ with emotion.
Weil reminds us that justice doesn’t begin with grand gestures but with our refusal to hurry past someone else’s experience. It is hard because we have to resist every thought or action that lessens the person before us. We must sit with discomfort (and not run away from it), stay with the testimony (and not minimise or diminish it) and wait with those who have neither the power nor the money to grab our interest.
Justice is another way of loving – loving as God does – with our full and undivided attention.
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