From the New Yorker, obviously.

Over dinner one night last week, Shannon and I puzzled over people’s desire to see photos of Bin Laden’s corpse. We don’t relate to people who want to see photos of dead people. Neither of us believe that photos of Bin Laden’s corpse will convince anyone who doubts his death. But now I’m wondering if there’s a moral imperative for us, as Americans, to see more of what our country does, even if it’s morbid.

We choose to live here. We pay taxes. By doing so, we explicitly or tacitly support our government’s policies. We compromise some of our beliefs and desires, trusting that our democratic system will find solutions that, while not ideal for us as individuals, are the best for most.

But can we trust this system to work if we can’t—or refuse to—see what it produces?

On Wednesday last week, John Stewart said:

Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is—and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny gold coin.

Earlier, Philip Gourevitch, talking about the Bin Laden photos, but referring to the Abu Ghraib photos, said:

…a photograph of the violence you inflict is always, in very large measure, a self-portrait.

Gourevitch advocates against releasing the photos, but perhaps we’d benefit from being more self-aware. Maybe we should let ourselves see who we are. Perhaps we’d make better decisions. Perhaps we wouldn’t be so cavalier about sending our children to kill people in other countries.

The idea that transparency leads to better decisions is the thesis of transparency advocacy. It’s easy to ask for transparency when we imagine it uncovering corruption in other people, but it becomes uncomfortable when it threatens to reveal parts of ourselves that we’d rather pretend aren’t there.

Seeing images of our victims—both our enemies and our own soldiers—could make us more introspective. It could also desensitize and harden us. Or it could just make us despair. I don’t know what it would do.

When I lived in Venezuela, a local newspaper printed a full color photo of a corpse and its decapitated head on one of its covers. The story was about a local prison riot. Most people I talked to about it were offended by the photo and complained that the newspaper shouldn’t have printed it. No one I talked to saw the photo as a call for prison reform—they saw it as a sensationalistic way to sell newspapers. I imagine it worked.

And now my mind returns to the beginning. I might be willing to confront images of our violence, hoping that they’ll encourage me to work harder for peace. But I’m nervous about life among these images, afraid that they won’t do anything at all.