Sight Is Our Dominant Sense, But Is It Trustworthy?

Sight is probably, for most people, their most valued sense, though musicians and chefs may privilege hearing and taste. The blind will value other senses. Sight is the hegemonic sense, but its construction is controversial. “Ours is a visual age,” said E.H. Gombrich in Scientific American, and Alan Dundes concurred in Natural History: “Americans tend to see the world around them, rather than hear, feel, smell, or taste it.”

Sight and Trust

Sight is trusted: “Seeing is believing.” “I won’t believe it til I see it.” “Show me.” Our language affirms this: The Enlightenment, “I see [understand] what you mean.” We see eye to eye [think alike].” The Enlightenment, insight, leaders of vision, far-sighted, you see? And the converse is blind, unclear dim, obscure.

Sight, our noblest sense is identified with reason, our noblest faculty.

But sight is not totally trustworthy. It is highly subjective. Optical illusions, blind spots, both literal and metaphorical, short-sightedness, mirages, tunnel vision, and bad light, can distort sight.

“Things are not always what they seem,” and “appearances are deceptive,” are also proverbial but stress the unreliability of sight.

Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and one of the reasons so many innocent people have been convicted of crimes that they did not commit, as may be the tunnel vision of the police.

Then again, people looking at the same scene often see quite different things: one sees the shoes in a store window, another sees the cars, yet another notices the hawk overhead, and yet another is looking for coins and cigarette butts on the ground or unlocked bikes.

Again, it is axiomatic that people see what they want to see, and do not, or cannot, see what they do not want to see, even if it is clear to others. They are blind to the obvious.

Sight and Love

Sight is not just a personal sense, it is also a social sense. Georg Simmel postulated that society is founded on mutual glances: Of the special sense-organs, the eye has a uniquely sociological function. The union and interaction of individuals are based upon mutual glances. This is perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity that exists anywhere. The totality of social relations of human beings, their self-assertion, self­abnegations, intimacies, and estrangements, would be changed in unpredictable ways if there occurred no glance of eye to eye. This mutual glance between persons signifies a wholly new and unique union between them. The eye of a person discloses his own soul when he seeks to uncover that of another. (1921:358)

King Solomon said it first: “Who is this whose glance is like the dawn? She is beautiful and bright, as dazzling as the sun or the vision.” (Song of Songs 6:10).

The mutual glances may be followed by the chat, the drink, the meal, the bed, the baby, the family, and so on to the society. Of course, the whole process may be short-circuited anywhere along this line of fantasy; and usually is. Equally, however, while the glances do not usually result in the family way, the family way usually starts with them.

Edmund Burke argued in “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) that society is founded on the family, and with the family founded on the glance, society is like an inverted pyramid: We begin our public affections in the families. We pass on to our neighbourhoods and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting places. Such divisions of our country were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill. The love for the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. (1986:315)

In his essay “The Gift,” Marcel Mauss on the other hand, suggested that society is founded on gifts, for gifts elicit reciprocity and therefore community.

These three ideas are not so much contradictory as complementary: glance to gifts to family, begin with eyes, which are therefore immensely powerful.

Sight and Power

Despite the ocularcentrism of western culture since Plato, Sartre was paranoid about sight. He had served on the Maginot Line in World War II and was afraid of snipers. In a chapter in “Being and Nothingness” he wrote extensively about The Look: This inclination to run away, which dominates me and carries me along and which I am – this I read in the Other’s watchful look and in that other look – the gun pointed at me. (1969:354)

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George Orwell was likewise concerned about surveillance, not military but political. Big Brother is Watching You was the theme of 1984, describing the total control of society by surveillance, based on his understanding of Stalin’s tyranny.

Michel Foucault developed this theme further with his studies of the asylum, the clinic, the prison, and everywhere. In “Discipline and Punish” he explained that the body is surveilled and controlled by “the microphysics of bio-power:” at home, in schools, in factories, the military. “Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere” (1979:195)

Feminists have taken Foucault one step further to critique the male gaze as an instrument of patriarchal power. The point was illustrated by Sting: “Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you.” Stalking, not love.

Now China has effectively weaponized the surveillance state with Facial Recognition Technology virtually everywhere. The Canadian federal police recently admitted their use of powerful spyware (Guardian Weekly, 15 July 2022).

That said, the CCTV systems in place in the UK and the US helped to identify the Oklahoma City bomber in 1995, the 7.7 tube bombers in London in 2005, the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, the Russian assassins in Salisbury in 2018, the Saudi assassins in Istanbul in 2018, and of course the Congress attackers on January 6, 2021. The surveillance state does have its uses in identifying criminals, despite the cultural relativity of definitions.

Conclusion

Sight, then, is constructed in surprisingly contradictory ways. Trustworthy but unreliable. Founding society in the glance of love, love expressed in gifts and the building of society, and so the family and community—or as oppressive and an instrument of power (Sartre, Orwell, Foucault, feminists, China)— or again as the protective surveillance of CCTV in the democracies, itself another construction. Sight as love may be seen as at the bottom of an inverted pyramid on which the whole social structure depends, or as power at the top of a class-structured pyramid of power, all-seeing, omniscient, and omnipotent. The State as God. Whether one sees society as built on love or power may depend on the society or the viewer.