Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. I’ve just started working on a joint physics-biology project with a team of colleagues who work on human vision. I’ve learned something remarkable from them. Our vision, it seems, has evolved to be especially sensitive to rapid movement and change in our environment. But this life-saving awareness comes with a drawback: it means that if our eyes are presented with exactly the same unchanging view for even a short period, we become completely blind to it – the vision scientists say that we ‘adapt.’ It’s partly to avoid this adaptive blindness that we continually need to shift our gaze. Adaptation of perception seems to apply to other senses as well – it’s part of the way our brains are wired. It’s also why we invent the idea of ‘new normal,’ in even social or moral ways. But here lies a greater danger – that we become all too quickly accustomed to environments that are toxic, including the morally poisonous. We become so continually exposed that we fail to see the wrong, even the evil, for what it is. Whether our perceptual exposure is to a UK covid death rate equivalent to another twin-towers tragedy every two weeks, or another Ukrainian suburb shelled into rubble, or a steady drip of normalised untruth in political life, our sense of shame is all too rapidly adapted into a shrug. This is why, especially in times of rapid change, we need reminders from perspectives that have deep and unshifting roots. Paying attention to them is what the British thinker Iris Murdoch called ‘unselfing.’ Seeing the world by the external light of the good, she writes, is an act of love: ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ The writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrews urges the ultimate ‘unselfing’ perspective, when they combine in the same breath one of the oldest promises in the Bible – ‘God has said, never will I leave you, never will I forsake you’ – with a recognition of the personal incarnation of Murdoch’s ‘light of the good’ in the world, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today and for ever.’ Truth, love, ‘unselfing’ for the sake of others – these are timeless human perceptions to keep in our field of view if we are to be human today and tomorrow. If we ever become blind by adapting to their absence, we risk becoming blind to humanity itself.