Moral Distance, Or The Root Of Atrocity

Moral distance is an act of unseeing, a sustained effort to not recognize what is plainly visible. This distance can be a momentary flash or a prolonged disengagement. It manifests when a child cries for help and is classified as 'manipulative', when suffering is renamed as 'drama', when the victim becomes the problem. This is the work of moral distance. It requires the labor of transfiguration: the suffering person must be transformed, through language and category, into a thing that does not demand a response.

Before one can harm another, distance itself must be constructed to overtake moral proximity. Distance precedes harm: unless one is a sociopath, the victim must first be made less than human. An abusive father would not beat his son if he saw the full human his fists struck, the hopes and yearning he carried in his own childhood. If he felt that terror and fear in his own body as he raised his fist, he would never find the will to do harm. I learned this not from a textbook, but from my grandmother's mouth on a scorching summer morning.

I was 19 years old, living in an RV in Trinity County, California, during a summer that often exceeded 100 degrees. My grandmother would visit as a reprieve from the heat. On this particular morning, I heard the tires of her Subaru crunching the gravel driveway, and I opened the door, excited to see her.

"Gay people are an abomination." These were her first words, her greeting.

This simple statement performed the miracle of transformation. What had been her grandson, a human standing in front of her, became reduced into a category of theological and moral anomaly. The word "abomination" is a word of force, a willful reduction of a person into a thing that warrants destruction, a subhuman. Through language, I was reclassified from human to theological error. In just a sentence, she collapsed hundreds of millions of human beings into abomination.

She didn't know.

This is how moral distance operates: it constructs the precondition for harm, an active categorization of person into a thing often through the use of language. My grandmother drove a long distance to see me; she cared enough to make the journey. Although she didn't realize her grandson was gay, she effectively categorized herself in a theological lineage of 'us' and 'them'. She declared universally that she belonged to a group of moral Christians: the heterosexual believer, and she declared that gay people existed in a category that required no individual assessment. The distance was established before I opened the door.

This language was hers to apply, not create. The word abomination is drawn from Leviticus, refined by centuries of theological interpretations:

You shall not lie with a male as a woman. It is an abomination.

Leviticus 18:22, New King James Version

Although the text condemns an act, my grandmother condemned a category of person. This transformation, from action to ontology, is the essential work of moral distance. It makes the distance total and permanent: if I had commited an abomination, I might repent. But if I am an abomination, I cannot be redeemed without ceasing to exist. The distance becomes absolute.

This is the transcendent force of language: the transformation of verb into noun, the reduction of man into thing, the transmutation of action into essence. The child is not being difficult; the child is difficult. The person is not acting crazy; the person is crazy. The human is not committing an abomination; the human is an abomination. The distance becomes insurmountable because it is woven through the person's very existence.

What followed was inevitable. When she found out I was gay, she sent me a message, but I didn't respond. I have not spoken to her since. This distance, constructed through language, authorized withdrawal. Her framework had transformed me into something incompatible with her moral world; the mechanism worked as designed.

This mechanism operates at all scales, from interpersonal conflict to genocide. Before the Rwandan genocide, Tutsis were called "cockroaches", not people who acted badly, but creatures who were vermin. Before the atrocities of the Holocaust, Jews were not people who practiced Judaism, rather they were "Untermensch": subhuman. Before the child is beaten, he is not disobedient; the child is bad. The linguistic transformation from action to being is a universal precondition. The distance must be established before the force can be applied.

Moral distance is not simply a moral failure of bad people. It is the systematic mechanism by which harm becomes necessary and even righteous. The person who creates distance need not hate. My grandmother did not hate; she loved God. The guard at the concentration camp need not be sadistic; he is following orders. The stranger who ignores a child's suffering need not be cruel; they are simply maintaining boundaries. Moral distance is the structure that makes ordinary people capable of the most extraordinary harm.

Simone Weil, writing about the Iliad, described force as that which turns a human into a thing. But this reduction requires a prior condition: the refusal to see a human as human in the first place. Force cannot operate on what we recognize as fully human, just as precarious and complex as ourselves: a person with hope, despair, dreams, and family. The distance must come before force. Without it, the hand wielding the weapon would falter, the finger on the trigger would hesitate, the pen signing the deportation order would pause. Moral distance is not the result of force but its architect.

The trained soldier is not only taught the mechanics of killing, but the application of distance. Through training, he indeed is taught how to handle a gun, how to navigate terrain, how to be a controllable unit in the name of a mission. But, more importantly, the enemy becomes "hostile", a "target", an "insurgent". The military understands that distance precedes force: the enemy must be reduced into category before the trigger can be pulled. Without distance, the hand shakes. With it, the hand is steady. The distance is the precondition; killing is merely execution.

The abusive parent sees not a child who is acting out, but a nuisance that must be subdued through beatings. The abusive father sees not his child, but the walking, breathing, and mocking limitation opposed onto his life, the thing that reduced his own dreams to ash. Through this, he beats not a child but a symbol. When his own son brings home a book titled "How to Raise Happy Children", he says "This would never work on you." This distance was absolute. I was not his son in those moments, I was the obstacle to his life. Only through this transformation could he strike without hesitation. He could not beat what he saw as human.

The bureaucrat processes not people but documentation. The social worker sees not a child in danger, but insufficient documentation of harm. The insurance adjuster sees not a dying patient but a claim outside coverage parameters. The bureaucratic system creates distance through rote procedure: forms that ask questions incapable of holding complexity, categories that can't hold the full human, protocols that distribute responsibility until no one bears it. The bureaucrat holds moral comfort because they simply followed procedure. Yet the child bleeds, the patient dies, the family is deported. The distance enabled the harm while protecting each participant from the recognition of what they have done.

In each case, the sequence is identical. First, the human is transformed into category. The enemy becomes a "target." The child becomes an "obstacle." The person becomes a "case." Second, this distance removes the natural resistance to causing harm. The hand that would falter becomes steady. Third, force operates without impediment. The mechanism functions without malice. The soldier doesn't need to hate. The father doesn't need to be sadistic: he needs only to see a symbol rather than a son. The bureaucrat doesn't need to be cruel: she only needs to follow the form. Distance is the architecture; force is merely what the architecture permits.

But what happens when distance fails to form? The soldier who sees the enemy as human suffers moral injury that manifests in PTSD that never heals, the inability to keep fighting, the replaying of the atrocities in his own body. The parent who recognizes the humanity of their child no different than their own cannot strike; the hand stops midair. The bureaucrat who allows herself to see the person behind the forms cannot continue denying claims; she either breaks protocol or quits. When we recognize the full humanity of another, to see them as we see ourselves, harm becomes psychologically unbearable. Distance removes this impediment. It is not the result of force but its prerequisite.

The creation of distance is one mechanism, but its maintenance is another. A child beat in a flash of fury could be explained as a loss of control, but a child beaten throughout his childhood requires sustained effort to not see. The suffering is visible. The bruises accumulate. The fear is unmistakable. Yet the distance holds. This is the active work of sustained force: the daily reconstruction of categories that permit harm to continue.

As a child, my father beat me routinely. Any small disturbance would trigger him to pick me up and throw me into walls, the strategic shoves into furniture so I would not risk fracturing a bone that would expose him. I would scream in total fear, and I sobbed. When this happened before I needed to walk to the bus stop, he would yell in repetition, "Stop crying!" This is a masterstroke of maintenance; if my outward cries were extinguished into inward silence, he could convince himself that what he did was not that bad.

In the first grade, my teacher asked me how I got some bruises. I told her that I fell while playing outside, afraid to upset the father who struck me. She routinely told my father that I was a well-behaved boy, and that he raised me well. Although skeptical, she accepted my lie. She ignored her intuition to believe a more comfortable reality that the child in front of her could never be abused. The distance required her active participation. She had to choose the comfortable lie over her own intuition. This choice was not made once but daily, each time she saw me. The maintenance of distance is not passive: it is the repeated selection of blindness over sight.

One time, my father collapsed to the floor in a drunk stupor. I called 911, and I let the first responders enter our home. They pointed towards a litany of empty beer bottles in the kitchen, asking if my father drank those tonight. I told them no. Eventually, CPS had a scheduled visit to our home. My father told me that if I ever called 911 again, he would give me away. I remember the kind lady from CPS asking me to turn off my TV playing Cartoon Network, and she asked me various questions about my home life. "Does he hurt you?", she asked. Of course, I looked into her eyes and told her no. Question after question was met with denial, and she believed me despite my bruises, despite the 911 call. The system had encountered visible evidence of harm: the emergency call, the bruises on a child's body, a scheduled investigation. Yet the distance held. She needed only my denial to maintain it. She needed the ability to check the boxes that would allow her to close the case and move on. The maintenance of distance required my participation: I was made complicit in my own unseeing. The system asked questions designed to be answered with no, and when I provided the expected answers, the distance was preserved.

She could leave believing she had done her job.

The maintenance of distance is harder than its creation, yet it happens daily across every institution and relationship. To create distance requires applying a category. To maintain it requires constant reinterpretation: my father reinterpreted my silence as evidence that the harm wasn't severe. My teacher reinterpreted bruises as playground accidents. The CPS worker reinterpreted visible evidence through a child's coached denials. Each act of maintenance was a choice: not always conscious, but a choice nonetheless. The distance held not because my suffering was hidden but because maintaining the distance was easier than breaking it. To ignore an abused child was more comfortable than to protect him.

This is the harrowing miracle of moral distance. At its extremes, it requires not an individual failure but a system of maintenance. The abuser maintains distance by the force of the victim's silence. The teacher maintains distance through the comfortable belief of calming lies. The institution meant to protect harm enables it through procedures that ask the wrong questions. Each participant in this system denies responsibility: my father because I made him do it, the teacher because she had no proof, the CPS worker because I denied abuse. Yet the child suffers under the cumulative weight of these maintained distances. The harm is collective even when no single person believed they were culpable. The child reduced to a thing, seized by lifelong disorders enabled by collective ignorance.

After the CPS worker left, I sat on the floor in front of the TV. Cartoon Network played, but I couldn't track the images. The same shows that once interested me fell flat, just a blur of sound and image. I felt distant, like my brain was separate from my body. There was a heaviness in my chest, not a pain but rather an absence, like something essential was missing. Its loss felt permanent. I had just participated in my own erasure, and my body registered what my mind couldn't: I was utterly alone in a world that wanted to erase me.

Before the visit, I thought that some form of rescue was possible, that if the right person saw me then I could be saved. After she left, that option became cognitively impossible. Not 'unlikely', but impossible. The category of 'people who might see me' ceased to exist in my mental map of the world.

I learned to recognize signals long before distance was applied. When I talked to some people, I felt this contortion in my body, the realization that this person is incapable of seeing the reality in front of them. What once was moral distance that enabled the beatings manifested into the emotional distance between me and other people, the inability to believe they could ever perceive my true reality.

I learned to perform 'fine' with precision. At school, when a teacher asked how I was, my face arranged itself into a configuration that would not invite questions. Not a smile, but a neutral mask that communicated 'nothing to see here.' The performance became automatic. My body knew which posture to hold, which tone to use, which level of eye contact would satisfy without connecting. The distance I once tried to break, I now maintained myself. It was the only way to survive in a world where being seen was dangerous.

Years later, I created a Facebook account to search for my family. I found my brother's profile; he was engaged now, his girlfriend graduated from college, both in a distant town. I looked at his face in the photos. It produced no feeling. Not anger or longing: nothing. The face that should register as 'brother' appeared as a stranger whose life events had no relation to me. The neural pathway that once connected 'this face' to 'family' had been severed. He existed as information, not as relation. I closed the app.

I can remember the young man who opened the door excited to see his grandmother. I can picture his face, recall what he hoped for. But when I try to locate him in my body, in my sense of myself, there is only rupture. He is not 'past me': he is someone who ceased to exist. I was not built from him; I was built from what remained after sustained distance destroyed him. When I try to feel a connection between him and me, I only feel a void, a severance. I share his memories but not his substance. I am not him recovered, but I am what distance created from his remains.

This is the application of force through continuous moral distance. Not merely harm but transformation: the genocide survivor who hears the screams of his parents in his dreams, the abused child who develops bipolar disorder from years of beating that rewired his brain, the survivor who looks at pictures of family and feels nothing in his chest. Those systematically reduced to a thing learn to live as a thing, to maintain their own distance, to make themselves unseeable, to sever connection of faces to feeling. The ghastly screams of force manifest in the body. The greatest harm is not the application of force but rather what was made impossible: the capacity to be seen, to trust being seen, to believe connection is possible. The body keeps the score.

I am not immune to the prescription of distance. Every weekend, I see a particular homeless man stands with his dog at my local grocery store asking for food. His shoes are tattered, his hair unkempt, his clothes dirty. Sometimes I feel the contortion: the classification, the distancing, the comfortable narrative that allows me to keep walking with a bag full of groceries. Sometimes I encounter suffering in others and I construct reasons why this suffering does not demand my response. The distance learned as survival became the distance I use to survive.

We cannot maintain proximity to all suffering in this world. To see every human as fully human as ourself, as precarious and complex, without end would be mentally torturous. This is to hold in perpetuity all suffering in the world: the mother in Gaza whose children are buried under rubble, the elderly man dying alone, the animals in mass slaughterhouses confined in inhumane cages. If we truly saw them all, truly felt the proximity to every instance of suffering our choices enable or ignore, we could not function. In July, I found myself feeling the weight of the world's suffering on my shoulders, and I fell into absolute despair that resulted in me sleeping on a mat in my work office. I could not function; some distance is not moral failure but cognitive necessity.

Yet there is a difference between distance chosen consciously and distance maintained unconsciously. Between that which is needed to function and that which is needed to enable atrocity. When I walk past that homeless man, I know what I am doing. I recognize the mechanism operating. I feel the distance widening the gap between him and I. My grandmother's distance was inherited, unexamined, and absolute. My father's distance was deliberate, cultivated, and violent. The bureaucrat's distance is institutionally codified, distributed, and systemic. Each maintains distance without recognizing it as such: the first act of harm begins in justification. Consciousness does not erase distance, but it prevents the comfortable lie that no distance exists at all.

I visited Portland last May. I walked to an incredible park in Northwest Portland, and I accidentally stumbled into the Holocaust memorial. Inscribed on the towering black stone was the story of a child:

Once upon a time there was Elzunia

Dying all alone

Because her daddy is in Majdanek

And in Auschwitz her mommy.

I felt a shatter in my body, an agony of what felt like my soul being turned inside out. My body felt rooted to that memorial in that moment; the people and city around me ceased to exist. I remember my mind racing, tormented by the questions of how many Elzunias died alone and forgotten, how many children suffered and died at the hands of systemic evil, how many trembling souls were erased from history with their whispers lost to the wind.

Something within my brain collapsed. It was the most wrenching agony I have ever felt. All I wished in that moment was to offer my soul into the wind if it meant Elzunia could enter this world again into a warm, safe life.

There is no comfort from distance, only sudden reprieve. Just a week later, I found myself once again feeling that distance in my body, that separation between me and others.

Conscious recognition is the only antidote to our unconscious construction of distance. This is a painful daily act of witness without redemption.

We see moral distance everywhere, from every maintained boundary, every moment of looking away. The mechanism operates in plain sight. The homeless person becomes a 'vagrant'. The suffering coworker becomes an 'incompetent fool'. The child in pain becomes 'not my responsibility'. We watch the categories form in front of us, and we feel it in our bodies. We recognize when we choose to turn a person into a thing, when we choose ignorance over clarity.

There is no comfort, solution, or redemption. Only occasional moments of grace. We can only offer recognition; this is our responsibility in preventing atrocity at scale.