The first thing I do on waking up is look at my phone. Mental wellness experts advise against this, but I can’t help it: I’m addicted. I also think we have a responsibility to know what is happening in the world. On X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), serious content is hedged with jokes, and news is processed in an atmosphere of generalised derision, where the first impulse to an event is to imagine how it can be mocked. So, each morning, hormones and ethics intermingle and I am no more sober than a Facebook-addled Baby Boomer. Several weeks ago, what I saw was a photograph of five soldiers standing in the rubble of a ruined city. Each soldier held a walking stick, leaning their weight on it slightly, only pretending to need it. These were young men, and they were all grinning. The joke, it seems, is that the walking sticks belonged to people who were dead.

The image didn’t so much shock as linger. As I thought about it, I was reminded of a moment in Paradise Lost. Published in its final form in 1674, John Milton’s epic poem has been an authority on evil and arguably the most influential modern portrait of Satan. In retelling the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, Paradise Lost is an account of the origin of evil, and over the past 350 years, countless modern readers have used it to make sense of the evil they were witnessing in their own times. And it presents us with a scene of derision similar to the picture of the soldiers.

In Heaven, Satan raises a rebellion against God, and the rebel angels fight a battle against God’s faithful. After the first day, having failed to get the better of his enemy, Satan turns to subterfuge. He tells his followers to mine ore and use it to make artillery and on the second day, the war machines are unleashed. These devastate God’s angels, knocking them over like bowling pins. Milton writes: “Satan beheld their plight, / And to his mates thus in derision called.” We offered them terms of peace, Satan cries to his followers, and now they are dancing. Maybe they are celebrating our offer? Of course, he has offered war, not peace, and what he calls their dancing is, instead, the contortions of pain. Satan’s followers then imitate him in deriding their enemies’ pain.

Derision is a morally fraught kind of laughter, associated with scorn, scoffing, and contempt. The French psychoanalyst Denis Vasse, author of a book entitled La Dérision ou la Joie? (Seuil, 1999), describes derision as violent laughter at a subject rather than a situation. Unlike irony, it does not communicate its meaning to that subject: instead, it turns away, denying all relation. Derision is what happens when you no longer believe that dialogue is possible, and it is often an expression of the breakdown of political bonds. In turn, it diminishes our ability to relate to what is happening in the world. It is a habit as debilitating as it is difficult to shake.

Under what conditions is derision evil? One summer, as a child, I was sitting on a beach in Spain with one of my siblings watching my mother and brother walking in from the sea. Suddenly, their bodies started to twitch awkwardly. This made us laugh. But when they finally reached where we were sitting, they told us that they had been walking on sharp coral. I knew intuitively that it was unacceptable to laugh at people who were in real pain, rather than mere discomfort, and I felt ashamed. Mocking your enemy is a custom of war – in Homer’s Iliad, Aeneas taunts his enemy by dancing to avoid his spear – but Satan’s derision mocks his enemy’s pain. When humans do this to each other, it is an attack on the very basis of their shared humanity.

Derision isn’t necessarily immoral. The Old Testament pictures God laughing at non-believers: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Psalms 2:4). Later in Paradise Lost, Milton invites the reader to join him in self-righteous derision. On the third day of the War in Heaven, the rebel angels are driven to the verge of Heaven, forcing them to cast themselves out, and down to Hell, and Milton compares them to goats jumping off a cliff in blind panic. We are supposed to laugh at this fate: its cartoonishness, the fact that the rebels brought it on themselves, and the lack of visceral bodily damage, means it is not as shocking as the earlier scene of derision. But some doubt remains: does laughing at their misfortune make us Satanic? Derision may be fine for an omniscient God but for us it involves a moral risk.

Politics often confronts us with situations that afford no stable perspective, and Paradise Lost proposes to teach us how to deal with them. In a story about God and Satan, we expect to know where our sympathies lie. But Milton’s rich, disorientating poetry leaves us uncertain. We can’t be certain that it is Satan and not God, our enemy and not our ally, who is the agent of evil. Milton teaches us to listen carefully to political arguments, something that the citizens of a functioning democracy should know how to do. In our world, today, politics is just as often a matter of looking at images – and we don’t process them in a sober, judicious public sphere, but in a world of delirious investments.

Digital minimalism, an increasingly popular philosophy, argues that we should reduce our dependency on technology. Its suave spokesmen, Andrew Sullivan and Cal Newport, tell us that we are “bombarded” by images – and it is striking that the language of warfare is used. We all know that our attention is being mined by big tech via our screens. But what to do about this when political events urgently demand our attention?

Few living people have thought more carefully about the responsibilities of looking at images than the writer and photographer Teju Cole. Born in the United States and raised in Nigeria, Cole is the author of three novels, mysterious and melancholy semi-autobiographical meditations on cities, history and catastrophe. A prodigious traveller, he has written perceptively of the effects of visiting Gaza. But it is his essays on photography, collected in Known and Strange Things (Faber, 2016) and Black Paper (University of Chicago Press, 2021), that make him a guide to a conflict playing out more than ever in images – though never, of course, only in images.

Cole is sceptical about the ethics of conflict photography. In a 2018 essay, “What Does it Mean to Look at This?” he questions the idea that looking at images of dead and wounded bodies will yield political good. Instead, he argues that other kinds of images might prove more effective in bringing about political action. Photography does, he says, “in unpredictable, unreliable, but unignorable ways help make the demands of justice visible.” He mentions the images of American soldiers mocking tortured Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, which undermined the moral justification of the War on Terror. It might not be the images we expect that turn out to make a difference.

A photographer, Tunde, is the protagonist of Cole’s most recent novel, Tremor (Faber, 2023), and what is most striking in the book is not what happens but Tunde’s attitude to aesthetics. Near the beginning of the novel, he decides to take a photograph of a neighbour’s hedge, but the owner comes out and shouts at him with an intensity that is surely racially motivated. Tunde returns later to photograph the hedge, only to decide against it. Finally, at the end of the novel, he takes the picture of the bush. It’s not only photography that receives this care. If Tunde hears a song he likes, he resists the temptation to find out its name. Instead, he turns the volume up or down. His restraint is a kind of negative capability, holding at bay the impulse to foreclose experience through consumption, appropriation or judgement.

Cole’s own photographic practice demonstrates a similar restraint. His most recent photobook, Pharmakon (MACK, 2024), contains meticulously captured images of oblique, peripheral, unremarkable views. A series of surfaces from which posters have been torn, leaving only scraps of paper and tape. The window frame of a ferry. A statue wrapped in fabric. A series of large, white rocks. A bush outside a large house (the same one Tunde photographs?). A black door, its letterbox like an inscrutable mouth. For a while, I thought Cole’s photographs less interesting than his writing, but Tunde’s restraint helped me to understand their obliqueness in relation to Cole’s thinking about politics. Pharmakon is an Ancient Greek word, meaning both remedy and poison, and also scapegoat. It is the word Plato used to describe how writing is at once an aid to memory and memory’s destroyer. Likewise, photography can be both a poison or a remedy for empathy. Cole’s invitation to attend to seemingly unremarkable views might help make us more sensitive to other images.

In a 2019 lecture entitled “Ethics”, Cole describes developing a sensitivity that is fundamental to witnessing:

“I open myself up to shake off ‘raising awareness’ and take on ‘bearing witness,’ to go closer, to feel what I feel there (wherever ‘there’ may be), to observe what I sense and transmute that into shared responsibility, into a knowledge that my body – our bodies – were made fit for it.”

This witnessing is not a substitute for political action, but neither can action be a substitute for it. There are always conflicts happening elsewhere, which demand our attention. It is easy to become cynical, difficult to remain open to a world where images don’t merely aestheticise suffering – as the complaint often goes – but also act as an anaesthetic, dulling our senses. If derision is a kind of false witness, a refusal to bear responsibility for the suffering of others, then sensitivity is a remedy.

For Cole, aesthetics has a special relationship to this sensitivity. His essay “After Caravaggio” – to my mind, one of his finest pieces – describes meeting a Gambian man in Malta, a recent arrival on the migration trail from North Africa into southern Europe. Cole is there to visit a church containing an altarpiece by Caravaggio, so the two men go together. The detour turns out to be the point, since the shared concern of Baroque painting and anyone bearing witness to the migration crisis is the destabilising effect of violence on the category of the human. Some time later, Cole sees viral clips of a market in Libya where migrants from Niger were sold as slaves, and this returns him to the artwork. “In the clips, what I saw was life turned inside out, life turned into death, just as I had seen in Caravaggio’s painting.” Here, art is not an escape from reality, but something used to sharpen our way of seeing.

Cole is sparing with the word “evil”. In Tremor, Tunde becomes preoccupied with the American serial killer Samuel Little. At one point, reading about Little’s victims, Tunde sobs. He doesn’t reach for the word evil. He closes his eyes and asks himself: “Why does he persist in watching this?” This question goes unanswered. Cole seems more interested in understanding than judgment. But he doesn’t avoid the word altogether. In “A Time for Refusal”, an essay written days after the 2016 US presidential election, he writes that “Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognise it.” There are good reasons to suspend moral judgement, but in situations where exceptional cruelty threatens to become normality, they must return.

Cole’s restraint, both in his rhetoric and his attitude to culture, seems essential to the preservation of sensitivity. And this, in turn, might be an answer to the problem of digital exposure. Unlike the digital minimalists, who have little to say about politics, this is a way to participate in a world where digital exposure leads to addiction, second-hand trauma, and cynicism, but where it is also an important part of political action.