A republic depends decisively on the norm of public truth-telling. Otherwise, why would citizens bother to trust one another or even listen to anyone?
Without such truth-telling, there is no foundation for mutual trust or for the responsible negotiations that make our democratic way of life possible. For this reason, public lying is arguably the worst possible offense against a society founded on the principle of self-government.
Which brings us to the story of a photograph.
On Jan. 22 in Minneapolis, federal agents arrested Nekima Levy Armstrong, a local African American civil rights leader. She was arrested for her role a few days earlier in a protest at Cities Church in St. Paul against the presence and conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers in the city.
That same day, the White House posted and circulated a digitally manipulated photograph of her, done in a way that made her look weak, fearful, and uncomposed. (The actual, unfalsified photo conveys the opposite qualities in her appearance.) Later, White House spokesperson Kaelan Dorr defended the use of the doctored photo and promised more to come, calling the falsified Armstrong photo a “meme” and stating plainly: “The memes will continue.”
A crucial line was crossed.
Photos have been altered before in U.S. history. But this appears to be the first time in our nation’s history that a president or a president’s administration has deliberately altered photographic evidence to demean an American citizen for political purposes.
The administration’s defenders can reply that altering photographs is nothing new, and they are right. Today millions of Americans use Photoshop or other technology to make our pictures more appealing, and each time we do so, we alter an original photograph. Many people today are also creating so-called memes in which photos are altered in order to appear funny or sarcastic.
But the falsification of Armstrong’s facial image on the day she was arrested was not done by ordinary citizens to make her look more attractive or tell a funny joke. It was done by the highest officials in the land to deceive the public about a possible crime and inflict intentional harm on an American citizen. This kind of conduct has no clear precedent in U.S. presidential history.
Arguably the worst form of public lying is corrupting our visual understanding — our capacity as citizens to make intelligent use of our own eyes.
Scientific evidence suggests that, for humans, seeing is prior to interpretation. Our initial access to the world comes primarily through our eyes. That’s why we say that “seeing is believing” and why saying “I saw it with my own eyes” is more convincing than, for example, “I heard it with my own ears.”
Among humans, vision dominates cognition. First and mainly we see it, then we try to make sense of it.
Authoritarian political leaders have long understood and acted on this fact. In the old Soviet Union, communist rulers regularly doctored official photographs, including the removal of people’s images entirely, because they knew erasing adversaries visually is longer-lasting and runs deeper than simply disparaging them with words.
Today, the similarly authoritarian Russian government regularly deploys manipulated photos and videos as part of information warfare campaigns in the Baltic states, Ukraine and elsewhere.
Hannah Arendt, the great student of totalitarianism, tells us that the ultimate aim of the totalitarian system is not to convince you that its lies are true, or even to force you to treat them as true when you know that they are not. The ultimate goal is to disorient you so thoroughly that you no longer feel able rationally to distinguish fact from fiction.
The best strategy for achieving this state of affairs is to disable me visually — to put me in a world where I can no longer trust my own eyes. Am I looking at the face of Nekima Levy Armstrong? Maybe, maybe not. I have no way of knowing.
In any society, this form of assault is terrible. In a republic, it’s potentially lethal. Public truth-telling, a necessity for self-governing people, effectively loses its meaning when citizens can no longer reliably judge what is true and what is false.
This is how free societies become unfree.
That’s why, even in today’s noise and haste, when news flies by so quickly that we feel unable to give anything the attention it deserves, all of us ought to take a moment, for the sake of our republic, to look carefully at the actual face of Nekima Levy Armstrong.
This current administration should reconsider its stated intention to continue the practice of manipulating photos for political purposes, and instead conduct a review of this episode, with the goal of new publicly stated pro-truth guidelines to highlight the ethical and civic issues involved and improve practices in this area across society.
The vast majority of Americans would support and admire this form of public leadership. More broadly, we can learn from the pioneering work now taking place in Estonia and Ukraine. This work includes teaching schoolchildren how images can be falsified, television programs devoted to exposing examples of manipulated images and videos, and mobilizing journalists and others in civil society to adopt and improve strategies for visual verification.
We can support the work of organizations such as the News Literacy Project, which works in the United States, and WITNESS, which works globally.
We have leaders who know what to do. The next and most important step is for America as a whole to decide that this issue is vital to our civic life.