One of the most suggestive statistics I ever heard was this – that when researchers went back to ask citizens why they had not voted in a U.S. presidential election, a significant proportion said they didn’t know an election was on. Although the election absolutely dominated television, these hundreds of thousands of people hadn’t allowed it into their heads. They hadn’t bothered listening to people talking on television. They heard news bulletins but they didn’t attend to their content. They switched off when workmates brought up the subject of the election. They never gave the thing a thought. They must have been so sunk in their personal lives that the whole public world passed them by.
You may think this is an unimaginable state of affairs. But it exactly describes how comfortable citizens of the First World such as ourselves relate to reports of injustice in the world as a whole. None of us really pays attention to the overall picture of what humankind has made so far of its stay on planet earth.
This reality is brought home by a certain kind of rhetorical question I’m now sick of. It goes: how come the world sat back complacently and allowed a massacre such as, say, Sabra and Chatila or, say, Rwanda to proceed, but jumped into action when a fraction of the number of Rwandan dead was massacred in the U.S.? As if the speaker had been worrying about Rwanda all along.
How come the world was quite content until September 11 to allow the men of Afghanistan to trash their country to the point where the Taliban were welcome, and then to allow the Taliban in the absence of any other enemy to assert their maleness by defining girls and women as dangerous animals, but not after September 11? As if the Taliban’s attitude to women had all the while been weighing on the questioner’s mind.
But let me join in – how come the world was indifferent to the plight of the refugees from Afghan virility who have been living wretchedly or dying in camps in Pakistan for the past 15 years? How come the spotlight rests on Afghanistan and not on the endemic horrors of the world – on little girls with painted faces kept in wooden cots in Lahore for the excitement of men; prostitutes chained to the beds in their workplaces in Thailand; small children breaking stones in quarries everywhere; half-starved children passively enduring their fate in North Korea; half-starved men picking over garbage dumps; laboring men holding themselves out for hire on wintry streets before dawn; simple-minded men waiting on death rows in U.S. jails; pauper alcoholics howling for vodka in the hell-hole towns of Siberia; miners who toil like beasts in Bolivia, chewing narcotic leaves against the pains of hunger; the homeless, muttering under their blankets in the porches of churches in Washington, D.C.…
Do you think I couldn’t go on?
All these “how come?” questions are designed to make us feel bad by pointing up the inconsistencies we live with, and the narrow limits of our compassion, and our self-interestedness. But that’s all they do, apart from making the people who ask them feel morally superior.
In ordinary life, no one behaves much better for being made to feel guilty. “How can I feel for the whole world?” people mutter to themselves. How can I even know enough to know whose side to be on? And even if I had all the information and all the moral courage and all the resources I wish I had, what good is one person against all the evil out there? The problems of the planet are simply too big to be tackled.
And they’re right. There is no effective way of feeling for the world. And it is a dreadful place, infinitely worse than we bother to recognize. We obscure, in a cloud of diversionary “how comes?” the simple truth that what humans have made of this planet is horrible. Although the events of September 11 and the craziness of what has been happening since may have lifted a corner of the fog we habitually stumble about in. The world is savagely unjust, and the only respite from injustice is won by force.
States have no goodness. They suppress these villains here and promote those villains there, with no aim but self-aggrandizement. They foster testosterone madness, inside and outside armies. Whole cultures, including Hollywood, glorify violence. War wonderfully distracts from injustice. We look at the photos of suffering children – huge eyes in bony heads drooping from little, frail bodies that will pass through life without ever knowing what it is like to feel full. And we watch the billion-pound missiles fall. And we pass on.
There seem to me three things we can do in this situation. We can support the United Nations in every possible way. If we get the chance to provide soldiers to “peacekeep,” or indeed to fight, people demonstrably as foul to each other as to their enemies, we should grasp it, and forget the old guff about the moral example of our Irish neutrality. And the last one is to be as good as we can in our own lives. We have to believe that in spite of what humankind does, individuals can – intermittently – achieve personal goodness.
Though God knows there are times when it is hard to muster up enough self-approval to get out of bed.
The Irish Times Magazine, January 5, 2002