Terrible recent images of drowned children are rightly inspiring activism around the world, and I find I have been on a roller-coaster of emotions, from sickness at the images, to anger at the situation, to disgust at some of the media treatment of this issue, to helplessness as an individual, to what I fear may be sentimentality on my part (for example, this clip of German citizens applauding migrants arriving in Munich made me feel great).
I have observed my own internal states with skepticism, because of their inconsistency and inconstancy; I know that were this issue to disappear from the news, I would forget about it within a week or two. I suspect many of us find ourselves in this position, and I think there are some important things we can learn here – and I hope, teach our children. I even think there is some informed action we can easily take.
Earlier I used the term ‘sentimentality’, which means the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth. So a sentimentalist would take his or her own feelings as necessary and sufficient conditions to believe something. Put like that, it’s clear that there is a role for this – in matters of personal taste, what more evidence could one want? But in general we have to distinguish between how we feel about a situation, and the facts of the same situation. They may or may not the same thing; and even if they coincide, believing the right thing for the wrong reason can be a very dangerous thing.
I believe that we need more than a sentimental approach to the Syrian migrants. While horrific images might impel us to action, Max Fischer’s skepticism is surely correct: ” because this young Syrian boy’s death produced a viral image, suddenly he was worth caring about. That’s not compassion; it’s voyeurism”. That’s a pretty hard-hitting statement – but if we only care when we see a shocking picture, is that really caring? As one of my Theory of Knowledge students wrote “With the recent picture of the young dead Syrian infant circling the media, many… experienced a paradigm shift; [but] nothing has changed, since migrants have been dying in their hundreds throughout 2015 alone. Nor does this picture offer more context than what we hear commonly on the news.”
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| True enough, but what is the right, intelligent way to act in complex circumstances ? |
Put another way, do we only care about the people whose pictures we see, when we know that there are many, many others in similar plights? Do we only want to help when disasters happen, when we know there are more effective and less dramatic ways we can help avert them in the first place? We won’t get anywhere without strong feelings; nor should we. But strong feeling may not take us to the right places. The heart is the engine of change, but the head needs to be the driver.
So there is a place for disaster relief, for sure, and we all can and should make a contribution. But if that’s all we are prepared to do, then we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the depth of our compassion. I speak from no moral high ground here; my mirror is as uncomfortable as anyone’s at the moment. But the Syrian crisis has given me some clarity I did not have until recently: For me, unless I can do something that is not driven by the unearned emotion of sentimentality, but by the reasoned, evidenced-based sciences that give us long lives of comfort and safety, then I am not living up to my own core values. I think that reason points us in a clear direction; the question is what we personally do about it.
As far as the College goes, I feel on safer ground. Our contribution is to ensure that students leave willing and able to engage in both short- and long-term projects, aware of complexity, nuance, trade-offs and contradictions. We do that in many ways – I have written about this here, on Complexity and here, on Questioning and here, on the role of fundraising in Service. In class, we might use this very striking and powerful cartoon strip to make the link between climate change, rural-urban migration, and the current crises – thus encouraging deeper and longer-term thinking that continues after the immediate disaster-mitigation. We might use this image on other migrants from recent history to place the issue in context, and to rigorously address our powers as individuals to step up and make a difference. I know, from conversations, that we are making a difference to many of our students.
