The
other day, as I was walking to the grocery store, I strategically
moved toward the far edge of the sidewalk to put distance between
myself and a pile of large, black trash bags haphazardly stacked
against the side of a building. This sight is common in downtown
Manhattan, as was the rustling I heard among the bags, which
nevertheless made me start. Rats or mice, I thought, as I instinctively
crossed the street to avoid them, but it was still light out,
too early, it seemed to me, for these nocturnal creatures to
be rummaging for food. So I looked again, only to have my breath
taken away as I made out the shape of what was certainly a human
being lying on his or her side--a man or a woman who apparently
was trying to stay warm inside and among a pile of trash bags
on this cheerless, wintry afternoon.
Living
in New York for over 20 years has not yet hardened me to the
point where I can immediately recover my equilibrium after glimpsing
such misery and degradation. Yet, I must admit that, except
for giving a dollar to a beggar on the street or subway, I don't
do anything more, anything significant, to aid the shockingly
large number of people in New York who live in poverty, which
is estimated at 20 percent of the population. What accounts
for my moral complacency? Even if there is something soul-numbing
in the bureaucratic, value-free language of population and percentages,
how do I simply go on with my daily life, knowing that so many
people are suffering? In recent days, this question has visited
me with renewed intensity, and this is because of all the talk
of poverty on a global scale that has come with the unveiling
of the United Nations Millennium Project, which seeks to cut
world poverty in half by the year 2015.
Above
all else, what has emerged from public discussions on TV and
reports and editorials in the newspaper is the staggering, indeed
thought-defying, number of people who are being crushed by the
effects of poverty in our world today: 300 million Africans
lack safe drinking water; 3,000 African children under the age
of five die every day from malaria; 6,000 Africans die each
day of AIDS; one in 16 African women die in childbirth. Over
the years, from time to time, I, like anyone else who reads
newspapers and magazines, have had to come to terms with hard,
bitter facts such as these, though I can't say I have ever come
close, for to do so would mean radically changing my life. How
could anyone with a conscience go on, business as usual, after
truly assimilating the knowledge that millions of people are
doomed to wretchedness and early death because we who live in
rich countries choose--consciously or unconsciously (it hardly
matters)--to look the other way?
At
such moments of extreme moral reckoning, my thoughts habitually
move to the Holocaust, and so I found myself thinking of all
those people -- not only German but English and American, too
-- who knew of the death camps at the same time that they wished
they didn't know, or perhaps more accurately, the way they self-protectively
only half-knew of their existence -- that accursed human capacity
for not seeing what is before our very eyes. And then I thought
of Dwight Macdonald's tortured efforts, after the war, to come
to terms with this unprecedented crime of mass murder, along
with the unprecedented murders of civilians by the bombings
of Hiroshima and Dresden, in a series of essays that Macdonald
aptly called The Responsibility of Peoples. Which made me think
of Rwanda.
But
then it occurred to me that this line of moral reckoning was
not quite right, since the misery and premature death brought
on by poverty have, until quite recently, been understood as
both a perennial and irremediable feature of the human condition.
In this, the widespread passive sympathy toward the poor today
resembles not the unconscionable inaction of the world that
might have prevented or stopped the Holocaust or the Rwandan
genocide--both of which were historically specific, premeditated
actions of the state--but rather the passive sympathy of many
people of conscience toward slavery during the nineteenth century.
Some of our most thoughtful historians (for example, David Brion
Davis and Thomas Haskell in their many exchanges over the antislavery
debate in the mid 1980s) have seriously considered the question
of why, after thousands of years of largely uncontested existence,
the ancient institution of slavery was finally abolished in
the middle of the nineteenth century. Given the depth of slavery's
roots, it is astonishing that a small group of abolitionists
was able to move beyond the conventional belief that slavery
was part of the natural order and instead became convinced that
it was an intolerable moral blight that could and must be wiped
from the face of the earth, eventually persuading a good number
of other people to believe it.
Such
radical expansions in the reach of moral responsibility are
so rare in history as to appear miraculous, yet with the emergence
of the United Nations Millennium Project, we seem to be living
through just such a moment. Where the eradication of slavery,
in the end, required a protracted, murderous civil war, the
Millennium Project has devised a strikingly simple, painless
plan to reduce poverty by half over the next decade: Wealthy
countries need only donate 0.54 percent of their national incomes
to poor ones. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and
Luxembourg, as always, are leading the way, having already reached
0.7 percent, which wealthy countries agreed upon in 2002. The
Bush administration, true to type, has increased foreign aid
to just fifteen hundredths of one percent, giving America the
distinction of being the most miserly rich nation in the world.
As
I grasped how much good could come from so preposterously little
sacrifice on the part of wealthy nations, it was maddening to
see the unwillingness of our leaders (and who knows, maybe of
some ordinary people, too) to honor their pledge to the poor,
let alone to hear the chorus of skeptics who predictably dismissed
the plan as "utopian." What could account for this
indifference but a failure of imagination, especially for the
kinds of misery that cannot easily be captured in photographs
or videotapes. This, of course, has not been the case with September
11 or the recent tsunami. When it comes to those catastrophes,
most people have proved extraordinarily adept at imagining themselves
flying on a plane that crashes into a skyscraper, or trapped
at the top of a burning office building, or washed away by an
enormous tidal wave. Such is the familiar stuff of disaster
movies and nightmares and, in theory at least, such dramatic,
random events could happen to any of us.
In
an effort to give the dire, yet more quotidian, plight of the
chronically poor a more momentous feel, Jeffrey Sachs, the head
of the Millennium Project, has spoken eloquently of the "silent
tsunami" of global poverty; 150,000 children die from malaria
alone every month -- the same staggering number of people killed
by the tsunami. The problem, then, facing those who would save
these ill-fated children is largely one of imagination: how
to make the deaths of these children and the anguish of their
parents touch strangers in the same immediate, unbearable way
that led so many people to send money and goods halfway around
the world to the tsunami victims, especially since the enormous
geographical range of Africa makes it impossible for photographers
to take heart-rending pictures of these dead children en masse,
as they notoriously did with the tsunami dead, and since the
various forms of suffering that come with a life of perpetual
poverty cannot be made to fit into the ridiculously sped-up
cycle of commercial news.
As
I thought about the difficulty of stirring other people's imaginations,
my mind wandered -- as it often does when I think about what
is wrong with our world -- to John Ruskin. His impassioned words
from The Nature of Gothic (1853) came back to me. I
went to my bookshelf and found the passage: "And now, reader,
look round this English room of yours, about which you have
been proud so often, because the work was so good and strong,
and the ornaments so finished." No matter how many times
I have read these words, I still find it shocking to be addressed
so personally; certainly it is a rare experience in reading
to be censured for one's pride in "accurate mouldings,"
"perfect polishings," and "unerring adjustments
of the seasoned wood and tempered steel," or to be reproached
for the blindness that comes with such pride: "Alas! if
read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in
our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading
than that of the scourged African, or Helot Greek." (Recall
when Ruskin wrote these words that slavery had not yet been
abolished.) The slavery Ruskin was deploring was the modern
system of English manufacture, in which men are "divided
into segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs
of life"; where the "multitudes are sent like fuel
to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given
daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into
the exactness of a line." He refused to allow his readers
to be complacent about the soul-destroying process that turned
men into mere "tools." Nor would he let them forget
that it was their desire for perfection that was directly responsible
for making men's "fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels,
and their arms strike curves like compasses," and in the
bargain, "unhumanizing them."
This
stirring word picture of degradation and suffering appears in
the second of his three-volume study, Stones of Venice,
a book ostensibly devoted to Venetian art and architecture.
But a soul so intensely attuned to the world as Ruskin, who
experienced every object and institution as a tangible sign
of the spiritual and moral condition of the individuals and
nations who made them, unsurprisingly found it harder and harder
to write about art. Unlike most of us, Ruskin was not able to
go on with his life, business as usual, once he fully took in
the magnitude of the misery and squalor all around him. In the
first instalment of Fors Clavigera, his Letters
to the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britain (1871), he
announced:
