About those miners…

I didn’t really pay attention to this story about the Chilean miners, but I was surprised to see how much notice it was getting. (Funnily enough, it was one of the very, very few current events to briefly get mentioned in my office, for whatever odd reason). The one good thing that can be taken away from this event, I think, is the global interconnectedness that it displayed. I never thought I would write about the positives of the 24-hour news cycle, but I guess one good thing about the news cycle is that it will increasingly look outside national borders for stories of interest to satisfy the timely demands of its consumers. And in doing so, there will be a fair amount of stories where people will become better acquainted with other people from other countries, cultures and societies, and maybe even start to empathize with them. Of course, there is also the risk that these stories may increase the fear factor and not lead to a more in-depth understanding of other peoples or events*.

Having started with that, I should say, I mostly saw overall negative things in the story — obviously, I was glad to see the miners rescued and all of that. First, there was the obvious ick factor of an event being used by the selfish motivations of politicians and media figures. But my main qualm goes along the lines of the coldly rational, cost-benefit analysis.

How many resources, both financial and labor, were being aimed at this rescue?Couldn’t they have been aimed at saving more lives? I don’t know the numbers but I’m sure that more lives could be saved if they were directed at feeding the numbers of the hungry, or treating those who are sick with diseases we in the western world have the cures for. I’m also sure that those opportunities to be taken right in Chile. Maybe this could be considered “cold” by some, but when you flip it around think of the numbers of people who were withheld help because of the cost of this episode, the charge could be easily leveled right back. 

I don’t think this is too cynical, but wouldn’t it be great if the president tried to pin his political standing to treating the no doubt countless number of poor, diseased and hungry people living throughout Chile with such willpower and such a sense of urgency? 

Of course there are certain things about this situation which make it hard not to empathize with the plight of the miners. They were innocent and helpless, and, if not for the successful rescue, would probably have suffered excruciatingly painful deaths. But how different are they from the millions of people who go hungry to bed every night? Unless you believe in the conservative, irrationally capitalist, if-a-black-man-raised-by-a-single-mother-in-Hawaii-can-reach-the-American-presidency-anyone-can type of rhetoric, then not much. 

But there are two noticeable differences with these situations. First, you could see the miners and you knew about their situation. It was a bit of an extraordinary one, and so it was in the news. When is the last time that world’s poor were given such a spotlight? Second, this situation had an end-date on it and different plans to solve it. There would either be a heroic rescue or an absence of a rescue that could be chalked up to the inefficacy of Latin American governments or some other storyline. Either way, we would know the answer, a story could typed up and finished an everyone could move on. Meanwhile, the problem of global poverty has no real end in sight and the approaches to tackling it are very diverse, sometime at odds with one another, and complex. I.e. It doesn’t make for an easily digestible story. 

There is another angle to this: emotionalism. You can watch the rescue and feel quite a rush, one that feels good**. But it’s fairly passive, and you don’t feel guilty for feeling passive because there’s nothing you can do.  

This is where I really struggle with what I saw in this incident. I’m becoming more and more convinced that this emotionalism can be pretty distracting/counterproductive. Emotion obviously has its place and will never disappear, but without a strong foundation in rational/critical thinking it can be quite a negative influence. I thinkthis is a pretty taken-for-granted thought. I think everyone accepts/knows that emotions can lead to quick and mistaken judgments, to use one example. Another aspect of this that doesn’t get aired out as much enough is emotions also prevent us from taking a step back and examining the status quo.

I increasingly believe that Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of confronting poverty are going to drastically change how we — in the Western, developed world — think about the ethical implications of our lifestyles. The just of his thought can be introduced in this*** hypothetical situation, one that he returns to in many of his writings:

In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

  It’s hard not to be convinced by this logic. Even though Singer first came up with this hypothetical formulation thirty years ago, I still think it needs to get spread around — though I’m sure that many people have independently had thoughts along these lines. This knowledge can drastically change how one comes to view the status quo in the West, as well as change how we in the West relate to the larger world and the impact we can have. 

The other thing that has to happen besides “spreading the message” — as somewhat silly as that message sounds — is adapting a positive emotional reaction to this. That may sound abstract and it is. It will be hard to do this, as we increasingly want to have easy moral calculations and not feel guilty for being passive — as the Chilean miners incident demonstrates. 

I’m not going to go on, because I haven’t spent enough time thinking about the merits of guilt as a stimulant for moral activity. What I will say is that things will have to change/be different on an emotional level. This story shows how much power emotions can have, and I think discussions about the affluent approaching poverty need to include the subject of emotional states of the affluent.  

One last note: Not to be overly idealistic, but it would be great if stories like this — ould generate the same type of energy and enthusiasm as the miner incident. It’s a little sad that on the New York Times website, it was only reported on a blog and not in the news edition of the New York Times, whereas the Miner story was clogging up my homepage non-stop for two straight days. 

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* Here is an interesting example of that happening by a pretty educated person on a subject that frequently gets treated sensationally and haphazardly by the American press — Mexico —and then being corrected by someone with a better knowledge of the situation. Luckily, the spreader of false, fear-driven realities apologized. 

** This un-sourced article says that one billion people, in fact, did that and watched the rescue on TV. 

*** This article is also very noteworthy, because he mathematically proves that richest 10% of Americans could donate enough money, with no real physical cost to themselves assuming restraining their lifestyles a little wouldn’t bring them physical pain, to reach the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals. These goals which include reducing the proportion in half of people who are hungry every day, guarantee a primary education for all to just name two.