Here’s a question that responds to the comments by Terry Tempest Williams and Peter Singer: why do those of us who believe we are not averting our gaze from important social problems often fail to follow our words with effective, appropriate action?

 This past weekend we drove to San Francisco to walk with friends at Land’s End, and en route to the Bay Area, somewhere near Vacaville, we passed a series of tersely worded signs in a cow pasture, urging drivers to help put an end to abortion. One section of the cow pasture was filled with small white crosses, thousands of them, symbolizing the number of abortions performed in the United States each day. Clearly someone had devoted time and thought to communicating to a large audience of freeway drivers about this issue. When we arrived in San Francisco we found our environmentalist friends on a streetcorner in the Marina District surrounded by monks and nuns and thousands of sign-carrying civilians who’d been bused to San Francisco from around the country for the largest annual pro-life demonstration, a gathering of some 25,000 people. We rendezvoused with our friends and quickly extricated ourselves from the protesters, but the question we discussed among ourselves was: how much of their personal income do these pro-life demonstrators actually devote to solving social and environmental problems resulting from human overpopulation? Do those who are “pro-life” typically give to the lives of impoverished families? They’ll spend ample time and money to travel to San Francisco and attend a demonstration urging the cessation of abortion, but do they act in response to problems caused by the birth of “too many” babies?

 To broaden the scope of this question, how many of us, even if we feel we are not averting our gazes from important issues, actually follow gazing (and speaking/writing) with action? And when we pay attention to some issues are we also able to notice and respond to corrolary issues? (For example, do pro-life activists respond as well to poverty, or do environmental activists adequately keep in mind the economic ramifications of environmental protection?)

 I supposed what I’m talking about here is the importance of multidimensional, perhaps even multidirectional, thinking. I see examples of people attempting to achieve this in various works of literature, although it’s pretty clear that all of us have blind spots. As a literary critic, I tend to think of genocide, environmental degradation, poverty, and other large-scale problems in the context of language. In particular, it seems important to consider how to communicate awareness of important issues—this is the role of journalists and scientists and politicians and also artists. It may well be true that our local, national, and international laws are inadequate to the task of responding effectively to perceived problems. But prior to invoking law, clear and evocative communication must occur.

 The occasion for this blog is the new film Reporter, which examines Nick Kristof’s efforts to raise awareness of the current genocide in Darfur and other relevant issues, despite the social and psychological forces that impede public attention to such phenemena and government action. Nonetheless, I’m not sure our best communicators on such topics typically have a conscious sense of the strategies they’re intuitively using to reach the public. It’s common for socially conscious writers to speak of the communicative challenge as a difficulty in prompting emotional responses in readers, viewers, or listeners—and often the desired response is empathy. Empathy for disadvantaged or endangered people, nearby or far away. Empathy for other species, including species akin to ourselves and species radically different from human beings. This effort to promote empathy seems to be based on the premise that ordinary people (“the public”) will speak out and will act in other ways (e.g., participating in demonstrations, voting for particular candidates or ballot measures, writing letters, etc.) if only they are given reason to care about a subject. As she does in her contribution to this blog, Terry Tempest Williams has often stated that the goal of much of her own writing is to “bypass rhetoric and pierce the heart,” as if this thing called “rhetoric” (by which she seems to mean abstract, ideologically entrenched language) prevents citizens from appreciating the deep, universal emotional connections (“heart”) with certain phenomena. For Wendell Berry, another major contemporary American author frequently engaged with challenging social and environmental topics, the major communicative obstacle is not “rhetoric” per se, but abstraction. He argues that people need to feel a sense of connection—or “love”—in order to be compelled to participate energetically in solving problems. And “love,” he writes, “is never abstract.”

Australian author William J. Lines articulates this issue by asking whether it matters how exactly we choose to express our sense of the value of certain phenomena we’re trying to protect. Most of us are in the habit of attaching monetary values to physical things and and even relatively abstract services, such as intellectual and artistic products. But what if the phenomenon we’re hoping to protect is a community of people or a forest or a river? In an essay called “Money,” Lines argues, “People exploit what has a price or what they conclude to be merely of value; they defend what they love. Love cannot be priced. But to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. The abstract, objective, dispassionate, and dissociative language of economics and science [...] cannot replace and cannot become the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of worth ultimately are protected and conserved.” Some would argue that monetary concerns are inescable in the modern world—intervening to stop genocide in a distant part of the world would involve various direct and indirect costs, such as the cost of relocating military forces and the potential cost of having unfriendly governments withhold natural resources or other services as a result of interventions. Many make similar claims regarding natural phenomena—that we must find ways of squeezing square, living phenomena into round, monetary holes, so to speak. Economist Frank Ackerman and law professor Lisa Heinzerling argued in Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing that certain phenomena, such as human life and the natural world, intrinsically defy the monetizing impulse. We care too much about some things to affix prices to them.

 The reality is that we need to refine multidimensional discourses that encompass dollars and feelings, rationality and emotionality, the big pictures and the singular stories. The writers and scholars participating in this blog have been seeking to do this in context of genocide and poverty. I think they would find many useful communicative strategies in the field of environmental literature: for instance, the braiding together of sweeping philosophical abstractions and particularizing anecdotes in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams; the similar strategy that comes across as a dramatic telescoping process of pulling back toward abstraction and moving in toward one’s own life in Bill McKibben’s Maybe One; Barbara Kingsolver’s demonstrations, through first-person narratives, of how one becomes aware of distant phenomena and comes to care about species and people whose lives may seem disconnected from one’s own life in her book Small Wonder; Terry Tempest Williams, in Refuge and various other books, addresses difficult, abstract social issues in a lyrical voice that resembles prose poetry, offering unusually memorable, quotable bits of language; and David Quammen and Sandra Steingraber, in works such as The Song of the Dodo and Having Faith, respectively, combine authoritative, credible scientific information with evocative (often humorous) metaphors. These are only six examples out of dozens and dozens. Again, the major strategic lessons from these examples are the braiding of abstract and concrete, the telescoping movement back and forth between big-picture information and illustrative story, the demonstration of how to care and act, the lyrical intensification of vast topics, and the translation of technical information into evocative (even humorous) metaphor.

 Many of us understand intuitively that the effective communication of information and perspectives pertaining to phenomena such as genocide or habitat destruction or climate change involves negotiating problems of scale. We are beings most strongly motivated by intense emotional connections, and our feelings of connection are stimulated most effectively by specific, concrete examples. What I’ve described here are some ideas about how and why certain authors approach intractable subjects in certain ways. Sometimes its helpful to have labels to describe techniques one is already using or to describe the strategies evident in other communicators’ work.

 Still, I have long been perplexed by the problem of matching social concerns with appropriate actions. And with the difficulty of expanding the multidirectional scope of one’s gaze.

I’d like to broaden this discussion.  The psychic numbing that Paul Slovic has researched has consequences that are even more significant than the fact that the genocide in Darfur has not been stopped.  Nicholas Kristof raised the issue himself in a 2006 column headed “Why Genocide Matters” in which he pointed out that the number of people killed in Darfur “is modest in global terms” – he estimated that it was then in the range of 200,000-500,000, compared to an annual death toll from malaria of one to three million.  And he added:

So yes, you can make an argument that Darfur is simply one of many tragedies and that it would be more cost-effective to save lives by tackling diarrhea, measles and malaria.

Mr Kristof then went on to argue that we should be especially concerned about genocide, even when by focusing on genocide we will save fewer lives than we could save if we focused instead on other causes of avoidable deaths.  Whatever we think about that claim, we can all agree that the costs of psychic numbing are far greater than the continuation of the genocide in Darfur.

In my forthcoming book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (Random House, March 2009) I argue that all of us who are comfortably middle-class have an obligation to help to prevent the poverty-related deaths of more than 10 million people a year.  (UNICEF gives this figure for the number of children under 5 who die each year from avoidable poverty-related causes, and of course many older children and adults are also victims of poverty.) Yet, even when we combine government and private aid, Americans still give less than 25 cents in every $100 they earn to help those in extreme poverty.  That’s about a quarter of what Swedes give, and even they could and should give more.

In my book I suggest some social strategies that may help to increase the amount we give.  Without going into details here, the main point is to change our expectations about what decent people ought to be doing about global poverty.  I’m also building a website to provide more information and encourage people to do more: www.thelifeyoucansave.com (to be up and running by February 2^nd).  

What I hear both of you talking about is how do we not avert our gaze?   How do we take these global humanitarian cries and crises and make them real, not abstract? How do we embrace suffering as part of our own conscience and consciousness and not be undone by it?

For me, it is the power of story.  Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. It makes things known.  When we hear a story, we become accountable for that sacred knowledge which has been shared.  Story becomes the conscience of the community. 

 This is the power of your work, Mr. Kristof.  This is the power of Paul Farmer’s work as a physician.  Both of you bear witness and then you act.  You create something on the page or in the world, a column, a health clinic, an awareness shared.  This is transformative work.  I used to think bearing witness was a passive act.  I don’t believe that any more.  Bearing witness creates empathy. Empathy enters our blood stream and we feel the world differently.  Our consciousness changes and we are moved to action.

Frantz Fanon writes, “The colonial world is a compartmentalized world.” 

One of the imperatives I see toward social change is to not only see but recognize as Gregory Bateson says, ‘the pattern that connects.”  How do we begin to see the interconnectedness of all things. Economic issues are environmental issues are issues of social justice.  The extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses:  prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance that turn on issues of power and justice.  If we cannot begin to see the interrelatedness of these things, if we choose to remain in a compartmentalized, fragmented, fractured world, then I fear we will continue to create and foster this seedbed of war.

We cannot understand social problems without looking at historical roots.  It is impossible to change society without changing the societal stories.  We must listen to the stories being told on the ground by those who have survived the abuses of power, those who bear witness and embody the resiliency of the human spirit.  And resiliency is what I witnessed in Rwanda.

Again, the story, the stories — bearing witness ultimately leads us to action.

For me, this is the power of REPORTER, how one man relentlessly chooses to not only bear witness but respond to the horrors of war through people not policies.  Kristof does not avert his gaze.  He writes.  His pen is both his paintbrush and his weapon.  How can we not respond?

My question then becomes whose story gets told?  

Nick, as you know I have been trying to understand why do good people and their governments ignore mass murder and genocide? Heroic efforts by you, Eric Reeves, Mia Farrow, Brian Steidle, and others have likely saved many lives in Darfur. But they have also given Darfur what Richard Just has termed “a morbid sort of distinction.” Writing in The New Republic, Just observed that “No genocide has ever been so thoroughly documented while it was taking place….But the genocide continues. We document what we do not stop. The truth does not set anybody free. How could we have known so much and done so little”? Psychic numbing, the insensitivity we exhibit in the face of mass tragedy, provides one answer to Just’s question. Another is that the laws and institutions designed many years ago to prevent or halt genocide have failed to do so. Darfur and Congo are but the latest in a long line of genocidal violence during the past century, responsible for many millions of deaths.

 I would like to see you use your powerful voice to motivate the design of legal and institutional mechanisms that will compel us to respond to mass atrocities with a degree of intensity that is commensurate with the high value we place on protecting individual human lives. There are good ideas available. See, for example, the recent report of the Genocide Prevention Task Force.

 The stakes are high. Failure to overcome psychic numbing may compel us to bear witness to another century of genocide and mass abuses of innocent people as has occurred during the previous century.

Among those who will pay a huge price for the drunken orgy of mortgages and other financial excesses in the United States will be some of the neediest people in Africa. They are less likely to get TB medication, malaria nets and schooling, because at a time when our own ship feels as if it is sinking, it’s far harder to build the political will to send off lifeboats to help others.

So look out! I’m afraid that the rising interest in global health and good works may be heading for a bust.

That makes it imperative that those who care about these issues get smarter about  building political will. Any company peddling toothpaste works out a marketing plan far more sophisticated than any devised in the humanitarian community. Ideally, the U.N. could help, but it’s one of the worst organizations at public relations I’ve ever seen.

 That gets us to the issue of psychic numbing, which is a pivot in the film “Reporter.” The standard humanitarian argument to try to galvanize a response is: “1 million people are dying!” But there’s abundant evidence from the work of Paul Slovic and other social psychologists that these kinds of numbers make us glaze over and turn away. Big numbers don’t move us, although individual stories do. That’s why the toothpaste companies don’t tell us that 1 million people have fresher breath because of Crest – they show us a model who looks utterly scrumptious, presumably solely because she brushes with Crest.

I’m not saying that the solution is TV commercials showing a model who claims to get rid of split ends because she has donated anti-malaria bed nets. But I think the humanitarian community must think much more rigorously about marketing and – while remaining as intellectually honest as anyone can be while thinking of marketing – fashion messages that will actually reach people and have impact. Particularly during this financial crisis, humanitarians must work harder at story-telling, at building empathy — or the real losers will be people half a world away who have never heard of mortgages.