All Too Human: Is There Room for Compassion and Conscience in International Relations?

A few years back, a survey by a group at the University of Maryland found that three quarters of Americans felt the United States was spending "too much" on aid to the third world. Sixty-four per cent of those questioned wanted foreign assistance cut. Only 11 per cent felt it was fine to spend "too much" helping the poorer parts of the planet.

At first, the Maryland survey sounds depressingly familiar, more evidence of a supposedly inward-looking, self-centred attitude in the American public. Over the past couple of decades, this attitude has come to be called "compassion fatigue", the idea that Americans are tired of giving. It can be cited to partly explain why the United States Congress has continued stalling on paying America's dues to the United Nations, which are now some $1.69 billion in arrears.

But on closer examination, the survey (published in 1995 by the University's Programme on International Policy Attitudes) is far more ambiguous - and intriguing. The survey asked Americans how much of the budget they thought their country was presently spending on foreign aid. The average answer was 18 per cent. In fact, the United States was spending less than 1 per cent of its $1.5 trillion budget on the third world, including military aid (a questionable inclusion in the total).

The Americans said, on average, they thought 5 per cent would be an appropriate spending level. So even though they said at first they wanted to cut spending, they were actually comfortable giving more than five times the actual existing rate.

Some commentators said this confusing set of responses showed once again that Americans were notoriously under-informed about world affairs. There is at least some truth to this observation; but by itself it is insufficient.

A closer look at the facts over the Last 20 years or so, along with a profound insight from a great 19th century American novelist, provides a much more complicated, interesting, and potentially encouraging interpretation of American attitudes.

The first part of a more complete explanation can be found in an excellent new book by Susan Moeller, an American academic who has thoroughly delved into how the United States media cover tragedies in the third world and how the American public reacts. One of her most interesting case studies in Compassion Fatigue is of the drought and famine that cut across wide swaths of Africa in 1984-1985. At first, she notes, there was little reporting in the West, and no public response. Western Governments were offering inadequate amounts of emergency aid.

Then, on 23 October 1984, the British Broadcasting Corporation ran some shocking television footage from Ethiopia and the American network NBC replayed the story. Moeller describes what happened next. "The phones at NBC, like the phones at the BBC in London, began ringing off the hook. Thousands wanted to know what they could do to help . . . In the 36 hours after the NBC broadcast, more than 10,000 people called Save the Children [one of the non-governmental organizations active in the relief effort]. By November 2, Save the Children was receiving 2,000 pieces of mail a day."

An Irish rock musician named Bob Geldof watched the first televised report and had trouble sleeping. The next day, he started calling his friends in the business. The Band-Aid Christmas record in the United Kingdom, followed by "We Are the World" in the United States, prompted some skeptical sneers about egotistical rock stars overstepping their zone of competence.

But Geldof and his friends ended up changing history; the musicians raised millions of dollars themselves, but, even more important, they helped create a wave of publicity that shamed the Reagan administration and other Western Governments into greatly increasing help. In the end, relief came too late for hundreds of thousands of Africans. But hundreds of thousands more were saved.

This was not the last famine in Africa. Hunger continued to hit the continent again and again, along with outbreaks of disease and wars, reaching one terrible culmination in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Some Western commentators started to talk about "compassion fatigue", contending that the wave of Western idealism seemed to have receded, while the tragedies continued relentlessly.

Susan Moeller illustrates the compassion fatigue thesis all too perfectly. "A man walks into a store, glances at a newsweekly with the Rwanda mass killings on the cover . . . and buys instead another publication, which features the model Cindy Crawford."

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was one of America's greatest novelists, a man who first travelled the world as a sailor, curious and open-minded, not a prisoner of the American - and Western - sense of superiority that was even more prevalent back then than it is today, His first novel, Typee, set in the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific, is respectful of Polynesian culture, and sharply critical of Western missionaries and colonialism. His masterpiece, Moby Dick, the story of an ill-fated whaling expedition, includes a multinational crew; the three harpooners, heroic figures, are a South Sea Islander, an American Indian, and an African.

Melville also turned his keen observational powers to life on land. His 1851 classic short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener", takes place in a New York City law office. The story is named for its maddeningly obstinate main character, a law clerk who seems increasingly unable to function in the world, but who rebuffs all efforts to help. The first-person narrator, Bartleby's boss, describes how his feelings toward his clerk change over time: "My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion"

Melville's narrator acknowledges this unpleasant change in his attitude, but he does not turn away, disgusted with himself. Instead, he presses on, trying to understand, to draw a larger lesson from his negative reaction: "So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not.

They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill." This reaction may not be altogether admirable, but it is deeply human. All too often, the Western media portray people in the third world as nameless, helpless wretches; Moeller explains that in Somalia in 1992 "the stories depicted the victims of the famine as bereft of family, alone in their struggle for survival", and, "as a result, the impression was created of a man-and-God-forsaken people".

Yet anyone who has visited Africa, or elsewhere in the third world, and stepped outside the international hotels for more than a few minutes will recognize that this dismal portrait is false. Third world countries are not hopeless places. The Western mainstream media, principally in America, is partly to blame for this unremittingly gloomy view. Over the past couple of decades, the most significant development in Africa, Asia and Latin America has been the rise of independent grass roots orations - labour, education, environmental, feminist and human rights groups - along with an emergent press, all of which are changing the political scene in places as diverse as India, Brazil and Zambia. Yet Americans will rarely read about these organizations, even in the best newspapers. They will never see them on television.

Americans can identify the dishes in the Thai restaurants that have sprung up all over the United States, but they have never been introduced to Dr. Prawasi Wasi, a gentle physician who is Thailand's beloved social conscience. Better-off Westerners may go on safari to Kenya, but they do not know about Professor Wangari Maathai, the feminist environmentalist who helped start the Green Belt Movement, whose 600,000 members have already planted 10 million trees; her boldness has earned her government attacks as a "subversive" and a "traitor". And how could the American press have ignored Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who died recently after spending decades issuing blistering, raucous pop songs attacking one military dictator after another from the smoky, after-midnight confines of his Lagos night club?

Americans, and other people in the first world, do get bad news from the third world - of dictators who steal billions of dollars while their citizens die of hunger and disease, of brutal civil wars that seem never to end. But leaving out people like Dr. Wasi, Professor Maathai, and the late Fela Kuti totally distorts reality. The result tends to confirm Melville's hard truth about how we humans react when faced with apparently hopeless cases.

Susan Moeller's book includes remarkable evidence that indirectly substantiates Herman Melville. She documents a fascinating shift in Western consciousness over Rwanda in 1994. As long as the killing went on, people felt helpless and turned away, like the man she described buying the Cindy Crawford magazine. But who can blame him; major Governments, and the United Nations itself, did not act with enough speed to prevent the genocide. But once the killing diminished, people did act. After Rwanda started to seem more recognizable, as a crisis of hunger, disease and refugees, people in the West sent in large sums. Medecins Sans Frontieres reported that a bartender in Alaska called after seeing one of their physicians on network television-with $9,000 he and his patrons had collected on the spot. Moeller concluded: "Americans weren't naive enough to think that their five dollars sent to Oxfam would rescue a child trapped by genocidal killers. It might however buy a refugee child a blanket."

Private donations during one emergency after another are of course no long-term answer to misery in the third world. An unjust global economic order that puts international banks, corporations and arms manufacturers first is a primary cause of the poor world's problems. Growing international cooperation is winning victories in a variety of areas, including the end of apartheid, the establishment of war crimes tribunals in The Hague and the United Republic of Tanzania, the worldwide campaign against landmines, and the effort to reduce the foreign debt of the poorest third world nations.

Herman Melville's insight can be a guide to continued international action.

Americans do not think their foreign aid budget is "too high" mainly because they are selfish. They do respond when you first show them that they are dealing with actual human beings on the other side of the globe, not with victims, and when you offer them a way to act that has some chance of success. Otherwise, they will try to ignore what they perceive as a hopeless situation-not because they are inhuman, but precisely because they are all too human.