Ask yourself what you were doing on the 28th March, 2025, upon reports of the greatest natural disaster since Trump re-entered office. Over 5,000 dead in an earthquake that cleaved through northwest Myanmar.
You don’t remember, do you.
Don’t beat yourself up about it: there are hard limits to how invested we are in people we don’t know. Something, with all the solidarity protests your friends are posting about, you’re forgiven to forget.
You might not, of course, be quite ready to concede. Rummage around for examples to prove me wrong: Your whimper at a reel of a suffering child in a war torn city. Mournful despair over a victim of violence in the news. Holding back tears at the death scene of a favourite character in a recent movie?
All are artworks of a kind. It’s the tradecraft of news, marketing, as well as entertainment and the arts, to smuggle-in triggers of emotions you only truly feel about the few with whom you’ve had direct human contact.
We intuit that caring for others is the natural metric for who’s good in this world. But our world is always too subtle for our intuitions. Behind the more obvious reading of the aphorism that a single death’s a tragedy and a million a statistic, is that we navigate morbid events involving people we’ve never met with our political compass rather than our moral one.
None of this is to claim that moral obligation depends on emotional proximity. But it’s right to be suspicious of care in the absence of acquaintance. The more people someone’s claiming to help, the more likely they’re trying to help themselves. Family and friends of my father travel vast distances to spend hours of their day in the awkward company of Parkinsonian dementia; a public crusade — even were it unadulterated by optics and zeal — feels like a moral imposter compared with this quiet compassion.
The latter also scales. I’d be quicker to trust a society premised in decentralised moral behaviour than centralised moral authority. Isn’t this the most apt case for the many, not the few?
Admittedly, some individual ambitions to impact the lives of many ended in global charity; some have established institutions that have helped distance the civilised world from its venal past. But extraordinary care — for people that aren’t in the activist’s address book — has overtaken hatred as the discourse auguring political violence.
Trump, the huddled masses, and ‘being on the right side of history’, might have been the object of Mr Allen’s increasingly popular brand of activism; but he’s the subject.
belowtheline.blog 