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Tragedy

Iftekhar Sayeed

    “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
    While Salman Rushdie is in intensive care, our sympathies and prayers go to him. Hang in there, Rush!
    This event will hog headlines and news channels for days to come - it ticks the right boxes: (a) those savage Muslims; (b) freedom of expression, a religious western value as strongly-held by the anti-clerical West as the sacred is held by Muslims, has again been threatened.
    And, of course, the West has the loudest megaphones.
    I do not owe the Stalinesque insight above entirely to the Communist: the view has been confirmed by behavioural economists. An identified life/death resonates more strongly than a statistical one.
    Thomas Schelling, an early supporter of behavioural economics, distinguished between a “statistical life” and an “identified life” (Ricard Thaler, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics (London: Penguin, 2016), pp 12-13). The hospitals represent the former concept while the six-year-old represents the latter.
    “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths - not many will drop a tear or reach for their chequebooks .”

The (Very Brief) Life - and Death - of Hassan Ali

    Take the nearly 2 million Iraqi children killed through Western sanction from 1991 to 2003. The Economist report of September 12 2002 entitled “Defiance and death” quotes the figure of 1.7 million. Norman Finkelstein, in his book The Holocaust Industry put the numbers at 1 million - and counting (The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation Of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2001), p 148). Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, in an interview in 1996 with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, when informed by Stahl that more children in Iraq had died of sanctions - 500,000 according to the Lancet - than had perished in Hiroshima in 1945, replied, “We think the price is worth it” (Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p 491).
    Brian Haw spent 10 years in Parliament Square (2001 - 2011) protesting what he described as “infanticide masquerading as foreign policy”. Tellingly, his megaphone was denied him by the courts.
    “Christmas is important to me as a Christian,” Brian observes. “How can I enjoy Christmas with my family while my neighbour’s families are being wiped out?” His words fell on secular ears.
    In this CNN documentary about the war in Yemen, we glimpse a few moments in the (very brief) life of Hassan Ali. Most likely, Hassan Ali received hardly any viewership, a conclusion drawn from an Economist graphic detail of 2018: The royal wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry inspired 1.1 million hours of attention in one day; and, while the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and the collapse of a bridge in Genoa in August received 12 million hours between them, the war in Yemen - during the entire year - got just 3.5 million hours.
    In the book Against Democracy, Jason Brennan lists “intergroup bias” as one of our irrational traits: We tend to demonise members of other groups, but are highly forgiving and charitable toward members of our own groups. We go along with whatever our group thinks and oppose what other groups think (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp 61 – 62). To preserve a positive group identity, members downplay their own groups’ moral shortcomings and play up the outgroups’ lack of desirable qualities: fGroup members may also experience various forms of social identity threats, one of which takes place when the moral behaviour of their group is called into question”. We owe this invaluable insight to Henri Tajfel, who, with his student John Turner, developed the now-famous social identity theory. Clearly, Brian Haw and Hassan Ali represent an identity threat to those who see themselves as Western and thereby on a higher ethical plane. Thus, when Joe Biden, miffed by Turkey purchasing military equipment from Russia, used his megaphone to call the mass killing of Armenians a “genocide” - giving in, where previous presidents had resisted, to the Armenian lobby, chuffed beyond measure as though a well-established historical fact becomes “more true” depending on who says it - the Turks responded along the lines predicted by Tajfel and Turner.
    “We entirely reject this statement,” wrote Mevlut Cavusoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, on Twitter. “We have nothing to learn from anybody on our own past. Political opportunism is the greatest betrayal to peace and justice.”
    But when Brian Haw, Norman Finkelstein, Leslie Stahl, Ramsey Clark and others made a similar point about Iraqi children, the megaphone went silent.
    Further light - if that’s the word - on our predicament comes from recent neuroscientific studies in empathy. In the jargon: “The areas typically showing an empathic neural response to observed pain include somatosensory cortex, and areas involved in the motivational-affective dimension in the pain matrix such as bilateral anterior insula (AI) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)”. However, matters are rarely as black-and-white, or perhaps more so.
    “Nevertheless, there is converging evidence to suggest that empathy in humans is more complex than a mere resonance with the target’s painful state. Indeed, cognitive and affective factors can modulate the activation of neural patterns in empathy. Furthermore, recent imaging studies have found that social and contextual factors can also regulate empathic neural responses to others’ pain, including race of the target person. This racial bias has been seen not just in empathy for pain, but also in empathic responses to facial emotions. Such studies build on evidence that racial bias is a potent modulator of neural responses underlying many social behaviours.”
    As Tajfel and his student would not have been surprised to find, the outgroup members’ suffering seems to evoke less empathy than that of one’s own group members’. Findings such as these help to explain the lack of outrage when the Bush brothers and Barack Obama bomb Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya than when Russian firepower wreaks havoc in Ukraine. In April, WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, lamented that “I don’t know if the world really gives equal attention to black and white lives. I need to be blunt and honest that the world is not treating the human race the same way. Some are more equal than others. And when I say this, it pains me. Because I see it. Very difficult to accept but it’s happening”. He was referring to the relative lack of attention to the Tigray province in Ethiopia (from where he hails), Yemen, Afghanistan and Syria.

Summing Up

    Thus, a tragic situation enshrines, on the one hand, the fact that single, identified lives matter more than astronomical numbers of deaths, especially of “alien” - and “savage” people - but also combines with Western, “universal values” delivered not only by a mighty media machine but also by a mighty military machine.
    The situation will come under a microscope, while other, larger events will continue to be seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

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