At any given point in time, there's usually a major situation in the world that garners an awful lot of attention. Everyone seems to have a 'pinion ('opinion' in the idiolect of a countryside person in a George Eliot novel), and the 'pinion is usually voiced vociferously, with self-righteous indignation, often with a single statistic, a picture, an infographic, a rousing slogan, or an unanswerable rhetorical question intended to settle the complex matter once and for all.
Now, if you were reading this two years ago, five years ago, in two years' time, or in five years' time, the topic would have been or might well be different than today's. It doesn't matter what the situation is: the dynamic is the same.
Superficially, the response might be: Fair enough! There is wrong in the world, and one's moral obligation is to pick a side (the right side of course) and express one's condemnation of the wrong side! This is how the world is changed!
I used to engage in this, but now I do not.
I recently 'slipped' on this question and mentally involved myself with an issue du jour.
I pulled myself up and stood back.
How did I pick this issue? Because it was a war? Not a good enough answer. According to an encyclopaedic source, there are five major wars taking place in the world right now, seventeen other wars, nineteen minor conflicts, plus numerous other clashes and skirmishes.
Was I equally upset about all of these? Nope. Was I upset about these in proportion to the deaths? Nope. Brief self-examination revealed that compassion for suffering per se or the desire for peace were not the real motivation behind my engagement. When I think about these other conflicts, I feel compassion and I desire peace. But then my attention drifts. The question is: why is my attention drawn to this and not to that conflict?
Conflicts aren't the only fodder for such engagements. The situation might be political, societal, or even scientific or academic. In terms of human rights abuses, a couple of countries spring to mind that have occupied my attention extensively. These countries are also regularly in the news. However, according to one particular think tank that creates an index of human freedoms and their restriction by human rights abuses, the two countries ranked somewhere in the middle of the league tables of all countries in the world. One of them was ahead of at least one hundred other countries in terms of human freedoms. However, most of the countries performing worse than our two reprobates are rarely, if ever, in the news. It turns out that, as with war, my attention was snagged by these two countries for reasons other than a genuine, egalitarian, and non-partisan interest in human rights.
When I cast my mind back to the various issues in the public eye that have caught my attention over the years and occupied my consciousness, I find consistently that the values I claim lie at the foundation of my indignation and involvement, whilst genuine in themselves, are not the reason for the indignation and involvement, because those same values, when violated in a hundred, a thousand other situations, 'fail to launch', do not activate my indignation and involvement.
What's the real reason, therefore?
I love drama. I love identifying a victim, siding with the victim, donning the garb of rescuer, and crusading against the perpetrator. Why? Because this is the mechanism by which I project out my own shame, guilt, and fear. Rather than dealing with it internally, I ignore it, but, because it is part of me, I see it. Where? Wherever will have it. It's much easier to visit a theatre than build one from scratch. If there is an existing situation that has become the venue for the playing out of this dynamic, it is much easier to buy a ticket for the stalls or audition as a cast member, join the fray, the mob, the swarm of locusts, than to try to kick up a stink about human rights abuses or wars that are not in the news.
On one occasion I made the fatal mistake of really reading an awful lot about the 'situation', avoiding polemicists and partisans and steering myself towards rounded, synoptic materials. Fatal, because I was no longer able so clearly and unequivocally to 'take a side'. The situation was unfathomably complex, and I realised that my criticisms added nothing to the debate: I hadn't the foggiest idea how the situation should be resolved, and nor did anyone else, it appeared. I could throw verbal stones at the castle, but the ramparts would remain firm. I could hurl abuse at the falling raindrops, but that would not end the storm.
I decided, with that particular situation, to hold my tongue. If all I could do was attack, and I had no fully thought-through, well-informed, cogent, coherent, and plausible contribution by way of solution to the many underlying problems, what was I seeking to achieve? Had my fulminating changed anything on the ground? Had anyone been convinced by my arguments? Had anything actually changed?
No. I had added noise to a noisy situation. That was all.
Except that was not quite all.
What had changed was me.
I was angry, and my anger was irresoluble. Every time the topic was brought up, it was as though the wound, the cause of the indignation were being re-inflicted. I was impossible to be around: when the topic was raised, I was set off like a string of Chinese fire-crackers. No one benefited from this unpleasantness. Even when the matter was not brought up, I would go online and find people arguing about the matter and join in. So proud of myself I was, for raising my standard and going to war!
Whenever I'm getting indignant about matters in the public domain, I now recognise I'm capitalising on the existence of a public debate, for my own psychological reasons: I enjoy self-righteousness. I enjoy condemnation. I enjoy displacing repressed emotions and igniting my conceptions of world events with this fetid fuel. This was not an expression of morality. Quite the reverse. It had to go.
Two further points.
Firstly, is the fact that a particular question is prominent in the public domain not proof that the question is more important morally than others? There are many reasons why particular issues or conflicts make the headlines and others do not. Geopolitical significance, vested interests, tribalism, sentimentality, habit, advertising revenue, polarisation, suitability for dramatisation: reasons abound. But it is quite clear that the absolute extent and nature of the human suffering involved is not the chief driver of prominence of a matter at the public level.
Secondly, is it ever legitimate to get involved? I ask these questions:
- How am I choosing this issue over others?
- What are my motivations?
- Should other issues more insistently command my attention?
- Is the contribution I am proposing to make a valuable one?
- Is indirect support potentially more valuable than direct action?
As a result of these questions, I do not engage in public and only very rarely engage in private debate on matters of the world. I do not deny their importance, but I deny the value of my mental and verbal engagement, particularly when that mental and verbal engagement is involuntary and triggered.
Instead, I give money to think tanks and organisations that actually do good on the questions that concern me. This fulfils my civic obligation without any collateral damage.