Small Islands

Disaster, anxiety, and the scale of catastrophe

Right now and for many years there has been a program of forced resettlement of Maasai people in Tanzania for conservationist reasons. The reasons seem to me, as an outsider, to be genuine and conservation goals especially around NgoroNgoro are legitimately important. At the same time, forced resettlement is an obvious component of genocide, the Maasai consider this genocide, and Human Rights Watch thinks the resettlement should be halted. I found out about this last year because I went on an ill-fated expedition to Tanzania mostly to faff around under the broad guise of exploratory research. (I got Zika virus so I paid for my sins). I would have never heard of it otherwise, and I have heard nobody else even talk about it before or since. 

In fact I would have heard nothing about this even during the trip to Tanzania, if I had not run into an American anthropologist in a guest house. He shared many stories of studying pastoralist tribes in East Africa, and we discussed overlapping data collection concerns between anthropology and development economics. He described how in semi-nomadic pastoralist societies, the lack of trust towards outsiders means that they routinely refuse to complete surveys and will lie if compelled to give information to researchers or government officials. 

In his view, therefore, the only way to get information about them is to be embedded with them, and maybe one person will allow you to earn their trust, and then that person will tell you things. “It turns statistics on its head,” he said, rather theatrically (not that I can’t relate to that). “It’s better to have a smaller sample.” Theatrics aside, it’s hard to disagree with it. I don’t think the claims of lying are overblown. And I have always had an affinity for small sample statistical work, and for small sets of numbers. Hard problems often yield no more than a handful of really good data points. Yet if you learn to handle these properly, it is possible to succeed, and to learn.  

I’m not writing this post to ask you to get worked up about the plight or tragedy of yet another group of people you know almost nothing about, or to try to adjudicate how much or how genuine a concern for conservation needs to be before resettling people is “worth it”. I don’t know how to begin to approach that trade-off, and I strongly believe that adding this issue to the outrage cycle would do nothing good. Even if you were to be so galvanised by my rather tepid story that you decided to enter pro-Maasai, or pro-conservation, activism, what good would that do? You literally just heard of the problem. Other people have been working on it for years. That’s what it takes to be useful on something, even a relatively small something. That is the level of commitment.

Viewed in a certain light, I know this can sound defeatist. And it is defeatist, but not in a political way — the defeat we experience on being told we can’t save the whole universe by caring a lot immediately is a defeat for ourselves, for our own ambitions, and perhaps for our understanding of the world. Even now I find it uncomfortable to admit that, in my observation of myself and others, the majority of people’s engagement in activism is emotional rather than sincerely political. I don’t mean to single out activists — the majority of people who refuse to engage with social causes also do so for emotional reasons, not as a wise and thoughtful abstention in the pursuit of “higher goals”.

It’s not wrong to be emotional or act for emotional reasons, but I do think it’s wrong to be confused about our emotions and motives and make no effort to gain clarity. As a liberal, of a sort, I guess, it is easy for me to observe this tendency in other political factions. But it is very evidently on display with us as well. In fact, nowhere is this confusion more apparent than in the liberal reaction to climate change. 

Psychologically, experientially, climate change is all at once happening and not happening. It is caused by all of us and no-one, so that we can simultaneously feel like we’re helping by not using plastic or not driving a car or not flying somewhere on holiday and yet know that we are not affecting it at all and it will still exactly be there tomorrow, because we also know in some part of ourselves even as we are doing these things that the real solution to this problem will look absolutely nothing like this. Nothing we do individually can change it. This makes it an excellent repository for our guilt. 

And that is indeed how we use it. I’m always astounded by how quickly we, myself very much included, can be provoked to describe the end of the world. Or, if I want to sound a bit more intelligent, I may just say things like “Lower Manhattan will be a flood plain” or “Bangladesh will be underwater” or “Australia will be at all times 25% on fire”. As usual I pay a cost for trying to be more intelligent. As my statements get closer to home, their ring becomes less catchy, at least to my own ears. 

***

The more specific we get about what is actually happening, the worse it feels, no?

And the less confidently we are able to use “the climate apocalypse” as a catchall for our misery, at once expressing and soothing it. That’s something surprising about invoking the apocalypse: emotionally, it’s not messy and upsetting. It’s tidy. The blankness of annihilation means the end of responsibility. It’s when we focus on the specifics of what will happen that the real trouble starts. Everybody wants to think about extinction and watch disaster movies and yell at other people for being stupid or greedy or not caring. Mostly nobody wants to get involved in electoral politics over it, or read, say, Chapter 15 of the IPCC report and understand what it means. You can find it here, handsomely titled “Small Islands”, a title I like so much I have stolen it. Um, I mean, “given it exposure”.¹

Listen, I know you’re not going to read it. (Actually quite a lot of you click links when I put them in these posts, which I do appreciate.) I’m not trying to say you’re bad — even I did not read it. I skimmed it. I found it and skimmed it because I was tired of hearing myself and everyone flippantly referring to the end of the world. Two words stuck out to me from skim-reading this report, particularly focused around the impact of climate change on less developed island nations. One is “uninhabitable”. The other is “inundation”. The rest of the report elaborates on the situation in those terms.

So, here it is, or here it will be, in this limited set of places. There will be some form of apocalypse, unless efforts are made now to adapt.² And yet no sooner do we find this out than we turn away from it and look for something better, something else. Admit it — I am barely holding your attention with this. You want to go back to me talking about such and such a place “being underwater” and some people “dying in the climate war”. The fact that some small island nations will have their economies and cultures shattered just doesn’t feel as moving as a fantasy of all of us being snuffed out in a moment or a series of long moments and the entirety of human civilisation destroyed, even though the former thing is real and the latter thing is not. Things being real is apparently a detail to us. Vanuatu, Timor and Trinidad are too small, with too few people, to feel good enough to get worked up about, especially when the problems have not yet arrived. Such minor contemplations will not slake our destructive lust. We want a huge catastrophe, or else catastrophe now.

And at the same time, understanding what will happen on these islands is too much, too real, and too upsetting, and that’s also why we want to be rid of it as a talking point. That should tell us more about what we get out of this exercise. I think we are contemplating catastrophe in order to launder our own existing negative emotions. Simultaneously, of course, we don’t want a real catastrophe to happen to us or anyone — that itself is part of what drives the fixation, and gives these references their complex allure.³ Self-situating next to these large and terrifying problems gives our own pain a respectable outlet and ourselves a feeling of release. It is a positive, not a negative, sensation. Gruesome. But that’s real.

There are in fact always ongoing catastrophes in the world, but they are rarely in places or at scales that naturally draw our attention. Even if we can get passionate about them for a little while, eventually we brush them aside. We can hold them in the periphery of our politics and our minds. They don’t feel big enough or grand enough; there is something humiliating about their scale. And they are often closer to home than we would like. We will look for grander struggles to join, rhetorically, at a scale which we feel expresses things more properly. As long as we are doing this, I think the lure of the cataclysmic will be impossible to resist. If we must acknowledge a smaller crisis, or that harm is coming to some inconsequential group of people, we will try to attach their fate and our own to something bigger if possible. If our need to feel involved and affected is sufficiently great, we will link them up even if it is not really possible.  

Trying to spin our anxieties into something grander than they are feels churlish to call out, though, precisely because it is so commonplace, so apparently tempting to us all. (The conservatives do this with gender, obviously. Sitting up at night, scared about linguistic shifts in pronouns.) But, to put it mildly, I think this tendency is not benign.

I am often reminded of the times that I saw Polish and Ukrainian folks on twitter complaining bitterly about how bad it feels to watch the comfortable anglosphere poster-commentariat make dark jokes about NATO and world war 3 and nuclear escalation and Poland and the end of the world.

I did not save or screenshot these tweets, but I wish I had, because can’t find them again and yet this exchange has stuck with me for almost — exactly almost — two years. The anger in those tweets, at us, was palpable, and rightly — you can read a related piece, called “Fuck Leftist Westsplaining”, by Zosia Brom, here. And indeed, on twitter that day as I remember it some westerners defended, to their Eastern European comrades, their right to post through their pre-emptive or second-hand panic. “We make these jokes to cope,” they said.

The Ukrainian responded, “To cope with what? Nothing is happening to you!” 

***

Of course it’s not entirely wrong to be affected by the small risk of global nuclear war going up a bit, or to just feel sympathetic pain for those living in a war. But it’s not entirely right either. It’s just not entirely honest. The truth is that we feel those emotions and then we give ourselves license to do whatever we like with them, including ignoring or talking back to the people who are much closer to those realities. They do not seem to be very charmed by us in this arena. Listening to them talk online and off it, I sense that they sense that for us they are a distraction. They knew then that in a month or two we would have forgotten that Russia is firing rockets nearby to Poland. And our anxiety would by then have attached itself to something else, and so it has. They know that their situation is, for us, a kind of emotional or quasi-spiritual outlet. They know that we use it like that. 

We borderline cannot admit it. What would we say to them if we could admit it? Even though we already know they know, and they know we know as well.

It’s not really right to use the pain of other people in this way. A little theft like this underpins almost all saviour-ism, and, to my view, infects it. Pretending to an altruism we simply do not possess, pretending to speak on behalf of people we have met only briefly, talking over them when they try to talk back to us, it’s totally wrong.⁴ And yet of course we are not indifferent to each other. A part of us wants to help others, always. It’s just that a part of us also fears for ourselves, along all sorts of unlikely dimensions — when those two parts are in conflict, no matter how stupid and small the fear is, the fear will always win.

It is up to us to remove that conflict where possible, where it is not real. I do think we have responsibilities to each other and for that matter to animals and to the earth, to the climate. A sustained and actual investment and assistance to those in crisis is important and necessary, and so is a response to climate change.⁵ I think we are called to address these problems without the theatrics of imagining ourselves to be more (or less) involved than we actually are. A version of this trick is involved in being a good development economist. 

But how to complete the trick? You can’t remove your fears or any of your other emotions by telling yourself they’re stupid and don’t matter because other people have it worse. You can only dissolve them by experiencing them deeply and making them part of you. And there’s a paradoxical way that it works. We think that by stoically bearing our small hurts, we somehow honour those whose wounds are greater, but the opposite is true. Acknowledging the real pain inflicted by small things elevates and rightly frames the larger pain caused by greater things. 

Alaa Abd El-Fattah talks about this in his book, “You have not yet been defeated”, when he talks about prison. He talks about feeling sheepish to complain that the authorities did not give him the things he was entitled to, such as english-language newspapers or books, while other prisoners are being regularly beaten. But who does it help if you don’t complain about the books? The authorities! Not the other prisoners. On the contrary, take the books seriously, insist on your right to have them, and it throws the worse situation of other prisoners into greater relief, displaying the abuses more sharply: We should have books. Instead we have no books, and what’s more, some people are beaten. 

A previous draft of this post was guilty of all the crimes I am calling out now and I am probably still guilty of them, just less so, I hope. I still cannot make myself care deeply about the plight of small islands even though I named the post after them. Even though I’ve been there and I find these islands very beautiful and I think that I should care, still, it does not capture my attention. The minimum I owe those people, I think, is honesty about that situation. I realise it is very unflattering. But I feel that nothing is more insulting to others than pretending to care about them more than is real.⁶ Perhaps from an honest acknowledgement of the situation, I can grow to care, in time. The journey may not be very long. As I sit with it, I already feel it shifting. 

After I wrote that bad first draft I went hunting for an image to accompany it and I found this one. I was attracted to the shape of it, the combination of curves and spikes, and the photograph’s careful lighting. This is a Rotinese zither, an instrument called a sesando. The Metropolitan Museum describes its purpose like this:

“Used at weddings and funerals, the sesando is believed to possess supernatural powers. Occasionally played as a solo instrument, this zither is predominantly used to accompany songs with verses composed in bini, a special poetic language, and refrains in ordinary Rotinese. The songs are often philosophical, portraying the world as dominated by inescapable fate and life as at times disappointing and ultimately fleeting.” 

Seems like they’re well across it.

The sesando from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. This image is in the public domain. Read more here.

1. Jokes aside, this is one of many instances of technical or scientific writing being inadvertently, strangely beautiful.

2. There are some efforts underway as of quite recently. I know about Australia’s contribution here, but I would think there are others.

3. If I could go back in time and kill baby Freud perhaps I would do it. (I wouldn’t, but like, come on, he cannot keep getting away with this.) If you’re unsure about what I am saying here, a useful analogy can be made to the massive cultural demand for true crime stories. I personally do not like true crime and I’m not mentioning it here to exonerate or condemn anyone, I am just saying that’s evidently the situation we are working with.

4. I am taking a shot here at anyone this applies to: charity workers, NGOs, development economists, effective altruists, etc.

5. Probably along the lines of the Montreal Convention by which we got rid of CFCs. This problem is much harder, obviously. But I think there are real political inroads to be made here, like Australia’s Climate 200 which has already substantially rearranged Australian climate politics.

6. To my fellow liberals, this is why MLK spent his time calling out the inefficacy of the white moderate. And, for the record, saying you care about something and then doing nothing about it other than worrying and tweeting is a form of not caring.