21 Lessons for the 21st Century(73)
But what counts as ‘a sincere effort to know’? Should postmasters in every country open the mail they are delivering, and resign or revolt if they discover government propaganda? It is easy to look back with absolute moral certainty at Nazi Germany of the 1930s – because we know where the chain of causes and effects led. But without the benefit of hindsight, moral certainty might be beyond our reach. The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.
Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases. We are all complicit in at least some such biases, and we just don’t have the time and energy to discover them all. Writing this book brought the lesson home to me on a personal level. When discussing global issues, I am always in danger of privileging the viewpoint of the global elite over that of various disadvantaged groups. The global elite commands the conversation, so it is impossible to miss its views. Disadvantaged groups, in contrast, are routinely silenced, so it is easy to forget about them – not out of deliberate malice, but out of sheer ignorance.
For example, I know absolutely nothing about the unique views and problems of aboriginal Tasmanians. Indeed, I know so little that in a previous book I assumed aboriginal Tasmanians don’t exist any more, because they were all wiped out by European settlers. In fact there are thousands of people alive today who trace their ancestry back to the aboriginal population of Tasmania, and they struggle with many unique problems – one of which is that their very existence is frequently denied, not least by learned scholars.
Even if you personally belong to a disadvantaged group, and therefore have a deep first-hand understanding of its viewpoint, that does not mean you understand the viewpoint of all other such groups. For each group and subgroup faces a different maze of glass ceilings, double standards, coded insults and institutional discrimination. A thirty-year-old African American man has thirty years’ experience of what it means to be an African American man. But he has no experience of what it means to be an African American woman, a Bulgarian Roma, a blind Russian or a Chinese lesbian.
As he grew up, this African American man was repeatedly stopped and searched by the police for no apparent reason – something the Chinese lesbian never had to undergo. In contrast, being born into an African American family in an African American neighbourhood meant that he was surrounded by people like him who taught him what he needed to know in order to survive and flourish as an African American man. The Chinese lesbian was not born into a lesbian family in a lesbian neighborhood, and maybe had nobody in the world to teach her key lessons. Hence growing up black in Baltimore hardly makes it easy to understand the struggle of growing up lesbian in Hangzhou.
In previous eras this mattered less, because you were hardly responsible for the plight of people halfway across the world. If you made an effort to sympathise with your less fortunate neighbours, that was usually enough. But today major global debates about things such as climate change and artificial intelligence have an impact on everybody – whether in Tasmania, Hangzhou or Baltimore – so we need to take into account all viewpoints. Yet how can anyone do that? How can anyone understand the web of relations between thousands of intersecting groups across the world?3
Downsize or deny?
Even if we truly want to, most of us are no longer capable of understanding the major moral problems of the world. People can comprehend relations between two foragers, between twenty foragers, or between two neighbouring clans. They are ill-equipped to comprehend relations between several million Syrians, between 500 million Europeans, or between all the intersecting groups and subgroups of the planet.
In trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas of this scale, people often resort to one of four methods. The first is to downsize the issue: to understand the Syrian civil war as though it were occurring between two foragers; to imagine the Assad regime as a lone person and the rebels as another person, one bad and one good. The historical complexity of the conflict is replaced by a simple, clear plot.4
The second is to focus on a touching human story, which ostensibly stands for the whole conflict. When you try to explain to people the true complexity of the conflict by means of statistics and precise data, you lose them; but a personal story about the fate of one child activates the tear ducts, makes the blood boil, and generates false moral certainty.5 This is something that many charities have understood for a long time. In one noteworthy experiment, people were asked to donate money to help a poor seven-year-old girl from Mali named Rokia. Many were moved by her story, and opened their hearts and purses. However, when in addition to Rokia’s personal story the researchers also presented people with statistics about the broader problem of poverty in Africa, respondents suddenly became less willing to help. In another study, scholars solicited donations to help either one sick child or eight sick children. People gave more money to the single child than to the group of eight.6
The third method to deal with large-scale moral dilemmas is to weave conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that twenty multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one – including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion – really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively.7