The Pity Party (8 page)

If Betsy Wilson's family has an income above the American average, it is even farther above the Richistan average, which puts their standard of living comfortably inside the top 10 percent of all households in the world. Assume Mpinga Bomboku's family has an income that is average for his country, which makes it low even by the standards of Poorlandia, and well below the boundary defining the poorest tenth of the global population. Indeed, the British journalist David Goodhart points out, “The poor in a rich country are, in fact, three times richer than the rich in a poor country, defined as that top 10 percent and not just the tiny number of the super-rich.”
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Yet, according to the moral lights of Paul Waldman and Barack Obama, it is very, very important to alleviate Betsy Wilson's suffering and only slightly important to assist the more grievously afflicted Mpinga Bomboku. How can they—how dare they—look at little Mpinga—ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished—and say: sorry, too bad—you can't have more than the pittance that rich countries, which insist they have more pressing things to do, take out of their governments' petty cash drawers? What kind of a person says that to a child?

We behold, then, a striking incongruity. Liberals, who in most political contexts are in equal parts verbose and lachrymose when addressing the horrors of suffering and the imperatives of compassion, have surprisingly few words and sentiments to spare concerning the world's most acute human distress. How can liberals who vote with hearts full of compassion for the guy or woman next to them also vote with hearts full of indifference for the starving child in a distant country? “If all human lives are equally valuable,” asks Goodhart, “how can we any longer favour our fellow national citizens over the impoverished masses of the global south? This ‘post-nationalism' nags away at the conscience of many liberal-minded people.”
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The illogic of liberals' lopsided preference for intranational over international remedies is a good place to begin examining liberalism's problems with acting on compassion's dictates. The liberal idea treats the alleviation of suffering as the most basic, and at the same time most exalted, moral imperative. The liberal project consists of identifying suffering situations and advocating measures to address them. If it is better to alleviate more suffering than less, then it is best to alleviate as much as possible. On this basis liberals favor public programs, backed by government's singular power to tax and borrow, over private charities that always disburse help less generously by virtue of operating with fewer resources.

The project is aligned with the idea, then, which means that liberalism's theoretical problems are likely to cause practical difficulties. One theoretical problem is that because there's a lot of suffering out there, we need, in a world of finite resources and capabilities, criteria for differentiating more from less urgent claims on our humanitarianism. There are, in the main, two ways to rank suffering situations: according to severity, or according to proximity. The logic of liberalism points to calibrating the severity of suffering situations, thereby giving the greatest attention to those who suffer most acutely.

The liberal sensibility, however—and the ubiquity of appeals to compassion and empathy affirms that liberals have chosen to build their house on the foundation of moral sentiment—strongly emphasizes proximity. We are
moved
to assist the afflicted more than we are
persuaded
to do so. A problem with compassion, Kant wrote in 1763, is that “there is no proportion in the result.” A “suffering child . . . will fill our hearts with sadness, while at the same time we hear with indifference the news of a terrible battle in which, obviously, a considerable number of the human species must suffer undeservedly under horrible evil.”
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Compassion pulls liberalism in opposite directions: toward a moral provincialism, insofar as it wants to make political use of the instinctive sympathy we feel for the sufferer in the center of our field of view; and toward a moral universalism, insofar as it calls upon us to direct that exact sentiment to ever wider circles of sufferers, whose plights are increasingly distant and exotic.

Anyone who says “Charity begins at home” is conveying that charity should end at a point not very far from home. It's infeasible, in other words, to proceed as if the resources available to alleviate suffering were infinite, and it's indecent to allocate those finite resources as though sufferers near and dear to us deserve no more of our compassion than distant strangers. Accordingly, normal people devote greater attention and care to immediate needs than to remote ones.

An important objective of liberal rhetoric has been to make this natural desire to help those close to us, and whom we care about, an ally rather than an enemy of the liberal project. That effort will succeed to the extent it gets us to enlarge our understanding of the home where charity begins, and the family to which we belong. As Mario Cuomo said, liberals have “a single fundamental idea” regarding “what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings. . . .”

The problems with the idea of a national family are thrown into sharper relief by the concept of a global family. The disparity between how liberals regard Betsy and Mpinga suggests that the fierce urgency to comfort the afflicted stops or dramatically weakens at the water's edge. If that's so, however, can we be entirely sure compassion extends, undiminished, right up
to
the water's edge? The global “family” of 7.15 billion people is 22 times larger than the American “family” of 318 million, but the idea is not decisively crazier. The liberal argument posits an imperative for an American to constantly weaken his particularist attachment to his own spouse, children, siblings, parents, neighbors, community, coworkers, and coreligionists in favor of an increasingly encompassing, undifferentiated concern for all other Americans. The logical next step is a bigger, more ambitiously humanitarian mission: replacing the narrow attachment Americans feel for other Americans with a comprehensive devotion to all humans everywhere. The world abounds in suffering situations, after all, millions of them more acute than the ones addressed by liberals' domestic policies.

One way to rationalize liberals' lesser concern with the greater suffering found in the Global South is to emphasize the moral and political importance of reciprocity. Philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson upholds the mutual sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all by using a different metaphor than Cuomo's. Instead of conceiving of our nation as a family, we should emulate tight-knit religious communities. Anderson cites an Amish barn-raising, where everyone lends help in the expectation of eventually receiving the same kind of help. She could just as plausibly be endorsing the transformation of our continental republic into the United Kibbutz of America. The welfare state, Anderson argues, mediates the reciprocal relations within a commune that has members numbering in the hundreds of millions by discharging reciprocity through redistributive public programs. “In a democracy, government is nothing more than citizens acting together, through state officials functioning as their agents. It's no different in principle from the barn-raising system. It's just on a vastly larger scale that, due to its size, requires an intermediary administrative apparatus.”
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The intermediary administrative apparatus through which Americans could share benefits and burdens with Mpinga is much weaker than the one that allows them to share with other Americans, the United Nations being much less united than the United States. Were it otherwise, global citizens could act together in a global democracy. Therein a worldwide New Deal coalition might encompass Mpinga's family, and all others similarly situated, then use its ballot-box power to elect a global parliament and prime minister whose policies redirected some of the resources currently devoted to Betsy Wilson's needs to programs designed to alleviate the suffering of the most desperately poor. It is, alternatively, conceivable that the coalition would include the Bombokus
and
the Wilsons, but any such political effort is likely to founder on the economic infeasibility of an agenda that attempts to make more than 90 percent of global voters net importers of globally redistributed wealth. Margaret Thatcher's warning about socialists running out of other people's money applies most forcefully at the global level, since by definition there can be no auxiliary resources available to help achieve the goals of a redistributive project once it encompasses the entire planet.

Furthermore, the reciprocity Cuomo and Anderson invoke is implausible on a global scale, and will not make sense to the Americans they're trying to persuade. Reciprocity amalgamates compassion to enlightened self-interest: we help those who need it
because
they need it, but also because we can readily imagine someday needing such help ourselves. The act of imagination that puts us in another's place, making his suffering vivid and distressing to us, speaks to our heads as well as our hearts. Today's benefaction, whether it's the labor I devote to building Samuel Yoder's barn or the tax I pay to subsidize Betsy Wilson's insurance, weaves those beneficiaries into a network of obligations that may well prove beneficial to me in the future.

It's far more difficult, however, to persuade a generic Richistani voter and taxpayer that if he does Mpinga's family a good turn today there will come a time when he's down on his luck and the Bombokus will be there for him. Thus, while “the hunger of a woman in Little Rock is our hunger,” in Cuomo's words, the hunger of a woman in Lagos remains . . . her hunger or, at most, her fellow Nigerians' hunger. Cuomo's admonition—“the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure”—is doubly qualified, then. First, reasonable people, ranging from John Rawls to William Buckley, can disagree about what we might reasonably provide to avoid pain. And it is in the family of
America
that we are bound to one another, so that the failure anywhere to alleviate suffering means anywhere in America, not anywhere in the world.

There is a second way that liberal thinking about suffering and compassion rationalizes the great solicitude shown to Betsy Wilson and the meager concern given to Mpinga Bomboku. If it turns out that the suffering of a poor person in a rich country is more severe than the suffering of a poor person in a poor country—even if the poor person in the poor country is, by every objective standard, worse off than the poor person in the rich country—then it may be just, decent, and sensible to devote more concern and assistance to Betsy than to Mpinga.

Mpinga's family is worse off than Betsy's, but may
feel
better off. After all, there's hardly anyone known to the Bombokus who
isn't
ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. As a result, they can go through their days and years without ever looking around and feeling that fate or an unjust socioeconomic system has singled them out for some special deprivation. If, from time to time, they view television programs showing life in Richistan, they might pause to reflect on the staggering differences between what they see around them every day and what appears on the TV screen. (They might even try to imagine how it is possible that there are people living unhappily in Richistan. If Mpinga ever got a chance to see, in particular, the HBO series
The Sopranos
, he could have witnessed a scene where Tony Soprano compliments Svetlana Kirilenko, a Russian immigrant hired to care for his uncle, on her cheerful attitude despite having had a leg amputated when she was a child. “That's the whole purpose of people like me,” she says with sudden coldness. “To inspire people like you.” When Tony protests he meant no offense, Svetlana says, “That's the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expect only bad to happen. And they are not disappointed.”) But, more probably, the Bombokus regard news or entertainment shows from the Global North the way Richistanis view science fiction movies, as depictions of radically different creatures leading utterly dissimilar lives.

By the same token, the Wilsons lead a much nicer life than the Bombokus yet may feel worse about it. We can assume they do
not
compare themselves to Kinshasa's slum residents, but to their own neighbors and friends who have healthy children, or employer-provided health insurance, or who are eligible for some public program presently closed to the Wilsons. Within that very different frame of reference, then, the Wilsons may well feel aggrieved and deprived in a way the Bombokus do not. As a result, when we conduct empathy triage and rank the severity of the various suffering situations the world presents, the Wilsons would have a stronger claim on our compassion than the Bombokus, and on the ameliorations compassion directs us to perform.

Such is the logic of liberal author Timothy Noah's rebuke to conservatives who say America's economic inequality is not a serious problem, given that economic growth and technological progress are improving the quality of life for all. The fact that even poor Americans in the twenty-first century routinely avail themselves of medications or technologies unknown to Henry VIII or Andrew Carnegie counts for little, he says, against the fact that “people do not experience life as an interesting moment in the evolution of human living standards. They experience it in the present and weigh their own experience against that of the living.” The fundamental fact is “We are social creatures and establish our expectations in relation to one another.”
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