Dealing with the Sheer Enormity of Human Suffering
For those who haven’t seen the incredibly thought-provoking video below, I recommend it highly. Here are a few comments:
Yes, it’s true; we can’t let 5.6 billion impoverished people, or even a tiny fraction, into our country. But factually, poverty really isn’t the most pressing reason for allowing immigration; it’s the ravages of war. If it weren’t for the current climate of hyper-xenophobia, we would be more than willing to absorb our fair share of refugees from war-torn countries, whose very lives are at stake. Note to those too young to remember: Leading the world with kindness and decency is something at which the U.S. formerly excelled.
The speaker asserts that, if we are to help impoverished people, we must do so in the lands in which they live, but no one denies that basic concept. But what does that mean, specifically? First, consider this: alleviating human suffering means manufacturing less of it in the first place. Very little is being done to deal with the root causes of run-away population growth. The main (only?) solution here is education, insofar as educated women don’t have 15 children. In turn, one of the main root causes of poor education is lack of access to energy: no light by which to read at night or access to the Internet. This is the reason that, in the long-term (or even the medium term), creating local markets that build schools with microgrids powered by renewable energy is the single best bang for our philanthropic buck.
Helping people in the lands in which they live also means providing access to family planning, which results in smaller, stronger, more stable and more affluent families. I listened to an hour-long interview with Melinda Gates recently, and learned about the wonderful things the Gates Foundation is doing to treat disease in sub-Saharan Africa, home to 19 of the 20 sovereign countries with the highest birth rates on Earth. But it made me wonder if these enormous resources would be better spent addressing the social conditions that cause tens of millions of babies to be conceived each year who are doomed to be malnourished and condemned to die in searing agony. Almost all those who survive their childhood will live in unimaginable levels of poverty, disease, ignorance and squalor. Before they die, however, in most cases they will reproduce themselves with an appalling number of offspring, thus repeating and expanding the cycle. (The only real alternative to this horrific outcome is that many, out of desperation, will be recruited into terrorist groups and, of course, wreak even more terrible consequences.)
The 60-minute show mentioned contraception for just a few seconds, during which Ms. Gates offered this: a) Finding some means of contraception means that both babies’ and the women’s health are likely to be better, and b) It’s women’s #1 issue. (Yes, that’s right; it’s by far the most important request that women make: Please! Help me stop having so many children!)
In the few moments devoted to the subject, she mused: “It’s weird. When I visit them, all I want to talk about is vaccines; all they want to talk about is contraception.”
But is that really so weird? If you or I were having those conversations, we’d be inclined to regard them as perfectly rational, though desperate, pleas for help.
Apparently, living under these miserable conditions, and caring about the welfare of their children as only mothers can, means wanting to create fewer of them. Mothers seem to know something that defies our understanding as philanthropists: again, alleviating suffering means manufacturing less of it. This is what these women are telling us with heart-piercing clarity. Why is this so hard for us to grasp?
