Here’s a question that responds to the comments by Terry Tempest Williams and Peter Singer: why do those of us who believe we are not averting our gaze from important social problems often fail to follow our words with effective, appropriate action?
This past weekend we drove to San Francisco to walk with friends at Land’s End, and en route to the Bay Area, somewhere near Vacaville, we passed a series of tersely worded signs in a cow pasture, urging drivers to help put an end to abortion. One section of the cow pasture was filled with small white crosses, thousands of them, symbolizing the number of abortions performed in the United States each day. Clearly someone had devoted time and thought to communicating to a large audience of freeway drivers about this issue. When we arrived in San Francisco we found our environmentalist friends on a streetcorner in the Marina District surrounded by monks and nuns and thousands of sign-carrying civilians who’d been bused to San Francisco from around the country for the largest annual pro-life demonstration, a gathering of some 25,000 people. We rendezvoused with our friends and quickly extricated ourselves from the protesters, but the question we discussed among ourselves was: how much of their personal income do these pro-life demonstrators actually devote to solving social and environmental problems resulting from human overpopulation? Do those who are “pro-life” typically give to the lives of impoverished families? They’ll spend ample time and money to travel to San Francisco and attend a demonstration urging the cessation of abortion, but do they act in response to problems caused by the birth of “too many” babies?
To broaden the scope of this question, how many of us, even if we feel we are not averting our gazes from important issues, actually follow gazing (and speaking/writing) with action? And when we pay attention to some issues are we also able to notice and respond to corrolary issues? (For example, do pro-life activists respond as well to poverty, or do environmental activists adequately keep in mind the economic ramifications of environmental protection?)
I supposed what I’m talking about here is the importance of multidimensional, perhaps even multidirectional, thinking. I see examples of people attempting to achieve this in various works of literature, although it’s pretty clear that all of us have blind spots. As a literary critic, I tend to think of genocide, environmental degradation, poverty, and other large-scale problems in the context of language. In particular, it seems important to consider how to communicate awareness of important issues—this is the role of journalists and scientists and politicians and also artists. It may well be true that our local, national, and international laws are inadequate to the task of responding effectively to perceived problems. But prior to invoking law, clear and evocative communication must occur.
The occasion for this blog is the new film Reporter, which examines Nick Kristof’s efforts to raise awareness of the current genocide in Darfur and other relevant issues, despite the social and psychological forces that impede public attention to such phenemena and government action. Nonetheless, I’m not sure our best communicators on such topics typically have a conscious sense of the strategies they’re intuitively using to reach the public. It’s common for socially conscious writers to speak of the communicative challenge as a difficulty in prompting emotional responses in readers, viewers, or listeners—and often the desired response is empathy. Empathy for disadvantaged or endangered people, nearby or far away. Empathy for other species, including species akin to ourselves and species radically different from human beings. This effort to promote empathy seems to be based on the premise that ordinary people (“the public”) will speak out and will act in other ways (e.g., participating in demonstrations, voting for particular candidates or ballot measures, writing letters, etc.) if only they are given reason to care about a subject. As she does in her contribution to this blog, Terry Tempest Williams has often stated that the goal of much of her own writing is to “bypass rhetoric and pierce the heart,” as if this thing called “rhetoric” (by which she seems to mean abstract, ideologically entrenched language) prevents citizens from appreciating the deep, universal emotional connections (“heart”) with certain phenomena. For Wendell Berry, another major contemporary American author frequently engaged with challenging social and environmental topics, the major communicative obstacle is not “rhetoric” per se, but abstraction. He argues that people need to feel a sense of connection—or “love”—in order to be compelled to participate energetically in solving problems. And “love,” he writes, “is never abstract.”
Australian author William J. Lines articulates this issue by asking whether it matters how exactly we choose to express our sense of the value of certain phenomena we’re trying to protect. Most of us are in the habit of attaching monetary values to physical things and and even relatively abstract services, such as intellectual and artistic products. But what if the phenomenon we’re hoping to protect is a community of people or a forest or a river? In an essay called “Money,” Lines argues, “People exploit what has a price or what they conclude to be merely of value; they defend what they love. Love cannot be priced. But to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know. The abstract, objective, dispassionate, and dissociative language of economics and science [...] cannot replace and cannot become the language of familiarity, reverence, and affection by which things of worth ultimately are protected and conserved.” Some would argue that monetary concerns are inescable in the modern world—intervening to stop genocide in a distant part of the world would involve various direct and indirect costs, such as the cost of relocating military forces and the potential cost of having unfriendly governments withhold natural resources or other services as a result of interventions. Many make similar claims regarding natural phenomena—that we must find ways of squeezing square, living phenomena into round, monetary holes, so to speak. Economist Frank Ackerman and law professor Lisa Heinzerling argued in Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing that certain phenomena, such as human life and the natural world, intrinsically defy the monetizing impulse. We care too much about some things to affix prices to them.
The reality is that we need to refine multidimensional discourses that encompass dollars and feelings, rationality and emotionality, the big pictures and the singular stories. The writers and scholars participating in this blog have been seeking to do this in context of genocide and poverty. I think they would find many useful communicative strategies in the field of environmental literature: for instance, the braiding together of sweeping philosophical abstractions and particularizing anecdotes in Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams; the similar strategy that comes across as a dramatic telescoping process of pulling back toward abstraction and moving in toward one’s own life in Bill McKibben’s Maybe One; Barbara Kingsolver’s demonstrations, through first-person narratives, of how one becomes aware of distant phenomena and comes to care about species and people whose lives may seem disconnected from one’s own life in her book Small Wonder; Terry Tempest Williams, in Refuge and various other books, addresses difficult, abstract social issues in a lyrical voice that resembles prose poetry, offering unusually memorable, quotable bits of language; and David Quammen and Sandra Steingraber, in works such as The Song of the Dodo and Having Faith, respectively, combine authoritative, credible scientific information with evocative (often humorous) metaphors. These are only six examples out of dozens and dozens. Again, the major strategic lessons from these examples are the braiding of abstract and concrete, the telescoping movement back and forth between big-picture information and illustrative story, the demonstration of how to care and act, the lyrical intensification of vast topics, and the translation of technical information into evocative (even humorous) metaphor.
Many of us understand intuitively that the effective communication of information and perspectives pertaining to phenomena such as genocide or habitat destruction or climate change involves negotiating problems of scale. We are beings most strongly motivated by intense emotional connections, and our feelings of connection are stimulated most effectively by specific, concrete examples. What I’ve described here are some ideas about how and why certain authors approach intractable subjects in certain ways. Sometimes its helpful to have labels to describe techniques one is already using or to describe the strategies evident in other communicators’ work.
Still, I have long been perplexed by the problem of matching social concerns with appropriate actions. And with the difficulty of expanding the multidirectional scope of one’s gaze.
