The Pagan Agenda

Question: What is the ethical obligation of the West to the people of Darfur?

Here in California there are now ads on TV in which several actors pose as “persons on the street” and read excerpts of letters from the people of Darfur that speak of numerous horrors. At the end of the ad the people take a didactic turn and say things along the lines of “I have done nothing about this tragedy”, and the tone turns downright judgemental of the viewer. I can’t find the original clip, but this one has something of the same spirit.

The details of Darfur are complex, but suffice to say a large number of people are being killed everyday in a situation many are calling a genocide. And yet the swelling of righteousness among many on the left as well as some on the religious right is troubling to me. There are two issues here that strike me as being unwisely fused into a single axiom:

a) The Darfur situation is a tragedy of epic scale;

b) therefore, we in the West ought to do what we can to remedy this situation.

Specifically, I am troubled by what I feel is the primacy placed on the recognition of the emotional resonance of the tragedy in Darfur, to such an extent that among Darfur activists this almost aesthetic experience of the genocide trumps discussion of pragmatic action. There is a sense that the West ignores Darfur because it doesn’t care, and no real acknowledgement of the fact that perhaps the West ignores Darfur because no one has a good solution.

I think it might be interesting to view this moral didacticism through the lens of Dostoyevsky’s character of Ivan Karamazov, if only because I personally sense some parallels. In his famous “Grand Inquisitor” narrative, Ivan revolts against God in the name of a single child, because the tears of one single child are enough of a travesty to render God’s omnipotence insufficiently moral and just. Ivan makes an intellectually devastating argument, and yet despite this brilliance Ivan’s stance is, for me, damningly juvenile. Ivan is beating chains against the sea in the name of this single child, and one hears unassailable logic of his argument…but what is he doing for the child? Ivan is a sulker, a man of ideas who nonetheless refuses to engage in actually carrying out his rebellion in a meaningful manner.

Put another way: Ivan knows what he stands against, but what does he stand for? I get the same sense from the Darfur coalition out here in North America. We know they are outraged by the mass killings, rapes, and starvation, and yet like Ivan they seem wholly defined by this mixture of rage, righteousness, and shame, as though their spiritual solidarity with the oppressed is an end in and of itself.

One of the reasons I bring this up is because to a certain extent I feel like I have no common language with these people. I honestly think they would render me emotionally suspect for my lack of outrage over the human suffering in Darfur. In that sense I feel like Alyosha, for whom the only response to Ivan is to kiss him.

If you look at the “Take Action” section of this website, it is as though the word “action” dies a quiet death in phrases such as “Meet with your member of Congress and urge him or her to do more to help the people of Darfur” and “Teach others about the first genocide of the 21st century and inform them of what they can do to help the people of Darfur.” “Action” apparently means urging others to become aware, and nothing more. I find such an approach grossly inadequate to the task at hand- namely, staving off a genocide.

Am I being unreasonable if I expect a “Take Action” section to address the following hard questions: What countries will supply peacekeepers? What role would peacekeepers play, and how long will they stay? What would be their rules of engagement should the Janjaweed militias fight back? Are we prepared to engage in offensive military missions or will we limit our scope of action to suit the sensitive geo-political nature of operating in that part of the world? How do we avoid repeats of failed humanitarian operations of the past, such as the Europeans in the Balkans and the US in Somalia? And what about moving through the UN or outside the UN?

You don’t hear the Western Darfur folks talk about any of these difficult issues, and this strikes me as exactly backwards. Much like the war in Iraq was sold by whipping up a potent emotional cocktail based on fear and vengeance, so this intervention seems predicated on a cocktail of shame and righteousness. In both cases this emphasis on the potency of emotion obscures the absence of a pragmatic plan that accommodates all the variables and deals with worst-case scenarios. We are, to my mind at least, in the territory of glorous rhetoric, where a soaring sense of solidarity is prized over the kind of hard-nosed logistics that will actually help these people, where Ivan is valued more than Alyosha. I don’t know if I would characterize my issues here as a matter of linguistics, but I do sense a realm in which language is stripped of tangible meaning and the passion factor of one’s opinions trumps meaningful discourse.

I don’t intend for this to be a political diatribe, but rather an exploration of how our sense of obligation to each other and the language we use to express this solidarity perhaps obscures our actual relationships as human beings and interferes with the language necessary to help each other. And with regards to helping the poor people of Darfur, I saw we tread carefully, not so much out of selfish concern or indifference, but out of respect for the complicated and awesome task before if we are indeed to take action in the end.