Just watched a documentary on the South Asian tsunami. One of the reasons this tragedy hits home for lots of people is the realization it could very easily be them next time. There is almost no place you can reside on the planet that is not potentially in the path of one natural calamity or anaother—earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tonadoes, the big one from space.
But let’s be honest: the reason the death toll was as high as it was there [or after the earthquake in Haiti] is because it effected areas where there were lots and lots of people living in poverty. That’s the way of the world.
Still, there is no real moral outrage being expressed regarding the devastation because it was the result of a natural disaster. An “act of god” if you will.
Irony intended.
Say what you will about the tsunami’s destructve power, but you can’t say it acted immorally, right? You can’t call it an “evil” thing. It is just an adventitious movement in the earth’s crust that precipitated horrific consequences for those unlucky enough to be in its path.
On the other hand, imagine a context in which the source of human misery is perceived to be exploitation or injustice. For example, according to WHO, every 24 hours nearly 20,000 children aged 5 years and younger die of starvation around the globe. That means in one week almost as many of these innocent kids will perish of hunger [one of the most agonizing and protracted ways to die] as have all the victums of the South Asian tsunami. It is the equivalent of nearly 50 of these tsunamis every single year. And all the victums are babies and infants and very young children.
Yet where is the moral outrage?
Some say the reality of worldwide starvation is built right into a worldwide global economy in which a small percentage of the world’s wealthiest citizens gobble up a huge percentage of the world’s resources day after day. Three and one half billion men, women and children literally subsist on less than $2 a day. And it has been estimated that if we used the food thrown away in dumpsters by American restaurants every night we could feed every single starving person around the globe ten times over. But we don’t.
And the moral codes embraced by many very compassionaite and decent and caring people seem to be completely oblivous to this. Why? Why is 7,000,000 children starving to death every year not leading the newscasts night after night?
And when folks walk into Wal Mart to buy their cheap products they don’t ask who made them…or what the working conditions were like…or whether the stuff came from sweatshops in which millions of adults and children are paid pennies a day. Why? Could it possibly have something to do with relationship between how morality is perceived in these countries and how that is intimately interwined in the relationships between government and corporations and the media?
But then those who run the world have plenty of their own rationalizations to justify why their way is the best of all possible worlds. And who knows, maybe it is.
To me that is the horror built right into human moral and political interaction. There is no way to say for certain which social or political or economic system is the most ethical. Says who? Based on what criteria?
And with no God to appeal to you have to endure the way the world works as best you can. Or organize with others and try to change it. Of course if you are one of those reaping the benefits of the way it works now you will probably not see all this in the manner in which those who are not benefiting do.
It makes you wonder. Could ethical convictions perhaps be, well, situational?