In a world filled with such inequalities, to live in the ‘favoured’ regions is to be virtually cut off from the experience, let alone the reactions, of people outside those regions.4 It takes an enormous effort of the imagination, as well as a great deal of knowledge, to break out of our comfortable, protected and self-absorbed enclaves and enter an uncomfortable and unprotected larger world inhabited by the majority of the human species. We are cut off from this world even if the sum total of amassed information is everywhere accessible at the click of a mouse, even if images of the remotest part of the world reach us at all times of day and night, even if more of us travel between civilisations than ever before. This is the paradox of a globalised twenty-first century.
I sometimes wonder whether we shouldn’t trust our instinctive, inner voices on some of these fundamental questions. The same voices that asked why the emperor was not wearing any clothes:
The voice of the child says:
‘What is profit? How is it made?
‘But where does the money really come from?’
The voice of the child knows
that paper cannot create value,
that labour is at the beginning and end of everything.
And all the teams of treasury economists,
the whole of the World Bank,
all the pink pages of the financial papers
cannot shift that voice in my head.
A voice as clear as justice.
And perhaps the most important questions of all – how then can we connect to the lives of others? How can we open ourselves to the experiences of the majority of people on our planet who do not have access to clean water or electricity or health services? To try and connect, even on an imaginative level, or a level of knowledge, is disturbing, even painful – yet the impulse is also at the heart of what makes us human beings. It is the impulse which lies behind Primo Levi’s terrible warning – describing a transmission between two worlds that are, in reality, one.
You who live safe
In your warm houses
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
*
The challenge of breaking out of our bubbles doesn’t relate only to crossing vast geographical territories between the developed world and poorer regions. Within the same society there can exist shocking divides, which people become incapable of seeing. Recently I was listening to a radio interview with the actor Antony Sher, and he began talking about his experience of growing up in South Africa in the 1960s:
Interviewer: How politically conscious were you growing up in the years of the apartheid system?
Sher: Not at all, and it’s quite a shocking, disturbing thing for me. If I look back on my youth and think of how comfortable my family were, what a joyous childhood it was, a childhood made up of beaches and brais, and so there we were living a very happy life – and we were in the middle of what was one of the atrocities of the last century – apartheid. And I didn’t really learn anything about apartheid till I came here to drama school and saw South Africa through British eyes … When I tell people that, I can hear people thinking that I’m trying to make an excuse, or an apology. I’m not. I’m stating quite a shocking truth about human beings – that we can live in the middle of an atrocity and not notice it if we don’t want to [my emphasis].
Interviewer: So how challenging was that for you to have to reappraise your childhood?
Sher: It was difficult, also because my grandparents had all fled persecution as Jews from eastern Europe, mostly Lithuania, at the turn of the century, and gone to South Africa – so they knew what it was like to be persecuted. And yet, as soon as they did well in South Africa, they supported the apartheid government – not in an active way, just in that middle-of-the-road way, they voted for the nationalist government. And they didn’t make … what you would have thought were the obvious comparisons of what it had been like to be second-class citizens as they had been in eastern Europe, and that the black people in South Africa were that now. How could they not make that comparison? But again, it’s very human, isn’t it?fn3
And if you think this is a rather extreme example of the walls that human beings can erect to block out what is going on all around them, just reflect for a moment about the staggering levels of inequalities in our societies at the moment. That in contemporary Britain we have become used to having ‘food banks’ because a million of our fellow citizens do not have enough to eat. What a shameful indictment of one of the richest countries in the world. Many of us would blame government policy here, vindictive official attitudes. Yes, this is certainly part of the problem. But also think for a moment about how hard we try not to see these million people. You may have impeccable liberal-left views, but the walls you create to separate yourself from others can be as impenetrable as steel.
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, was fascinated in what happens when we really look into the face of another human being and all that can be triggered by such a seemingly simple action:
The moral ‘authority’ of the face of the other is felt in my ‘infinite responsibility’ for the other … The face of the other comes toward me with its infinite moral demands.5
These ideas were also referred to by Justin Welby, now Archbishop of Canterbury, in a Guardian interview with Giles Fraser on 21 July 2012 – Welby expressed strong agreement with Levinas that ‘the face of the other is the true site of human obligation’. If this is true, then the converse must also be true – if you cannot see the face of the other, it is hard to feel human obligation. I was surprised to learn that Welby had spent eleven years in the oil industry, at Elf in France, and subsequently as group treasurer for Enterprise Oil, based in the City of London. Even more remarkably, it emerged that his principal area of knowledge was West Africa, and he had spent time working in the Niger Delta. I’m intrigued by how he, clearly a man of strong religious and ethical convictions, could have spent time working in such a compromised and exploitative environment. Did he find himself at times having to turn away from things he couldn’t bear to face?
Welby said something which struck me powerfully in this interview. He was discussing financial and banking corruption, and the move away from face-to-face trading in the City of London to electronic trading after the ‘Big Bang’: ‘there’s something different about looking someone in the eyes and doing something dishonest, to doing it over the phone or screen.’ This connects to another example, regarding what happens when we look into another’s face, when we look directly into their eyes: in a 1974 lecture in New York, Hannah Arendt remarked that it is easier to kill a dog than a man, easier yet to kill a rat or a frog, and no problem at all to kill insects – ‘It is in the glance, in the eyes.’6