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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822370123 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/08/2017 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
THE STARVING CHILD
After he read Singer's article, everything Aaron bought, even the smallest, cheapest thing, felt to him like food snatched from someone dying. Nobody would buy a soda if there was a starving child standing next to the vending machine, he thought; well, for him now there was always a starving child standing next to the vending machine.
It seems worth noting that the starving child next to the vending machine, whom I borrow from Larissa MacFarquhar's book Strangers Drowning, is not an actual child. Aaron does not observe someone starving. The child next to the vending machine is an idea he summons up from far away after reading the philosopher Peter Singer.
I say this not to engage in philosophical quibbling but because some readers will find Aaron's social vision a bit nearsighted. After all, he is not noticing the homeless people around him, some of them hungry and some of them children, who have been known to make use of vending machines. Most Americans don't have to fantasize to conjure up malnutrition. Hunger and poverty are very present realities in America. On this subject the figures available from an NGO such as Feeding America are unambiguous. If he's in search of economic injustice, Aaron doesn't have to look overseas or resort to leaps of imagination. Observation will do.
Yet on second thought, Aaron is not getting things entirely wrong. Being so malnourished as to risk dying of it — starvation in the strict sense — is in fact rare in the United States. (It's rarer still in many other countries, not all of them "developed." A country can be much less prosperous than the United States but do much better than the United States in ensuring that everyone has at least a minimum to eat.) The charitable appeals circulated by Feeding America speak of hunger and of "food insecurity," but they don't brandish the thermonuclear term "starvation." Feeding America knows its business. Talk of starvation would be overkill.
So let us assume that Aaron is not mistaken about these two fundamental facts, whatever else he may or may not be in error about: there is starvation, and it is far away. At the scale of the planet, I will assume that is in fact the proper starting point. "We" — more on what I mean by "we" below — are not starving. Other people are. And if that's the way it is, then however bemused MacFarquhar may be by the do-gooder, she is correct not to dismiss do-gooders as merely naive or delusional or obnoxiously eager to flaunt their moral superiority. They may be condescending and (given how hard it is to live up to their principles) likely to be at least somewhat hypocritical, but, she concludes, "they are the best of us" (167 – 68).
Living every day with eyes fixed on global economic inequality, like Aaron, does not make for tranquility of mind. If it is a spiritual exercise, it is arguably overambitious, like sleeping in your coffin. It could be seen as a pathology or a curse. The sympathetic reader may therefore be tempted to show Aaron a way out of his unnecessary self-punishment. In a sense that's the point of this book, though before I get to that point I will have to give more time to Aaron and those like him than you may think they deserve.
You may want to inform him that images of starving children far away have been thrown in people's faces before, and not always with impeccable motives or crystal-clear logic. Boomers raised by parents who had been through the Great Depression were often told to eat everything on their plates not just because I said so but because children were starving in Africa or Asia or another place their parents probably didn't know much about. This didn't do the Africans or Asians any obvious good. Yes, the older generation probably did know something about not having enough to eat. (Historian James Vernon estimates that until recently parental references to the hungry 1930s were roughly equal in quantity to references to starvation in the Third World.) It was perhaps safer for parents to channel their often-harrowing experiences through the imagined situation of distant foreigners. In any event, the causality implied by this dietary arm-twisting could only be sketchy. Its sketchiness is even more salient if you compare images of starvation then and now. Yesterday's starving child seemed to say that you should gobble up what you are lucky enough to have in front of you. The child next to the vending machine seems to say exactly the opposite: that you should walk away from the vending machine, consuming nothing at all. Suddenly starvation elsewhere is no longer a reason to consume but on the contrary an argument against consumerism. By itself, history informs us, the mere existence of starvation doesn't say anything very specific.
Will it help Aaron to know that representations of distant suffering have a history, as it happens, a history rich in leaps of the imagination like his own? Will he feel any less burdened by his relative good fortune? Right now, I imagine him saying, it is clear that something must and can be done. Compare the value to me of the flagrantly superfluous luxuries I am in the habit of purchasing, on the one hand, with the value to the hungry of the food, clothing, and shelter that might be purchased with the same money, on the other. Who would not feel inclined to change her or his habits? Who would not want to start transferring that money to those who really, really need it? That is the reasoning recommended by Peter Singer, the philosopher who inspired several of the figures MacFarquhar profiles, including Aaron, and whose example of a child drowning in a shallow pond gave MacFarquhar her title. Money spent on luxurious consumption, Singer argues, should be spent on meeting the basic needs of the distant poor. So forget the diet soda and give the money — give all the money you don't absolutely need — to a well-chosen charity. It is this argument that Aaron finds "irrefutable."
Moral philosophers have certainly tried to refute it. "If all Americans or Europeans stopped buying consumer goods," Anthony Appiah responds in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, "the result would almost certainly be a collapse of the global economy" (168). This would mean a huge drop in government revenue, hence also of the development assistance that Singer wants to expand. It would mean the even more severe impoverishment of those regions of the world whose poverty inspired Singer's thinking in the first place. The actual consequences of everyone adopting his principle don't seem foremost in Singer's mind. Like "Clean your plate!," his position isn't the obvious basis for a responsible platform or policy.
At the same time, this response feels a bit evasive. It stops short of thinking what might emerge from the ruins. It may or may not count as a refutation of Singer, but can it possibly refute Aaron? What Aaron is offering up is less a philosophical proposition than a feeling of outrage. Aaron can't stomach either the fact of global inequality or the confident imperviousness of our everyday moral values, based as they are on immediate local obligations, to the thought of more distant obligations. To say that his feelings don't immediately translate themselves into practical proposals is not to say that he is wrong to hold them and to keep looking for some form they might yet take. Commissioning a feasibility study seems the wrong way to go. These materials have to be held onto, lived with, allowed to simmer for as long as it takes. However awkwardly phrased, concern for global justice has to be given its due space.
One way to give it space is by reconsidering the history of humanitarianism. In a sense, Singer starts where humanitarianism starts. With you. How lucky you are not to be starving! This is of course not what humanitarianism tells its addressees, but it is how humanitarianism silently divides the world: some of you are fortunate and well fed, and those who are have responsibilities to those (over there) who are not. As Luc Boltanski writes in Distant Suffering, this is humanitarianism's primal scene. Here are the lucky; there are the unlucky. They have no kinship or solidarity in common. Nothing connects them except their common humanity. The paradigm is the Good Samaritan, he who helps a suffering stranger who shares with him neither a common interest nor a common identity.
I will come back to this binary division of the world. It may seem unacceptable in the same way that any large generalization about individual human beings is unacceptable. It is of course also vulnerable to the more specific objection with which I began: what about the poor here at home? In Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry, and Stuff, Leigh Phillips raises just this point in a discussion of Naomi Klein. Klein's recent book on climate change, This Changes Everything (2015), circles back unexpectedly to the most influential theme of her early antisweatshop best seller No Logo (2000): the fact that affluent consumption in the West looks especially bad when seen from a global point of view. This makes Phillips crazy. "It was the assumption of equally grandiose levels of wealth in that little word 'we' in the demand that 'we all should consume less' that bothered me so much," Phillips comments. "The idea that 'we' in the West, every last one of us, were living a life of Riley, of carefree luxury and prosperity. I certainly didn't feel that I or many of my friends in similar situations were overconsuming at all" (8). Others will no doubt be tempted to say the same, whether thinking of their own limited buying power or of the still less privileged around them. But Klein is not Peter Singer. She is not talking about "carefree luxury," or indeed about luxury at all as judged by American standards. Her standards are global ones. How poor are America's poor relative to the poor in the rest of the world? According to William MacAskill in Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference, someone living below the US poverty line, earning $11,000 per year, is in the top 15 percent of world income distribution. Someone earning $28,000 per year, the median individual income in the United States, is globally speaking in the top 5 percent. Someone earning $52,000 or more is in the top 1 percent (15 – 17).
In light of these figures, it seems defensible for Klein to use her "we." In fact it seems not merely defensible but obligatory. What would justify not remembering the divide between "us" and "them" at the global scale? This "us" and "them" is roughly analogous to what Edward Said denounces with his concept of Orientalism. In a surprising agreement with humanitarianism, it invites us to recognize what we may think of as an economic Orientalism — not as a matter of discourse but as a matter of fact. Much has been said against the actual effects and even the motives of humanitarianism. For me, however, humanitarianism's fiercely simplifying assumption of a structural inequality between global rich and global poor counts as a virtue. How could it not, given the general inability of everyday politics (including the politics of humanitarianism's critics) even to acknowledge, let alone do anything about, this planetary scandal?
As for other aspects of humanitarianism, I will have my own objections, many of them (predictably) political ones. But my chief objection can also be described as ethical. Ethically speaking, I will argue, the problem with humanitarianism is that it is not demanding enough.
This will sound counterintuitive. As practiced by a philosopher like Singer, humanitarianism is routinely described as overly demanding, even insanely so. Consider the essay that inspired Aaron to see a starving child next to every vending machine. Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972) has been credited with initiating the movement called "effective altruism." It has even been set to music. But the essay is best known for the brief but unforgettable example with which it illustrates its fundamental principle: "If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing." This Good Samaritan – like scenario brings rescuer and rescued more or less face to face. It does not make unreasonable demands on the rescuer. That is one key to its seductiveness: the pond is shallow. The rescuer's life is not at risk. But Singer immediately extends the example so as to demand much, much more. Distance, he says, is irrelevant. Your obligations to distant and invisible children are the same as to the child in the shallow pond. And because the number of distant and invisible children who are in danger of death is effectively infinite, your obligations do not stop with the dry cleaning bill for one suit of muddy clothes. In fact, there is no obvious stopping place for those obligations until you have surrendered everything you possess beyond the bare minimum necessary to sustain your life.
Singer is surely right that if everyone in the prosperous countries acted upon this principle, "our world would be fundamentally changed" (107). (How it would be changed is another question.) It is just as sure that this is not going to happen. True, his outlandish proposal has more going for it than might appear. Psychologically speaking, there is a well-documented pleasure in the prospect of divesting from the self. That pleasure is difficult to quantify and may not end up weighing heavily against the various forms of hedonism that remain in the ascendant, but it is not negligible. Why would it be? It's a predictable effect of the asceticism that Max Weber long ago diagnosed in delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is necessary, Weber argued, to capitalism's early stages. In this later stage of capitalism, the ascetic impulse has arguably and paradoxically migrated from the realm of production — the work ethic — to the realm of consumption. The enthusiasm that has gathered recently around locavore cuisine and Fair Trade, such as the success of the antisweatshop movement before the great derailment of September 11, 2001, is otherwise inexplicable. The ethical consumer is cultivating and (re)fashioning the self. That can be fun.
And yet of course it remains true that Singer is asking for too much.
Many commentators have noticed that there is a kind of nihilism in Singer's argument: a refusal to recognize any value whatsoever in the ordinary objects, activities, and commitments that he asks people to abandon in order to save the starving. As MacFarquhar observes, Singer's ethical stringency undermines everyday ethical judgments: "If sacrificing your life for a stranger is as much a duty as not lying or stealing; if buying a pair of shoes is as bad as failing to rescue a child drowning in a pond; then it can seem that not lying or not stealing is no more required than sacrificing your life for a stranger" (Strangers Drowning, 68). Antiutilitarian philosophers such as Bernard Williams, trying to protect as much as possible of the unreasoned givenness of life as we know it, suggest that Singer and his allies have carried rational calculation further than it can be allowed to go if we are to hold on to what makes us ourselves. Appiah is deliberately provocative on this issue; he demands the right, in full knowledge that somewhere children are starving, to enjoy a night at the opera. But the same point can be made without referring to anyone but the suffering themselves. Once their initial hunger has been appeased, wouldn't the same moral obligation fall on them as well? Shouldn't they be asked to sacrifice everything they have beyond the bare minimum in order to satisfy the unappeased hunger of others, whether near or far? Shouldn't they too be forbidden from enjoying any goods or services that are not essential to their survival on the grounds that someone, somewhere is still in need? There is no relief from the moral pressure Singer puts on human life. Under those conditions, the hungry might not want to be rescued at all.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Beneficiary"
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Starving Child 15 2. You Acquiesce In It: George Orwell on the System 33 3. A Short History of Commodity Recognition 51 4. The Nation-State as Agent of Cosmopolitanism 75 5. Naomi Klein's Love Story 93 6. Life Will Win 117 Conclusion: You Can't Handle the Truth 139 Notes 155 Bibliography 169 Index 177What People are Saying About This
"A bracing revisionist account of western humanitarianism, one that blasts open the causal connections between distant suffering and cosmopolitan acknowledgement of that suffering through the complicit, anguished figure of the beneficiary."
"With The Beneficiary, Bruce Robbins has done it again. Those who already follow his work in English, political theory, and cosmopolitanism will be eager readers, but so too will be anyone interested in environmentalism and global justice. This brave book is a timely and outstanding piece of scholarship."