Bashar al Assad and the Deadly Arithmetic of Compassion
By Paul Slovic
PHOTOGRAPH BY OSCAR B. CASTILLO FOR THE NEW REPUBLIC.
The sudden overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria has led to a flood of revelations of decades of inhumane repression and abuse of the Syrian people that never should have been allowed to occur. The war that Assad waged against citizens he viewed as critical of his regime is estimated to have killed more than half a million people and forced millions to flee the country seeking refugee status in foreign lands. The suffering has been immense and beyond comprehension by human societies relying solely on their feelings to motivate concern and intervention. Psychic numbing and other elements of the arithmetic of compassion teach us that we cannot trust our unreflective intuitive feelings.
Rather, to overcome pseudoinefficacy- the feeling of helplessness that demotivates action, we must confront the news of atrocities by slowing down, trying to imagine the humanity of the individual lives being destroyed beneath the numbing statistics, pressuring governments, and supporting NGOs and other activists dedicated to confronting such abuses.
All this became apparent to Daniel Vastfjall, Arvid Erlandsson, Robin Gregory, and me when we reported the reaction to the photograph of the drowned Syrian boy, Alan (Aylan) Kurdi, on a beach in Turkey after his family’s small boat capsized in September, 2015. It drew worldwide attention and concern to Assad’s brutal war and the suffering of the Syrian people.
Two-year-old Alan Kurdi lifeless body lying on a Turkish beach.
Assad’s war against his people began in 2011 as an attempt to quell massive protests against his government. Shooting protesters quickly escalated into an all-out one-sided war. In early 2012 Syrians were desperately calling for help. The death toll had reached 15,000. Few cared. By September 2015 , the count had steadily grown to a staggering 250,000, and our study documented the lack of interest as evidenced by minimal searches for information on google for information on Syria or refugees. All that changed instantly when the photo of the little boy on the beach broke through the numbing and went viral across the world.
Sweden had accepted 150,000 Syrian refugees in 2015 and sought donations to finance their care. That fund struggled at about $8,000 U.S. dollars a day. When the photo surfaced, it shot over night to more than $400,000 and stayed elevated for a month until people who donated enthusiastically, ran out of ways to help and turned their attention elsewhere.
The lesson in this story is that emotional stories and images can dispel numbing and motivate action, creating a window of opportunity for action that won’t be sustained without a sense of efficacy. One top official in the Obama administration defended their inaction by saying “We can’t fix Syria”, a depressing example of pseudoinefficacy.
Nine years after the photo of the boy on the beach, Assad’s fall has shed light on continuing war crimes of murder and torture that reveal unrelenting brutality perpetrated in every corner of Syria’s surveillance state. Perhaps much of this suffering could have been averted had the world been alerted to ways that our minds deceive us into complacently demonstrating that the more who die the less we care.
As we enter a new era in the United States, threatening surveillance and vengeful retribution against perceived enemies of the state, we must learn the lessons of the deadly arithmetic of compassion from the suffering of Syrians and innumerable oppressed people before them, lest we suffer a similar fate. Be alert to signs of numbing and communicate stories, photos, testimony of victims and other information that replaces dry statistics with compassion. Don’t let thoughts of what you can’t do keep you from doing what you can do. Counter pseudoinefficacy by appreciating the value of small steps- “Even partial solutions save whole lives”.
Syrian refugee children. Photographer Maranie Rae Staab says: ‘We have seen a lot of images of death, destruction and fighting coming out of Mosul. While these are all, of course, important, I suggest that we also continue to see their humanity.’ (Photo by Maranie Rae Staab/PublicSource).