Two years ago the Pope warned a congregation of Lampedusans about what he called the “globalisation of indifference”. The occasion was his visit to the island following the deaths of over 300 African migrants at sea.
In his words, “in this world of globalisation we have fallen into a globalisation of indifference. We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business”.
There were two things about that part of his speech I didn’t quite buy. First, it is something of a sweeping statement to say that people in general have become less sensitive to suffering.
On the contrary, one might say that public displays of grief and empathy have in many instances been stretched almost to the point of sentimentality.
Thousands of people were genuinely moved when a dog was shot and left for dead in a hole in Birżebbuġa some years ago. Just as well too, because dogs feel pain as much as we do. The point is that I just don’t think the argument for a growing collective and general indifference to suffering works.
Second, the Pope seems to have assumed that globalisation should in principle spread itself evenly. Only there is no contradiction between globalisation and a chequered cartography of feeling. On the contrary, the map of globalisation is one on which indifference to hundreds of dead migrants, and a public memorial to a dead dog, happily coexist.
It’s the same map we use to stuff our faces with things we know, but don’t want to know, are made by people who work in conditions that approach slavery.
Still, the Pope was certainly right to draw our attention to indifference. I got up yesterday morning to photos of the bodies of dead Syrian children on a beach in Libya. I was suitably shocked for a few minutes, had my coffee and oats, and went for a swim. It’s a fine line between indifference and getting on with one’s life.
More than a third of a million migrants have tried, and in some cases managed, to make it to Europe this year. Until recently the main theatre was the sea crossing in the south, but there are now important land routes in the east. And that’s just Europe. Word is that the situation across the border (in Turkey, Syria, and so on) is far worse.
Thousands of migrants have died. Last week alone, up to 300 migrants drowned off Libya. Seventy-one were found dead, probably suffocated, in a sealed lorry in Austria. And so on. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions, and one which somehow fails to move us in any meaningful way.
More than a third of a million migrants have tried, and in some cases managed, to make it to Europe this year
Let us leave aside two staple responses. The first, that the EU is not doing enough. Be that as it may, it doesn’t mean it’s doing nothing. In any case I’ve a feeling that this blame game is so much Freudian displacement. The clue is in the use of the generic ‘EU’ (‘l-Ewropa’), as opposed to more tangible national governments or named politicians.
The second is the familiar dim-witted stone-throwing type. Etienne Grech, a doctor and Labour MP, wrote last week that his response to the rescue of migrants off Libya was that he had one eyebrow raised (his exact words). Readers will agree with me that such churlishness is beneath comment.
That leaves us with the many who are not inclined to pass the buck, and whose eyebrows are not raised. The problem is that even these bastions of relative sanity are largely indifferent to the suffering of migrants.
One of the reasons is that, in this case specifically, there is a serious crisis of representation. The term means different things in technical-scholarly circles, but let’s not go there. What I mean here is that it has become difficult for journalists to produce material that moves us.
The first weapon in the journalistic arsenal is images. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it easier to think of an image that represents the madness of the Vietnam War than I do of one that does the same for the suffering of migrants in Europe today. Which is strange, given that I do not have a living memory of Vietnam.
It would be unfair to blame it on photo-journalists. Darrin Zammit Lupi’s Islelanders project, for example, is a fine piece of work. And yet somehow there isn’t a single iconic image I can latch on to.
The second device is biography. Last April I wrote of the outrage of burying 24 unnamed migrants in unmarked graves. I stand by what I wrote. I still think that anonymity (‘200 people’) can contribute no end to indifference.
Still, that’s too easy. Mark Micallef, who writes for this paper and whose work with migrants is up there with the best, tells me there are scores of journalists in the field who are sensitive to this issue. Their attempts at biography – at putting names to the nameless, that is – are very much out there. Only the intended effect is seldom achieved.
The third potential hope is in language and terminology. Recently Al Jazeera suggested that journalists ought to drop the word ‘migrants’ altogether and use ‘refugees’ instead. The idea was that people were more likely to be moved by the latter, and that in any case it was more accurate.
Not really. First, it is quite impossible to distil the complex phenomenon that is migration into a single set of motivations. Second, it wouldn’t do to create a new dualism that valued refugees as good and migrants as bad. Third, why should it matter whether a body on a beach is that of a refugee or a migrant? Surely no one would argue that undesirables should be left to drown or suffocate in a lorry?
We’ve been here before. The value of Anne Frank’s diary is that it managed to represent, in a way that moved people, the suffering of the millions who died in the Holocaust.
I find myself hoping that somewhere out there at sea there is a little girl clinging on to her notes.
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