The Telescope Effect
Hundreds of protesters — Ukrainians, but also Russians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Latvians, Poles, and other folk from former Soviet bloc nations — marched from UNICEF headquarters, near the United Nations, to Times Square yesterday. They carried home-made signs, flags of their homelands, and the American flag. They brought their children. They also carried dolls splattered in red paint, in a plea for us to see more clearly and demand action to stop what we already know is happening: Putin is carrying out a war of attrition in Ukraine, targeting civilians, including children, in their homes, in hospitals and in schools, and in clearly marked places, like the theater in Mariupol, where they seek shelter. The group stopped at Fox News — a grim irony, in that Fox has sold and continues to sell lies about Russia and Ukraine to benefit the Trump administration and Trumpist politicians. Trump actively worked against the Zelenskyy government while fawning for Putin — his first impeachment trial centered on this this issue — and Tucker Carlson and usual Fox talking heads continued to make light of or even deny his obvious intentions toward Ukraine.
The news from Mariupol and Ukraine is horrific. Putin’s military is forcibly relocating Ukrainian citizens to remote villages in Russia, just as Stalin sent Armenians, Jews, and others into exile in Siberia. Rescuers were still digging through the rubble of the Mariupol theater, where some 1,300 people were taking, when the Russians again bombed a civilian shelter, this time an art school, even as protestors marched through New York and other cities. ( https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/zelenskyy-siege-mariupol-involved-war-crimes-83560033 ). Alex, an iron worker from Kyiv, who worked on buildings in his home city and now is a construction worker in New York, wore his hard hat with a simple message in painter’s tape: STOP WAR:
A few refrains remain constant at these protests. One sees reminders of Ukrainian identity, in flags, traditional clothing, real sunflowers and sunflowers on signs, and floral headdresses; pleas by Russians, in solidarity with Ukraine, to end the war and to end Putin’s grip on Russia; and calls for Europe, NATO, and the world to provide military and as well as humanitarian support, before it is too late.
And this brings us to the telescope effect. Psychologists and evolutionary biologists tells us that our numbness to great tragedy, and even our unwillingness to take action, are less due to callous or psychopathic indifference than an all-too-human predisposition — a hard-wired bias, really — to focus on an individual in need rather than on a group, as a whole. We respond to a child’s cry in our presence, but are much less likely to think of all the children in need in our cities, much less in the word at large. As experimental psychologist Paul Slovic put it, this plays out in moral decision-making, with often dire consequences: "You can't lock onto two people in need of help as closely as you can lock onto one person. You can't make an emotional connection as strongly to two as to one. If empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes, think of putting yourself in two people's shoes. It does not work. It falls apart." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/11/AR2010011102007_3.html ) Что делать? What is to be done?
Protests are a mix of performance, costume, signs, and sounds, signifiers that, individually and in their grouping, are designed to focus our attention and compassion on people and contexts both present and absent. The harm is happening to real people in Ukraine, far away from here. The harm is also happening to Ukrainians here, people with family and friends in Ukraine, and Ukrainian historical and cultural identities. Words commonly seen on signs, “Save Children in Ukraine,” surrounded by the colors of the Ukrainian flag. These comprise a signifier of actual harm, and compel us to see the imminent pain of individuals and a community, and then to make the empathic, compassionate, and thus moral choice to acknowledge the harm being done, the humanity and need of people whose lives and cities are being destroyed in the war, and take action on their behalf.
Ukrainians wrote the word дети — “children” in Russian, one of the first words I learned in Russian language classes in college — in huge white letters in front and in back of the Mariupol theater, a large red-roofed building surrounded by parks. The words were and are visible in satellite images we see in newspapers.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/03/19/mariupol-theater-satellite-images/ )
The 1,300 Ukrainians, most of them children, taking shelter there were not seen by the Russian pilots who bombed the building. The victims were not visible but likewise signified in before and after satellite images. They are now tragically more directly visible in gruesome photographs of children being removed from the rubble in body bags, signified in turn by signs, dolls, and costumes on the streets of New York and other cities. The distance from New York to Mariupol is great, as was the distance from the bomber, thousands of feet in air and moving at hundreds of miles per hour, to its target on the ground. We must not ignore these mediating signifiers any more than we must not ignore the cry for help of a child near to us, lest we lose sight of the victims’ humanity and, in so doing, lose our own humanity, in allowing, however tacitly, this war of annihilation to continue unfolding, unchecked, in Ukraine.