Paul Slovic attempts to explain why people ignore mass killings. He argues that it is harder to react and to act when killing happens on such a large scale as it does with mass killings. Sugary excerpt:
The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It’s not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human beings. In fact, the opposite is true. Just look at the extraordinary efforts people expend to rescue someone in distress, such as an injured mountain climber. It’s not that we only care about victims we identify with—those of similar skin color, or those who live near us: Witness the outpouring of aid to victims of the December 2004 tsunami. Yet, despite many brief episodes of generosity and compassion, the catalogue of genocide—the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur—continues to grow. The repeated failure to respond to such atrocities raises the question of whether there is a fundamental deficiency in our humanity: a deficiency that—once identified—could be overcome. […]When writer Annie Dillard was struggling to comprehend the mass human tragedies that the world ignores, she asked, “At what number do other individuals blur for me?” In other words, when does “compassion fatigue” set in? Our research suggests that the “blurring” of individuals may begin as early as the number two.
Slovic is right, I wonder if scale is a more important factor in the setting in of compassion fatigue than distance that is whether one feels that the mass killing can endanger one’s own life. In other words, I wonder whether the silence or rather the manufactured and inactive outrage expressed by most about what is happening in Darfur can be explainable not only in the fact that hundred of thousands are dying by also that they are dying in Sudan, a country that is located away from most of them and that is at the center of a continent used to poverty and to mass killings. The Iraq war is still defendable not because there aren’t Mass killings, but because there exist American interests. Defenders of the Surge and of action even though it is unclear whether it will stop the killing can argue for the mass killing in Iraq should be stopped by the use of American troops, because the war in Iraq is in some way about America’s safety and the mass killings may happen in American streets.