Reacting to the migration crisis now unfolding in Europe, The Spectator’s Ed West contrasts the “shame” cultures of the Middle and Far East and European “guilt” culture. I’m not convinced by the argument as West applies it to the Syrian exodus (while some Arab societies have failed to extend any sort of welcome to the Syrian refugees, others, notably The Lebanon and Jordan, are hosting them by the hundreds of thousand) what he has to say in this extract hits home, particularly perhaps the passage that I’ve highlighted:
There are at least two theories as to what drove the creation of a guilt culture. One is that European societies tended to involve far more interaction with people to whom we are not related, and internalising one’s conscience was the only way of adapting from more clannish societies. The other, and more likely cause, is Christianity, which transformed shame-based societies, like that of Anglo-Saxon England, into guilt-based ones.
The most common phrase used by those wishing to accept more refugees is to talk of ‘Europe’s shame’ or ‘Britain’s shame’, a word also used on placards by refugees stuck in Hungary. But what they’re actually appealing to is Europe’s sense of guilt. Certainly that’s my personal reaction when I see the awful scenes – guilt that by an accident of birth my life is far easier and safer.
The downside to guilt culture is that social justice politics, having evolved from Christianity, often sounds sanctimonious – a deeply unattractive trait. In particular, Christianity’s universalism, referencing St Paul’s idea that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, can often lead to pathological altruism. This is problematic, especially when it involves integrating people from a shame culture into a guilt culture, and in particular the second generation when the restraints of the former are lifted. The Syrian war is like a positive feedback loop of migration and misery, with alienated second-generation Muslim immigrants leaving Europe to fight jihad in the Middle East, which in turn ruins the lives of middle eastern Muslims, who are forced to settle in Europe.
It is because of Europe’s previous immigration problems that many people are reluctant about accepting more people from the Middle East.
It is indeed; and even more so with radical Islam on the march in ever more virulent forms. In this context, it’s worth noting that Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have explicitly favored Christian Syrian refugees.
Sorting through this mess—this tragedy—in a way that is both compassionate and clear-headed is not going to be easy, but it’s far from clear that it will even be tried.
Also writing in The Spectator, Brendan O’Neil reacts to the horrifying image of a drowned Syrian toddler that has driven so much of the public discussion in Europe this week:
There’s a tradition of pushing victimised or dead kids to the front of news reporting. And more recently they’ve been given a starring role in the Twitterati’s handwringing over global calamities. From those famous images of half-starved children in Ethiopia in the 1980s to the ugly fashion for sharing photos of dead children from Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip last year, the sad or hungry or dead child has become a substitute for serious analysis or rational commentary. It shuts down discussion.‘You don’t think Israel is evil? Well, look at this photo of this blown-up Palestinian kid.’ It’s cheap moralism, emotionalism taking the place of thoughtfulness.
The desire to circumvent serious debate in favour of eliciting the visceral but ultimately pointless ‘Oh Jesus Christ’ response is clear from the fact that these photos are often cynically cropped to exclude adults, in order to accentuate the vulnerability of the kid. Rather than focus on drowned adults, the Guardian and the Independent have instead focussed only on Aylan’s tiny, pathetic body.
The photography expert Patricia Holland wrote about this in the 1990s. She said the focus on kids in disaster or war zones was, weirdly, about making Westerners feel good: ‘As the children in the image reveal their vulnerability, we long to protect them and provide for their needs. Paradoxically, while we are moved by the image of the sorrowful child, we also welcome it, for it can arouse pleasurable emotions of tenderness.’
This narcissistic search for outlets for our tenderness has increased a million-fold with the dawn of the internet, when not only can we gawp at more images of destitute, destroyed kids, but we can republish them too, signalling our virtue and emotional sensitivity. But showing dead kids is, in my mind, emotionally insensitive. It can be cruel and unnecessary. It’s the victory of the visceral over the rational. And we really need a rational debate about the migrant crisis, rather than people holding up a dead-child snuff photo and saying: ‘I cried, therefore I’m good.’
But what most people think may be very different from what a noisy minority says, at least in Britain. A new Survation poll shows that only 8 percent of Britons believe that the UK should accept more than 10,000 refugees. Over half think that the total should be between zero (29 percent) and 3,000 (12 percent). Just one poll, but still…