Feel the Pain

          The UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25) in Madrid seems to rumble on – as conferences do – without the sense of emergency upon which Greta Thunberg, George Monbiot, Extinction Rebellion and others are insistent. “Glacially slow” is the description applied to the progress being made though, given the current rate of temperature rise, the metaphor will soon be out of date. Governments are inclined to do business as usual, until they feel obliged to adopt minimal measures to address environmental concerns – despite the scientific certainty that such minimal measures ensure that we are set on a course for doom and destruction. Still, it should be no surprise that people are prepared to ignore, deny or rebuff the facts, since this peculiarly illogical human trait is one that that populist politicians have always appreciated and exploited. It is, as has been said, “difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”. So, if it is desirable to motivate people to save themselves from destruction, other means must be employed. One of those might be to encourage empathy.

          Ever since stories have been told – orally, written or acted out in plays and films – they have afforded us the opportunity to put ourselves in others’ shoes. Such a shift in perspective enables us, without being persuaded by argument, to see and feel beyond our own tight circle of preoccupations and to perceive a common humanity in spite of differing circumstances.  I was at the cinema this week and I saw a couple of films that did that trick for me. So Long, My Son brought a few tears to my eyes, even though the setting is far from my own life and experiences. A Chinese couple whose only son drowns before reaching teenage, suffer the torments of bereavement and loss – as parents will. The fact that China’s official “one child” policy was promoted as a solution to its economic dilemma is well known, but its sometimes tragic personal consequences are not so apparent seen from overseas. What a skilfully told story such as this can do is make you feel the consequences, not just nod your head in comprehension.

          The other film I saw that offered a similar insight is Blue Story, a tell-it-like-it-is portrayal of what it is like to be a black youth caught up in the warfare between South London’s “postcode gangs”. This was never my experience, any more than was life in communist China, but the film engaged both my brain and my sympathies – something that news media struggle to achieve with even the best, unbiased reportage of news, statistics and related commentary. The difference that distinguishes them is the dramatised story’s ability to make an audience engage with the characters as real people and, consequently, identify with their human dilemmas.

          Even though we might accept the fact that ecological disaster looms, it does so – conveniently for many of us – either somewhere else or sometime in the future, which makes it relatively easy to ignore. David Attenborough, with his nature-under-threat films, has done a good job of rousing people’s passions for the subject, but the visceral effect of observing the sufferings of other species does not necessarily transfer through to our own. To motivate us to save ourselves from destruction, we need more exposure to personalised, dramatised stories of climate-change crisis and ecological disaster that make us feel the pain. These stories may exist in parts of the world that have already been affected, in which case, let them be translated and set before us, since all the factual presentations thus far have not been enough to provoke us to significant action.