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why where matters November 23, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : society , trackback

I noted just over a week ago that “where is not important” — and today Megan McArdle notes that “[o]n the list of things to be thankful for, geography has to be at the top.” Her point is that those born into the most economically developed nations have much more of everything — material goods, health care, and most of all opportunity — than does everyone else. In other words, geography matters very much, indeed.

So, how to I settle my cognitive dissonance? Well, I think that Ms McArdle’s point reinforces my own, earlier one — if we are in fact ever going to move beyond our short-sighted view of the future and our near-sighted view of what matters, we have to realize that the circumstances of just about everyone’s life are determined by the chance location of their birth. In other words, where matters most of all. And we must realize that, hand in hand with this, regardless of where someone lives, works, or dies — any value that we may think of someone having as a human neither increases nor diminishes based on their location. In other words, where doesn’t matter.

I don’t think that suffering can be strictly quantified: with a set amount of money I might be able to create a much larger difference, materially, in the life of someone living in ‘the bottom billion’ than I could for someone who is without shelter in, say, Portland, Oregon. But, simply picking up a Portland neighborhood and dropping it in sub-Saharan Africa for the locals to ‘move in’ won’t really do much good, either. Saying that someone who is living below the poverty line in the US is not suffering is to say just that — “They’ve got a color television and air conditioning, what’s the problem?” — that material well-being is the only kind; that dropping a western-style city in the middle of some impoverished region would make a difference.

We need to realize how lucky we are, and how unlucky others are, and we need to stop paying attention to those who live near us as if their proximity increased their importance in some mystical way. I think that if we really want our own lives to make a marginal difference in the world at large, we need to learn how to ignore, if not completely forget, about those imaginary lines our ancestors drew in the sand.

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