An uncomfortable truth.
Someone is starving right now. Not just “really hungry,” I mean literally dying of hunger. What’s interesting about this fact isn’t its truthfulness; I am confident it is true. What’s interesting is what we do with it, how we wrestle with or avoid it.
I was sixteen years old, and we were sitting in a classroom on Stanford’s beautiful campus. It was warm. The professor had wild, curly hair and light blue eyes. He emphatically waved his hands every time he said something he wanted us to remember. I was mesmerized by the lecture, trying to be a “good student” when the professor said something I’ll never forget. He said,
“It’s not that there’s a global food shortage. There’s plenty of food to feed everyone on the planet, no problem. It’s that we have several problems with distribution. We can’t get food to everyone who needs it because there are economic, social, and political barriers.”
Until that moment, I assumed that starvation was a byproduct of a global food shortage. Growing up, I remember my mom saying things like, “there are starving kids in Africa,” whenever I didn’t clean my dinner plate, implying that there wasn’t enough food to go around. I remember thinking that technology could be the panacea our world needed, thinking it could help us grow food more efficiently. But I was wrong. Math and science have already helped us grow enough food to feed everyone.
Human suffering today is not a technical problem. It is a social one.
Starvation is a choice we make as a global society. There’s enough food. People don’t starve because of a worldwide shortage. They die because of “economic, social, and political barriers.” Barriers we’ve collectively built and maintain.
So, someone is starving right now. Again, not just “really hungry,” but literally dying of hunger. What now? How do you respond to that knowledge? Regardless of your response, as a member of the global society, you contribute to the outcome.
Importantly, I want to clarify that I don’t know if there’s a “right” answer here per se. There was a time when most people only knew those who lived in their town, a time when the average person’s “world” was relatively small. In that time, if someone was starving, you probably knew them, which likely informed your response to that problem.
In that situation, most people would agree that carrying on about your business, as someone you know dies a preventable death, seems wrong.
Today, on the other hand, we have direct knowledge of several issues from across the globe. But, we often don’t “know the people” involved. So, when I say “someone” is starving, you don’t conjure up the picture of a specific person. It’s more an anonymous “someone,” which, if we’re honest, doesn’t stir up much emotion, let alone a call to action. It’s easy to dismiss the knowledge with something like,
“People die all the time! Of course, bad things happen every day! It’s not my fault. All I can do is be responsible for the things I have control over. There are limits!”
For me, that lecture seeded the following persistent questions, “What do I need to learn to convince others not to let people starve? What fields of study might provide me with the skills and knowledge to address the social aspects of human suffering on a global scale?” It was the beginning of my deeply personal, educational journey and has informed my conception of “work” ever since. Sometimes I imagine what it would feel like to go to sleep one day knowing that no one on the planet is starving. When I’m feeling particularly optimistic, I think to myself,
“Well, global inequality isn’t a physical law of the universe. One day we might cooperate on a global scale. That’s not impossible in the literal sense.”
Then, I often hear the voice of one of my more pessimistic (realistic?) colleagues wryly respond,
“It’s not impossible, but it’ll never happen.”
I think a lot of people agree. We will never cooperate on a global scale towards a sustainable and prosperous future. Interestingly, this thought is relieving. It makes it easier for me not to worry about someone who is starving. The logic feels very human,
“Since there’s always going to be someone starving, there’s no point in trying to end hunger. Now that I’ve come to accept the inevitability of human suffering, I can go back to doing whatever else I feel like doing, to working on something else.”
This is not the only way folks negotiate the uncomfortable truth of global inequality. Some plain old ignore it or dismiss it outright — out of sight, out of mind. Others make more pragmatic claims about their limited resources or about how they’re doing everything they can while taking care of themselves and their loved ones. A few folks earnestly dedicate their lives to ending hunger, despite the perceived futility of their best efforts.
It’s been over twenty years since that lecture on Stanford’s campus. I still don’t know how to remove those “economic, social, and political barriers.” There is still plenty of food to feed everyone in the world. I still feel strange about the radical asymmetry in global resource distribution.
I still sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in a world without preventable human suffering.
What would it be like to cooperate on a global scale? Most nights, I go to sleep feeling some version of the following: “There’s more work to be done.”
Again, what’s interesting is how we respond to the knowledge of human suffering on such an impersonal scale, how we wrestle with or avoid it. It’s a relatively new experience. What’s your response? Someone is starving right now. What, if anything, are you going to do? Regardless, you’re contributing to the global outcome. Yes, it’s hard to keep starvation in mind while you’re eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the same time, you still need to eat. You still need to feed yourself. What do you do?
