Objects and Subjects of Suffering

So apparently there's a gentleman by the name of Larry Macauly, a.k.a. El Capitan, who has started radio broadcasts in Germany that offer refugees that opportunity to share their stories to a broader audience.  And I think this is amazing.

Macauly in his studio.

It's not just that he's drawing attention to an urgent humanitarian crisis - it's the method he's chosen to do so.  He could have shown us images of brutalized travelers or war-torn homelands.  He could have selected any number of heart-wrenching scenes that made us feel sympathy for refugees.  Instead, he chose to facilitate communication from the refugees to us, to give them a voice and allow them to choose how they're represented in the world, rather than imposing a victimized representation onto them.  And that choice makes all the difference.

An image of a suffering person might make us feel sympathetic; but sympathy is an inherently unequal relation between oneself and the other.  Sympathy implies a superior state for the one who gives it to the other.  It turns the other purely into a recipient, the object of another's actions, whether that other chooses to give aid and assistance or dismiss the object as being the inevitable result of horrible, evil processes at work in the world.

But to give voice is to give agency.  It turns those objects of suffering back into thinking, acting subjects.  For one thing, as I mentioned above, it explicitly empowers the speaker to choose the words she or he uses to tell her/his own story.  The speaking subject decides how to define itself.  Second, it creates a window for empathy, rather than sympathy; only individual humans are capable of speech, and speaking words is a reminder to all those that listen that the speaker is a sentient being that is actively interpreting many layers of physical and psychological experience in an attempt to make a connection with others.  Speech is the ultimate form of connection - it is meaningless without an other to listen.  It is the key to establishing empathetic connections, rather than sympathetic condescension.  

Just some food for thought, especially for all of you well-intentioned souls out there trying to increase the Global North's concern for the billions of other human lives that exist in this World.  Don't sacrifice people's humanity in an attempt to drum up sympathy.