"We may be hard-wired to panic about minor threats such as swine flu and ignore real dangers, writes John Watson.
THINK of each "threat", be it terrorism, asylum seekers, SARS, bird flu and now swine flu: how many deaths in Australia has each of these caused? None. Smoking, cars, ordinary flu — these cause thousands of preventable deaths every year and we shrug them off. The disparity between the impacts of threats and the panic they cause is remarkable. Even globally, with the exception of terrorism or, rather, the conflicts it has triggered, the tolls are strikingly small by comparison to the threats that are most likely to kill us.
"... when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd talks about swine flu being a "serious international concern for public health" and vows to use all available resources to counter it, one has to wonder why the world's really big preventable killers barely register""Each panic about relatively minor or remote risks diverts attention and resources from tackling threats that we know will kill millions year after year.
- nearly 2 billion people — a third of the world's population — are infected with tuberculosis. About 5 to 10 per cent go on to develop full-blown TB, which kills about 2 million people a year.
- AIDS has infected more than 33 million people, including 2.5 million children, and killed about 2.1 million in 2007. In low to middle-income countries, fewer than one in three HIV-positive people receives antiviral therapy.
- Malaria causes about 250 million cases of fever and about 1 million deaths a year.
- Even the simple tragedy of diarrhoea as a result of poor sanitation and malnutrition kills about 1.8 million a year. Each day, about 25,000 children die of infectious disease and hunger.
These are not potential pandemics; they are happening now."
"The question, then, is why do the deaths of only some people from obscure diseases cause us to panic? And how can we be so unfeeling when we have the power to save the lives of millions by relatively simple, inexpensive precautions and treatments? The answer possibly lies in the profound hold that stereotypes have over our assessment of threats and our ability to empathise with others. Recent psychological research, including the mapping of brain activity, has established that stereotypes have a very powerful hold over us.
The world is a complex place, full of threats and opportunities. At its most primal level, we quickly need to make sense of these by sorting friend from foe. We are mentally wired to judge by appearances, to categorise on the basis of past experience or conditioning. On a very basic level, this means we almost instantly, automatically and unconsciously decide where people fit into our world. "
"The power of stereotypes would also explain the irrational difference in our attitudes to asylum seekers who arrive by boat and those who arrive by air. Fewer than 40 per cent of "aeroplane people", who vastly outnumber "boat people", succeed in their asylum claims, but their arrival causes no great public concern or resentment. More than 90 per cent of boat people have proven to be genuine refugees, yet the Howard government's claim that the "threat" amounted to a "national emergency" was readily accepted. Boat people fit the stereotype.
As for swine flu, bird flu and SARS, it seems that only when we perceive that infectious diseases threaten "people like us" do we respond with real urgency. The millions killed by TB, AIDS, malaria and other mass killers are doomed to fit the stereotype of people who live and die like that. We can accept it as the way of the world. Aboriginal Australians are just as much victims of the indifference that flows from such stereotyping. Stereotypes matter, but not everyone is prisoner to the irrationality they can inspire. Being conscious of the power of stereotypes to sway the responses of individuals and governments is the first step to reducing them to a useful mental tool, rather than succumbing to a dangerously distorting trap of the mind.
Cheryl links the article really well to Jesus conversing with the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7:24ff when she writes:"- if we think there’s a chance Jesus got it very wrong at the beginning of the conversation, then the story becomes about something else - the broadening of the mission of God, perhaps; i like the idea that it was about Jesus beginning to recognise that he was tapped into something that could change the world… that this whole section of Mark is as much about Jesus working out who he was, as it was about the disciples doing likewise. And that was happening by being in conversations with ‘the other’… not by the conversations with those who agreed with him, or those who worshipped him.
"I also like the idea that the story fits into the whole Markan theme about humanising the de-humanised… that the systems of power that Mark wants to overthrow are those that suck the life out of people and the world; shattering preconceptions, generalisations and labels… always making us look behind our assumptions of each other, and our judgements that diminish another’s worth… i don’t think that Mark was on about people becoming Christians, he was on about people becoming human."
For myself, one of the challenges to living an authentic Christian life is to see within myself this "neural dehumanisation" that is evidenced by preparing for an influenza pandemic without doing anything much to address the real killers of our world. I need to find a place to start.
