Understanding abstraction

“Shutdown has cost the US economy more than $24 billion”, screamed one headline. 

“Nokia to shed another 10,000 employees by the end of 2013”, cautioned another.

These headlines, in their bold fonts, seem to be commenting on momentous events in the world. But I frequently find myself unable to relate to them. How does one relate to a number like $24 billion? How does one comprehend the magnitude of an entire town being rendered unemployed? To my admittedly uninformed view, numbers like these remain firmly lodged in the abstract – empty statistics devoid of context or much meaning.

The American media featured a slew of similar sounding statistics during the 16-day US government shutdown last month. All 401 National Parks of the US National Parks System remained shuttered, turning away an estimated 11 million tourists. My partner and I were two of those 11 million, allowing us to gain some small perspective on the shutdown; a tangible (albeit, frivolous) physical consequence that I could comprehend, relate to and outrage about. However, the government shutdown resulted in a number of other, more painful consequences. 800, 000 government employees lost their pay (and their jobs). Some cancer patients were denied life-saving treatment during this fortnight. 

I wondered to myself: if the politicians were not protected from the consequences of their actions, would they have decided to shutdown the government anyway? Did they not know of the stress of the furloughed employee living pay cheque to pay cheque, or of the gut-wrenching worry of the cancer patient whose treatment was delayed? Or did they know these things but didn’t care enough?

For the sake of my own sanity, I’d like to think it was the former. In my sympathetic imagination, politicians sometimes feature as a bunch of ignorant Ender Wigginses, the eponymous hero of Ender’s Game. Ender thinks he's playing a particularly challenging video game, in which he is expected to annihilate a vastly powerful alien enemy with a limited reserve of spaceships and soldiers. After he manages to vanquish the alien horde, he learns that the video game was, in fact, real. The spaceships on his screen were real spaceships with actual people in them who died quite convincingly when they were struck by enemy fire. His teachers had abstracted away this minor point from him when he began playing ‘the game’. He would not have otherwise made the tough, tactical decisions that he so easily made in the context of the game. Maybe politicians, like Ender, sometimes make policy and financial decisions without appreciating the fact that they are not playing a game of Monopoly.

But, what if it’s the latter? What if people who make momentous decisions know fully well the consequences of their actions, but just don’t care enough? Lord knows, there are enough examples of those too. Just to pick a seemingly random one: consider the Wall Street bankers who knowingly chose to lend subprime mortgages to those who couldn’t repay, safe in the knowledge that when the proverbial excrement hit the fan, their executive positions and generous salaries were secure. Even when millions of people were losing homes due to their decisions.

If I were in the shoes of a US Senator or Wall Street executive, would I have done the same?

Oh wait, never mind. That’s the kind of classic hypothetical straw man scenario one constructs (and answers in the negative) to feel good about one’s own moral superiority.  I actually don’t have to travel that far into probability space to see how I’d respond to this sort of a moral conundrum. I blithely make these sorts of moral decisions in the abstract almost every single day. Before breakfast.

Every time I discard a can of Coca-Cola instead of recycling it, I contribute to the unnecessary displacement of thousands of people from their sacred lands. Each day, when I throw my unsegregated trash into the overflowing community trash bin at the end of our street, I poison the air, land and water of a not-so-faraway village. Every time I plug in my plasma TV, two laptops, three A/Cs and four mobile phones into the power outlet, I help send people to jail.

How could this be possible? I am a reasonably law-abiding individual living within the moral constraints of society. How could my innocuous actions have such far-reaching consequences?

Let’s take a closer look at the above examples. 

Each day in the US, 100 million aluminium cans are discarded in the trash instead of being recycled. To put that in context, if the population of the US recycled one additional can per week on average, there would be no need for a Vedanta-esque takeover of the Niyamgiri hills*. In Vedanta’s effort to set up a Rs. 50,000 crore alumina refinery in Lanjigarh, Odisha, and to mine bauxite from the adjacent mineral rich Niyamgiri hills, entire villages were displaced and scores of local people forcibly evicted – often without due process or adequate compensation. Members of the Dongria Kondh tribe fought Vedanta for a decade before managing to prevent the desecration of their sacred lands. Careless trashing of Pepsi cans contributed to 10 years of untold suffering, heartache and aggravation for an entire group of people. Kya yehi hai right choice, baby?

Or take, for instance, the case of the Indian cities that overwhelmingly rely on unsanitary landfills to dump their waste. Since 2003, the Bangalore Municipality had been dumping the city's solid waste in Mavallipura, a village 20 km north of Bangalore, with disastrous consequences. Air quality degraded alarmingly, agricultural land became contaminated and toxins from the landfill leached into the village's drinking water sources. The health of livestock and village residents has been severely affected, even leading to a few deaths. An over-reliance on plastic, a reluctance to segregate trash and continued indifference towards bringing policy changes all contribute to this problem. The consequences of our out of sight, out of mind policy unfortunately are borne by others. 

Similarly, when we impatient citizens demand more electricity to power our “modern“ lifestyles, what does that mean in real world terms? To address this demand, the Indian government plans to add 88,000 MW of installed capacity over the next five years, approximately 10% of which is expected to come from nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors are being constructed (in Jaitapur, Maharashtra), or being brought online (in Kudankulam, Tamil Nadu) with scant respect for proper communication about project safety or for public involvement. Thousands of local fisherfolk in Kudankulam protesting this threat to their land, safety and livelihoods have been called 'agents of foreign hands', beaten by the police, charged with sedition (!) and even thrown in jail. Meanwhile, with the commissioning of Unit 1 of the reactor and the imminent flow of hundreds of megawatts of electricity to Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, we urban citizens of these Southern states can afford to ignore – in air-conditioned comfort – the real consequences of our abstract actions.

This sort of externalization of cost is a pervasive feature of many of our daily decisions. Driving instead of using public transport. Drinking bottled water instead of boiled tap water. Buying fireworks manufactured by cheap, young hands. The list is rather long. 

In our defence, we may claim ignorance. Or we may say that we are not direct participants in these injustices. After all, we don't actually go out and harass protesting citizens who bear the cost of India's “development”. We don’t actually poison the Mavallipuras of our world. But we might as well. Our apathy in the face of the consequences of our actions is just as damning as the injustice itself. As Howard Zinn wrote, “You cannot be neutral on a moving train”. Especially when we know where this particular train is headed.

*Many thanks to Dr. Nirveek Bhattacharjee, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle and a member of the Board of Directors of Association for India’s Development, for the estimates on aluminium recycling.

Pavan Vaidyanathan is a biologist, programmer and amateur photographer. Sometimes all at once. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and volunteers with the Association for India's Development (AID). He tweets as @pavanapuresan