There’s been a lot of discussion in ASTU about humanizing our perceptions of foreign conflicts, starting with Persepolis and continued with Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde. We’ve been asking ourselves again and again how we can understand the people behind the numbers, what enables us to do this, the implications of this in memory, and whether or not we are entitled to this kind of knowing. On the political stage these conflicts are often reduced to statistics. X amount of people were killed. There are X amount of Syrian refugees. There are X amount of missing and murdered Indigenous women. While this without question adds gravity to the issues, why is it that we likely wouldn’t be bothered were these issues scaled down to only a handful of people, or even just one person? What is it about numbers that calls for our attention?
There is so much emphasis on the worth of being able to measure things empirically, giving things a scientific face, defining things. It’s built in. I consider myself a relatively empathetic person, but I often tend not to be able to take things seriously without numerical relevance. I get frustrated in class when people share very loosely related anecdotes, because it’s just a stupid little story and I’d rather get to the tried and tested material. I think it’s thoroughly uncool that I end up feeling that way.
In one of my other classes today the prof began the hour by asking if anyone had any feelings to share. We hadn’t even began talking about anything yet. I had to stifle the urge to laugh, roll my eyes, whatever. Then I asked myself, why do I think that that is an invalid way to begin a class? I looked up synonyms for invalid. Google gave me unscientific. Go figure. Forget trying to humanize the people behind the statistics in foreign conflicts. I had to remind myself that the people in the room right beside me weren’t just UBC student numbers.
So what’s the fascination with numbers? I want to be able to know people deeply, and if that means knowing only one person well then so be it, but I’d rather be able to extend it to everyone. I guess as humans we’re limited in how much empathy and understanding we can handle. Does that mean we have to choose who and what to invest in? I suppose. But we can in a way fight our own nature of exclusion by sharing our own and other people’s stories like those in Persepolis and Safe Area Gorazde. How else can we humanize the numbers? How can we understand more deeply what humanizing someone looks like?