It shouldn't have to take an earthquake

The terrifying earthquakes in El Salvador and India brought on a powerful mobilization of resources from around the world. India's crisis has brought monetary aid, supplies, and rescue workers from China, Turkey, Germany, Thailand, the United States, and even rival Pakistan. Admirable efforts from private organizations all over the country, including some on the Yale campus, are also generating relief. Students and Administrators successfully raised funds to send to El Salvador, and this week such efforts have multiplied out of sympathy for the victims of the Bhuj quake. Although relatively little could be done from afar in terms of emergency rescue work, aid to sustain the survivors began to pour in from all over the globe within 24 hours of each disaster.

ALYSSA BANTA/NEWSMAKERS With a death toll estimate of over 50,000, the relief effort in India is well under way.

Disaster relief is hyper-philanthropy—a nearly instantaneous flow of wealth to any area of the world suddenly beset by natural catastrophe. Even juxtaposed with the heartbreaking tragedy of shattered families and live burials, the image is beautiful: distance, borders, and nationality mean nothing. Compassionate community organizations and centers of private wealth all over the nation let their material excess swiftly flow out to those in desperate need; well-off Yalies shed their spending money and old blankets to save lives. The philanthropist's quality of life suffers nothing for it. This is a rare facet of globalization, where multinational profit motives have spun off a far-reaching side-effect of altruism, courtesy of graphic mass media, diasporas, and expanded humanitarian thinking.

Even though this emergency generosity knows no geographical bounds, it still has limits. Victims of natural disasters are unquestionably desperate for relief aid, and those who can manage it should by no means hesitate to share in the wealth. But in addition to provoking on-the-spot compassion, the occasion demands reflection on the much more frequent "unnatural" disasters that create comparable suffering, but never comparable global sympathy. Whereas sizeable earthquakes strike fewer than 18 times a year, and usually in uninhabited places, chronic hunger, political violence, and cataclysmic disease persistently ravage the poorer regions of the world, shaping the lives and deaths of millions every day. India is currently home to four million of the 36 million people in the world infected with HIV and has one of the fastest-rising infection rates. According to human rights concerns, it also was home to thousands of political imprisonments and extrajudicial executions last year. El Salvador, in its turn, is one of the most impoverished countries in our hemisphere. In both places, "relief" for most quake victims means restitution to a condition of low-intensity misery, unassuaged by any further charity.

While there's no sense in setting up a contest of causes—there's more than enough devastation to go around—it's vital to examine why some suffering is relatively overlooked by charity, both globally and locally. Some obvious answers are racism and ethnocentrism, particularly when it comes to the tardiness of relief funds targeting the AIDS nightmare in Africa. Many critics argue that if an AIDS pandemic anywhere near the size of Africa's happened to be plaguing a Western region, aid for prevention and treatment would never have been withheld for so long. But we can push it further. When it comes to natural disaster, race and culture suddenly lose a lot of their usual importance, except for where they inspire additional aid from diaspora communities. Rather, the favoritism of charity and foreign aid for such crises leaves the impression that victims of hunger, political violence, and disease are somehow more deserving of their plight. As if they had more agency in the matter. As if they truly brought disaster onto themselves.

Natural disaster, on the other hand, inspires in us an atypical sense of social justice, winning our awe, tenderness, and unconstrained charity. But natural disaster is probably the most just form of crisis there is. Unlike poverty, violence, and even disease, natural disaster does not discriminate. The exception is when safety codes are neglected in poor neighborhoods, or when the socially disadvantaged are herded by property values into areas more prone to disaster. In these cases, society has worked hard to help the natural world discriminate.

Even quakes as horrific as India's are small in scale compared to the misery of the everyday. And even hyper-philanthropy faces dead-ends, one of which is the need to make judgment calls about which type of suffering is more worthy—a mostly arbitrary matter that will inevitably result in strange fascinations. But instead of turning disaster relief efforts around to feed poor children in El Salvador, philanthropists (both nations and individuals) would be wise to revise their sense of social justice and face up to how their own place in the system may contribute to making those children desperate to begin with.

Global philanthropy's biggest dead-end, by far, comes in the paradox of resource polarization that makes such "generosity" possible: the accumulated wealth of the hyper-philanthropist, in our globalized system, nearly always stems from the exploitation of labor and the pillaging of resources in Third World countries like India and El Salvador. Philanthropy may help some people in need, but it's often an ugly privilege. Solving the kinds of chronic cataclysms brought on by worldwide economic polarization will take much more than relief work.

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