The horrors of the first world war were clear enough to everyone who fought in it, as Wilfred Owen did: “If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace / Behind the wagon that we flung him in, / And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, / His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin / If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs”.  But for those who watched from the comfort of the home front, it was still easy to believe the old lies. It took 10 years or more from the end of the fighting for Owen to be widely read, and for the great novels and prose memoirs to appear which peopled the trenches with individual soldiers whose deaths made a terrible and compelling sense so that a whole generation saw through the uplifting official generalities to the grotesque and particular horrors of reality. Something like that has happened now, very much more quickly, with the death of Aylan Kurdi. One photograph has turned something we all knew was happening, but somewhere little-known and far away, into a wrenching tragedy that demands immediate action.  The turnaround in the British tabloid press has been astonishing. The Murdoch Sun, which just months ago published a column describing the refugees as “cockroaches” by a woman boasting that her heart could not be touched by drowning children, now puts “For Aylan” on its front page and demands that the government provide places for 3,000 orphans. That is very little compared with the need, but it is still 3,000 times more than the paper would have considered Britain had room for three days ago.  Almost everyone now sees that there is a moral imperative to help the Syrian refugees, even if this means letting them into the UK. It may be that this is just a spasm of sentimentality and that in a fortnight the same papers will be back to denouncing the “migrant” hordes in Calais, and demanding that dogs, or the British army, be deployed to protect holidaymakers from refugees as they were three weeks ago.  But it is also an astonishingly vivid demonstration of the inadequacy of statistics to move our moral sentiments compared with the power of pictures, and still more of pictures that bring to life stories, to affect us in ways that reasoning never could. As the critic Teresa Nielsen Hayden observed, “Story is a force of nature.” One single death and a refugee family have moved a nation to whom 200,000 deaths and 11 million refugees had remained for years merely a statistic, and not a very interesting one at that.  The inadequacy of reason to change minds and hearts is something that we have intellectually known for a long time. It is the root of the failure of technocrats in democratic politics. Wonks won’t win elections – ask Ed Miliband – even when they happen to be right about the facts. The only exception is when a genuine policy wonk like Bill Clinton can also appeal to the emotions, even if Mr Clinton famously found that his appeal to the emotions of less powerful people could lead him (and them) to a whole lot of trouble.  It appears that there are at least two styles or mechanisms of reaching decisions, one of which is deliberative and considered, and the other immediate, largely unconscious and much the more powerful of the two. This is a real problem for the left, which likes to think itself more rational than the right, as well as possessed of better emotional instincts. Most of the examples of irrationality and mythmaking triumphing over reasoned consideration of all the facts seem to come from the right: Ronald Reagan’s notorious clipbook of anecdotes about “Welfare queens in Cadillacs”.  But it would not be hard to come up with corresponding examples of myths and stories that inspire the progressive side yet hardly stand up to rational examination. Just as a nation is supposed to be composed of a flag, an army, and a false account of history, a cynic might suppose that nothing great was ever accomplished in the world without a group of people agreeing to believe something that is not strictly true.  Not that this is a modern discovery. The inadequacy of reason to steer us right has been known since at least the Garden of Eden and restated by thinkers as various as Hume and Machiavelli. Even Kant said that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever built”. This is no cause for despair. We should simply be glad when something better is built from this weak and warped material, as has happened this week.
Editorial: Our reaction to an individual tragedy may not be strictly rational. So much the worse for rationality