Where is our sense of proportion?
By Jonathan Power More by this Author  How sour sweet music is,  When time is broke, and no proportion kept! So it is in the music of mens lives. Shakespeare wrote this in his play Richard II in 1595. In the events of his day in high politics there was little sense of proportion. In Europe war was everywhere. Neither is there much today, particularly when it comes to conflict and war. If you watch television and read the serious newspapers its hard not to be convinced that we are constantly immersed in friction and strife. This is simply not true. For most people, in most parts of the world, for most of the time, for most of their lives, people live their lives without serious ill treatment, molestation, violence or persecution. Take war today. Without those moving pictures of conflict and war, TV news would be singularly and conspicuously bereft, even unable to fill up its time-slot. Advertisement  I list the countries where there is war or serious armed conflict today, and their populations:  Ukraine- 40 million people. Yemen- 1 million. Afghanistan- 12 million. Myanmar- 30 million. Somalia- 5 million. Chad- 16. Mali- 5 million. Congo- 60 million. Syria- 17 million. Ethiopia- 112 million. That gives a grand total of 244 million people who live in countries at war. The worlds population is close to 8 billion, so that is 1/32 or 0.03 percent (rounded up). Moreover, most of them are not living near the actual fighting. I would take a guess that only around 50 million are actually in war zones. Proportion! Exaggeration undermines our judgement and eventually our equilibrium. Another example is the coronavirus. A pandemic of fear, a Russian journalist friend of mine described it 18 months ago. Over the last two years more people have died from heart disease than corona in the US and Europe. In the US ten times more children and teenagers have died from traffic accidents than have died because of the virus. Malaria has been claiming the deaths of over 200,000 children in Africa each of the last 50 years. But investment by richer countries in funding malaria research into a vaccine has declined in recent years. This is not to argue that the coronavirus has not been a terrible event but it has certainly been hyped beyond what is reasonable, to the exclusion of the useful and worthwhile comparisons I have just made - and there are many more. The media, given a choice, have always highlighted the worst of the figures. Moreover, if one reads or replays the reporting of the last three months you will see that there has been scant attention given to the fact that for some months now China - population 1.4 billion - has shown convincingly that it has practically defeated the virus, apart from the odd cluster here and there. Positive stories dont sell or, in Chinas case, are not welcome for ideological reasons. Better to highlight the travails of France - 111,000 deaths with a population of a mere 67 million, dramatically lit up by the Eiffel Tower. Now lets take a look at the Wests quarrel with Russia. Back then most Western politicians were stressing that Russia was no longer an enemy. But then in 1999 came Natos decision to expand its boundaries close-up to Russias, even though that broke the American, German and British promise made to the Soviet Union not to. Europe with some uncertainty at first moved in lockstep with America. Russia justifiably became angry- not just the leadership but an overwhelming majority of its population. A growing antagonist relationship, often with bitter outbursts, as over the poisoning and the imprisonment of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, or the decisions by the US to abrogate important nuclear arms control treaties. The fact is, if we do, we are souring the sweet music when time is broke, and no proportion kept.