Human Nature

As that old cynic and mass murderer Joe Stalin put it: One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic. That sad, simple truth about human nature may help to explain why the world doesn't do anything about, say, Darfur. Does it also explain the lack of meaningful action on global warming, which, by the way, is at the root of the Darfur genocide -- at least according to observers like Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery, as well as this recent article in the Atlantic? While most of the press paints the genocide in Sudan as ethnically motivated, many others argue that it's really a struggle between farmers and herders over increasingly scarce water and arable land.