Permit Me One Maudlin Anecdote

Lessons from a park bench in the Champs de Mars

As a rule, I avoid appealing to readers’ emotions. I specialize in crafting arguments for logical minds. It was the great Mike Huemer who taught me “how to think”:

1. Begin with common-sense premises, simple claims that that make sense to reasonable people who do not share your conclusions.

2. Calmly move, step-by-step, to surprising conclusions.

3. But not so surprising that the argument is a reductio ad absurdum of the premises.

Today, however, I shall set all that aside, and make a bald appeal to readers’ emotions. What does it prove? Nothing. But many readers will think more clearly if they hear me out. And since I rarely appeal to emotions, I deserve a little latitude to make my point. So please, dear readers, permit me one maudlin anecdote.

In 2017, my wife and I travelled with our four children to Paris. We arrived at the airport around 7 AM, in various stages of sleep deprivation. My daughter, five years old at the time, barely slept on the plane. After clearing customs, we still had six hours to kill before check-in time at our hotel. So we started touring around Paris.

By late morning, we found ourselves walking through the Champ de Mars, in sight of the Eiffel Tower. Despite our exhaustion, all of us were still doing well. Except my five-year-old daughter, Vali. She had outgrown her stroller the previous summer, so when she stopped walking, we had to carry her. But even with four adult-size family members to share the load, she was too heavy to carry for long.

At this point, I tried getting tough. “You’re too big for us to carry. You have to carry yourself.”

Toughness failed. My five-year-old daughter started crying like a baby, and my heart wept with her.

If I hadn’t been sleep-deprived myself, I probably would have realized, “We should immediately pay for a cheap hotel room so Vali can rest.” Instead, I just picked her up again as she whimpered. But after walking a few hundred more feet, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Defeated, I found a park bench and watched her as she fell asleep.

Which filled me with an overwhelming sense of shame. Of failure as a guardian. A voice in my head sternly told me, “Your daughter is sleeping on a park bench. You are a poor excuse for a father. You are a worthless person.” Seriously, I had to choke back my own tears.

At this point, I had a sleep-deprived epiphany: Compared to what I was experiencing, every refugee father suffers 1000x more. Maybe 10,000x more. I felt crushing shame because my daughter was sleeping on a park bench for a hour. I could have bought my way out of this problem in a heartbeat.

In contrast, imagine what it would feel like to be a father trying to get my kids out of a war zone. A father illegally trying to transport my children to a safer country. A father trying to find shelter for my family, with nothing to offer but the clothes on my back. A father unable to support my children because I lacked the paperwork for legal employment.

And then I imagined how I would feel as a father to see those Rapefugee signs anti-immigration people were gleefully sharing at the time.

Intellectually, I was already a staunch supporter of open borders. But experiencing a one-thimble sip of the bitterness of being a refugee was a revelation. I felt like Bill Paxton in Titanic when he confesses, “Three years, I've thought of nothing except Titanic; but I never got it... I never let it in.”

With that revelation came another: If your gut reaction to refugees is individual or collective self-pity, to moan, “Why should we have to take them?,” then what the hell is wrong with you? Who could be more deserving of your sympathy than people fleeing the horrors of violence, homelessness, and hunger? If you’re stingy, fine; don’t help. But to self-righteously ask government to treat refugees like criminals instead of victims is truly depraved.

I am not remotely a bleeding heart. As a firm believer in the Success Sequence, I think that irresponsible behavior is the most important — and most morally relevant — cause of First World poverty. Still, you would have to twist your mind into knots to blame the typical refugee for his plight. What would you even say? “You should have kept your children in a war zone and fought to fix your country”? “It’s your fault for having children before finding a First World country willing to admit you legally”?!

By the way, “refugee” definitely includes much-maligned “economic refugees.” If my children were hungry, and I could feed them by sneaking into a richer country to work illegally, I would totally do it. Any decent father on Earth would do the same. That’s what you would do — and that’s what you should do.

I’m well-aware that emotions often lead us to mistaken conclusions. That’s the main reason why I almost always avoid emotional appeals. One of the main functions of moral reasoning is to motivate us to do good things that feel bad.

When people are too emotional to heed moral reasoning, though, our last best hope is to counter with emotion. “How would you feel if you were a refugee?” is not a logical argument. But if your gut reaction to desperate human suffering is anger, not pity, logic is not for you.