The headlines read like a bad action film: a six-year-old Ebola patient, snatched from her hospital bed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then found safe and recovering. Cue the collective sigh of relief. But step back, if you will, from the emotional bathos and consider what this event truly signifies about our age.
Here we have a child, victim of one of nature’s most terrifying plagues, abducted by armed men in a country that has known little but chaos and exploitation. And the world watches, tweets, and moves on. Our own news cycle will soon forget her, lost in the next scandal or celebrity divorce. This is the hallmark of intellectual decadence: we have become connoisseurs of outrage, consuming horror as spectacle.
Compare this to the Victorian era, that age of moral certainty and imperial duty. Then, the abduction of a child by ‘natives’ would have been a casus belli, a call to arms for the civilising mission. We might sneer at that colonialism, but at least they believed in something. Today we have no such convictions; we have only performances of concern. The child is safe, so we pat ourselves on the back for our humanitarian instincts, while the forces that made her abduction possible remain untouched.
The Fall of Rome comes to mind. As the Empire crumbled, its citizens grew obsessed with bread and circuses, with the spectacle of gladiators and chariot races, while barbarians massed at the gates. We are no different: we gorge on news cycles and empty gestures, while the real barbarians are not at our gates but within our souls. We have lost the capacity for sustained moral outrage, replacing it with fleeting emotions that flicker and die as quickly as a smartphone notification.
The DR Congo is a smouldering wreck of a nation, a monument to our collective indifference. It bleeds resources, diamonds, coltan, the very minerals that power our devices. And we respond by abducting a child? No. That is not the real story. The real story is that such a place exists at all, that we allow it to exist, that it is a product of centuries of exploitation and neglect. The abduction is a symptom, not the disease.
So yes, rejoice that the girl is safe. But do not mistake relief for virtue. We have merely witnessed a single note in a symphony of despair, a tragedy that will play on long after we have clicked away. The Victorians at least built schools and hospitals, however patronisingly. We build walled gardens of distraction. And we call that progress.
Mark my words: our descendants will look back on this era not as a golden age of humanitarianism, but as a time when we perfected the art of feeling good about doing nothing. The child is safe. But the sickness remains.
