The Number We Cannot Feel

Somewhere past a hundred and eight million, a number stops being a fact and becomes a fog. That is the figure for registered climate migrants this July, and it is climbing through the hot months, and I no longer believe most of us can feel it. The mind that can grieve one drowned village goes numb before a hundred, and numb is a dangerous place from which to govern. This week the Concordat prepares to debate water; markets price corridors in the tens of billions; ministers speak of "pace" and "throughput" and "absorptive capacity," the vocabulary we invent to keep the fog at a manageable distance. I do not blame them — scale demands abstraction, and no relief agency could function otherwise. But abstraction is a loan against our humanity, and the interest comes due. The task of anyone who writes in a summer like this one is small and stubborn: to keep insisting that the number is made of mornings, of names, of Tuesdays. A hundred and eight million is not a crowd. It is a hundred and eight million ones, and each of them is the whole of a life.