Nonetheless, we have definitely moved beyond nineteenth-century imperialistic modes of thought. People in the West are confronting their own many-cultured reality; fifth graders today in Iowa or London are offered a view of the world different from what their forebears got in 1899, when Rudyard Kipling held sway.

My experience over the past twenty-five years writing about Third World people convinces me there is an audience for the truth--open-minded, curious, not huge, yet not insignificant either. But people don't want to read about victims. If I tell them about a Bolivian tin miner who earns a dollar a day, they will turn the page, maybe wincing slightly with Melvillean guilt. But if I tell them the tin miner has a cute daughter named Erica, that he is a fanatic for the Bolivar soccer team, and that he and his friends in the miners' union used to catapult sticks of dynamite toward the dictatorship's soldiers, readers are more likely to pay attention.

Moeller's detailed account of the press coverage of the Rwanda genocide offers more intriguing evidence that the public is willing to go past the Orientalist pattern. She praises the press, particularly print reporters, for getting to the scene promptly. Then she looks at the reaction in the West. She gives an account of a man walking into a store, glancing at a newsmagazine with Rwanda on the cover...and buying instead another publication, which featured the model Cindy Crawford. Moeller calls his behavior "compassion avoidance," and she is mildly disapproving.

But this man precisely illustrates Melville's insight. Western governments, with their so-called experts, did not act during the genocide, so how is the magazine buyer going to know what to do? After the killings were over, there were proposals for some kind of permanent international intervention force, but at the time, all of us felt stunned and helpless. He is not a bad man because he turned to Cindy Crawford.

Then Moeller describes a fascinating shift in the West after the killings diminished. Once Rwanda started to seem more recognizable, as a crisis of hunger, disease and refugees, Americans did contribute. Doctors Without Borders said that a bartender in Alaska called--after seeing one of their physicians on network TV--with $9,000 he and his patrons had collected. Moeller concluded: "Americans weren't naive enough to think that their five dollars sent to Oxfam would rescue a child trapped by genocidal killers. It might however buy a refugee child a blanket."

Private donations during one emergency after another are of course no long-term answer to misery in the Third World. An unjust global economic order that puts international banks, corporations and arms manufacturers first is the root cause of the poor world's problems. But here too, there is doubt that "compassion fatigue" is real. In a few short years, the international campaign against landmines came out of nowhere to win tremendous victories and a Nobel Peace Prize. The organized struggle against Third World sweatshops is making an increasing impact. The worldwide human rights effort has even put Augusto Pinochet on the defensive; the Chilean dictator, who had once promoted himself to the exalted rank of "capitan-general," was reduced to trying to hide out from a Spanish judge in an English hospital.

No one is suggesting that we are at the doorway to a paradise of internationalist cooperation. But people do respond when you first show them that they are dealing with other people on the other side of the globe, not with victims, and when you offer them a plausible way to act that has some chance of success. Otherwise, they will try to ignore what they perceive as a hopeless situation--not because they are inhuman but precisely because they are all too human.

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