There’s an equation in large-scale humanitarian disasters that’s always hard to wrap your head around.  It goes something like this:

If T = the tragedy of one person’s experience

and N = the number of people affected

Then T x N = … ?

You tell me.  When it comes to situations of mass misery, we have a story versus scope problem: we can be moved by individual people’s sufferings, and we can be stunned by statistics, but we cannot sum them up, in either sense of the phrase.

Iraqis waiting at UNHCR to register, receive assistance or check on the status of their application.

This reality hit home for me again here in Syria, where the Iraqi refugee crisis comes closest to showing its true proportions.  At the peak of the crisis in 2007, some 6000 Iraqis traveled the one-way road from Baghdad to Damascus every day.  Now, two years later, an estimated 1.2 million refugees make their home here, such as they can.  That makes for 1.2 million stories in Syria alone.

The trouble with that many stories is that no one person can absorb them all — let alone one person in a position to do anything about the problem.  (UNHCR, the one entity in the world that actually tries to listen to every refugee’s story, has registered only around 250,000 of them in Syria.)  The trouble, too, is that it risks creating a kind of morbid oneupmanship, in which it is no longer enough simply to have suffered the kind of tragedies that would level you and me: constant exposure to violence and danger; the murder of multiple friends and neighbors; the utter rearrangement, for the worse, of your nation as you knew it; the need to leave behind your career, your home, and virtually all your possessions and flee to a country where you are not a citizen, can’t work, and can’t provide for your family; and, subsequently, complete uncertainty about and precious little control over your future.

In an environment where that kind of hardship is the baseline, it’s easy for only the most extreme stories to stand out — particularly gruesome torture cases, for instance, or the murder of children.  This troubling tendency has real consequences.  UNHCR, for instance, is not above relying on a kind of Comparative Suffering metric to make decisions about who should be resettled and who must continue to wait.  Ditto much of the media, which sifts through these stories looking for the best of them — by which we mean, perversely, the worst of them.  But I’ve yet to meet an Iraqi refugee, any Iraqi refugee, whose reasons for leaving his or her homeland were anything short of horrible.

Women wait for their number to be called.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that individual solutions are both ethically indispensable and drastically inadequate. Case-by-case assistance matters; just ask anyone who’s benefited from it.  But it only gets us as far as the level of the story.  To solve the problem at the scale at which it really exists — up there in the unimaginable realm of not one or six or ten or twenty tales but multiple millions of them — we need a solution that operates at that scale, too.  Otherwise, we are looking at 4 million people who feel that they have been betrayed by the United States (at least) twice over: once during in invasion that promised freedom and delivered chaos; and again in its aftermath, when those who fled face far too few viable options for rebuilding their lives.

As for the consequences of that — well, that’s some math we can all do.