The right side of history is rarely fashionable

There are epochs in which moral conviction becomes indistinguishable from choreography. Ours is such an age: a time in which public virtue is measured not by the suffering one alleviates, but by performative symbolism. The global landscape of outrage today resembles less a conscience than a stage—carefully lit, meticulously curated and strictly selective in the tragedies it chooses to acknowledge.

The revealing contrast is that, in Congo, children starve in what experts unanimously describe as one of the worst humanitarian collapses of the century. In Sudan, largely invisible to Western eyes,...