Haiti and the parody of empathy
A few centuries ago, people believed in sensibility, that if a person whose natural impulses and responses were not distorted by flawed society saw another person suffering, that person would be moved to help them as instinctively as moving one's hand away from a hot stove. You shouldn't need to teach or motivate people to do the right thing. If the past century has proven anything, that doesn't work. We've had poor, starving, plague-ridden, disaster-struck brown people on our televisions for decades, and it keeps happening. The response to human suffering varies considerably,
I write this after the celebrity telethon to solicit donations for earthquake relief in Haiti.
We're told over and over in the coverage of this disaster that Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere. If people had GIVEN A SHIT about Haiti for the past 200 years, there still would have been an earthquake, and the island would be in trouble, but it would not have been an utter disaster. There would have been no need for telethons, no need for tearful media coverage, no need for international disaster relief by the same people who utterly bungled post-Katrina New Orleans.
Earlier this week, I put a check for $10 into the mail for the Red Cross for use in Haiti relief. I say this not to encourage others to donate, or promote my own supposed virtue, or even because I give a damn about Haiti. I barely knew Haiti existed before last week, and I sure as hell never lifted a finger to do anything to help them. That check was an observance, a symbolic, ritual act, like putting out cookies and milk for Santa Claus.
Assuaging our consciences, appeasing our carefully cultivated sense of liberal guilt, is not enough. It produces just enough help to keep people at the level of abject misery, neither rising or falling.
Only genuine empathy and understanding, not the degraded Hallmark Card version of it most people experience, can motivate a worthwhile degree of aid for another. I can only conclude that does not come naturally. We attempt to do it, but get lazy and instead perform mawkish ceremonies, parodying the people we know we ought to be but fall short of being.
I write this after the celebrity telethon to solicit donations for earthquake relief in Haiti.
We're told over and over in the coverage of this disaster that Haiti is one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere. If people had GIVEN A SHIT about Haiti for the past 200 years, there still would have been an earthquake, and the island would be in trouble, but it would not have been an utter disaster. There would have been no need for telethons, no need for tearful media coverage, no need for international disaster relief by the same people who utterly bungled post-Katrina New Orleans.
Earlier this week, I put a check for $10 into the mail for the Red Cross for use in Haiti relief. I say this not to encourage others to donate, or promote my own supposed virtue, or even because I give a damn about Haiti. I barely knew Haiti existed before last week, and I sure as hell never lifted a finger to do anything to help them. That check was an observance, a symbolic, ritual act, like putting out cookies and milk for Santa Claus.
Assuaging our consciences, appeasing our carefully cultivated sense of liberal guilt, is not enough. It produces just enough help to keep people at the level of abject misery, neither rising or falling.
Only genuine empathy and understanding, not the degraded Hallmark Card version of it most people experience, can motivate a worthwhile degree of aid for another. I can only conclude that does not come naturally. We attempt to do it, but get lazy and instead perform mawkish ceremonies, parodying the people we know we ought to be but fall short of being.