Empathy, murder, and the NRA
I’ve been having lots of dinnertime discussions with my kids about the following three news stories:
- the guy who was pushed into the subway and nobody helped him
- the Sandy Hook murders
- the Syrian uprising
When my son asked why people care so much about the kids murdered in Connecticut but not nearly as much in a random day when as many rebels are murdered by their government in Syria, I talk about how for whatever reason people have more empathy for individuals closer to them, and Connecticut is closer than Syria. It doesn’t feel good but it kind of makes sense.
But of course this doesn’t apply to the guy who was pushed off the subway.
And, speaking of the subway incident, let me be the person who stands up and says that yes, if I’d been there I would have tried to help that man get out of the subway tracks. There were 22 seconds to help him after the crazy guy fled.
For me the ethical obligations are obvious and the empathy I feel for strangers in danger is visceral. I’ve been in situations not entirely unlike this in the subway, and I saw firsthand how other people ran away and start talking about themselves rather than trying to help someone suffering, and it amazes and disgusts me.
It makes me wonder how we develop what I’ll term “working empathy”, to distinguish between someone who actually tries to help in real time and in a meaningful way when someone else is in pain versus someone who is gawking at arm’s length.
This New York Times article touches on it but doesn’t go very deep; it basically suggests we model it for children and talk about how other people feel. It also talks about how monetary rewards stifle empathy (which I knew already from working in finance).
I’m not wondering this abstractly or philosophically. I’m wondering it because if I had a good theory about creating and spreading working empathy, I’d try to join the NRA and apply the technique to see if it works on tough cases. As in, they actually try to prevent unreasonable guns in unreasonable places, not that they issue press releases.