There's a recent article on Wired.com written by Clive Thompson regarding something called the psychology of numeracy. Basically, it boils down to the idea that humans are very empathic towards small groups of people who are in need, but not proportionally empathic to large groups of people with the same need. To quote directly from the article: "we'll break the bank to save Baby Jessica, but when half of Africa is dying, we're buying iPhones." I suspect this is why all those "save the starving children" commercials always showed individual kids - it's harder to ignore one face than to ignore many.
This idea extrapolates out to things like disease research as well. We're ready to spend bajillions of dollars to prevent things like SARS, which is (at least so far) VERY harmless in the grand scheme of things. And yet, every year, millions of people die because they don't have access to something as simple as clean water.
So I pose the question: why would God build us this way? Why would God make us so able to relate to individuals, but be unable to extrapolate out that feeling to large groups of people? If we see a news bit of one person being persecuted in a foreign country, why don't we feel millions of times worse for the ongoing genocide in Dharfur? If we feel sympathy for a single disfigured child in Iraq, why don't we feel many, many times worse for all the child victims of war violence?
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that support and help for the Baby Jessicas or Youssifs of the world are misplaced. I'm simply wondering why it is that people like to focus those feelings on individuals, instead of "spreading the love", so to speak.
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2 comments:
I love that you're blogging!
I suspect that the trait you're talking about (which has been repeatedly demonstrated, by the way) isn't the way we're designed but is actually a byproduct of our fallenness and the extreme self-centeredness that brought about. I think we feel altruistic toward one person b/c we see ourselves or our own children or loved ones in that one person's suffering. The suffering of many just doesn't appeal to our narcissism, frankly. Anyway, to embrace the suffering of millions, we would have to be not only as big as God but as selfless as Jesus and that's not going to happen anytime soon! That's my two cents.
Perhaps our tendency to connect with individuals is actually a way that we are like God. I think God's nature is to relate to us as individuals rather than as "humanity" as a group. Because God is infinite it amounts to the same thing for him, but for us there's a big difference between individuals and groups. We know intellectually that groups are made up of individuals but it doesn't feel that way.
I also think this is why we are most commonly led to faith by a close friend or by a person we respect. We connect best one-to-one.
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