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Sunday December 14, 2008

Familiarity breeds compassion

STRAY THOUGHT WITH A ASOHAN


We relate more to those who most resemble us, and we empathise most with those we can relate to.

EARLIER this week, International Trade and Industry Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin suggested that the Government sponsor hotel lodgings for the residents of Selangor’s Bukit Antarabangsa area who had been forced to evacuate their homes in the wake of last Saturday’s landslide.

Another newspaper reported that it was a done deal, and Muhyiddin had to clarify that it was merely something the Government was considering. In any case, my immediate reaction when reading that story was, “Well done, YB”.

Then I read other stories in The Star that day: Residents in a whole lot of other areas living in fear of landslides as well; thousands of others affected by floods in Malacca, Terengganu, and Pahang; follow-up stories on the bus crash near Tangkak, Johor, that killed 10.

It was nearly Biblical, like the End of Days, especially when you consider how relatively safe Malaysia is from natural disasters compared with most other countries.

Then I had a nasty little thought, one that produced more than a twinge of guilt because lives have been lost and uprooted, and we all should be reaching out to those in need.

But, but ... why do the folks of Bukit Antarabangsa need hotel accommodations when the flood victims in mostly rural areas have to be satisfied with makeshift relief centres or school canteens?

It’s an insensitive thought, I know, and even offensive to some, I’m sure. But think about it: Why? Do certain classes of victims deserve better treatment?

And why isn’t anybody pissed off about the implications of an unfair society that prizes its more well-heeled people? It’s not as if an “upper-class” person feels his loss more keenly.

Perhaps it’s because – and here’s the sticky part – we can probably relate more to people who are on the same level as us, or a few rungs higher, on the social ladder than we can to the people below us.

The people on the same level as us are just like us, the people above are what we aspire to be, and, sadly, we’re probably just happy to have escaped the struggles of the ones below us.

This is a generalisation, so don’t get your knickers in a twist or your jockeys in a knot. Within every strata of society, there are compassionate people who can look beyond all this and empathise with just about any other person. If you’re one of them, I salute you.

But let’s be honest here, there are too few of these kinds of people.

The empathy we feel doesn’t necessarily have to be linked only to social class but can also be tied to culture and race. And culture can be more all encompassing than we’d like to think, thanks to modern mass media and their built-in and sometimes, to be fair, inadvertent biases.

Didn’t we all feel the shock and horror of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks, beaming into our living rooms that terrible day in 2001, more keenly than we did, for instance, the botched US military strike against an Afghanistan wedding party last month? If that had happened to Western families, the media (and not just the US media) would have given us the life stories of the people killed, and we all would have felt that loss and tragedy more keenly, and would have clamoured harder for heads to roll.

The “Blackwater trial” is currently going on in Washington, in which five military veterans employed by Blackwater Worldwide are being tried for killing 14 innocent Iraqis and injuring dozens more in an unprovoked attack in Baghdad in 2007.

The shooting by the largest US security contractor in Iraq has sparked international condemnation and launched US Congressional hearings, news agencies noted in reports last week. There has been a lot of coverage of the terrible deed, but how many of us know the names of the Iraqis killed?

Substitute Iraqis there with Somalians and Rwandans. We don’t even have to be racist about it – what about Georgians and Bosnians and others? Or Central and South Americans?

Sure, we sympathise with such victims, no matter their race, creed, or colour. Any half-decent person who watches the news will feel something for them. But we don’t necessarily empathise with them.

Like it or not, most Malaysians relate more readily to Americans than we do to Iraqis. We’re mostly a middle-class multicultural society; they’re mostly a middle-class multicultural society.

But more importantly, there is the dominance of the United States in so many different spheres, from entertainment to the Internet. We’re all exposed to the pervasiveness (and some would say, the perversity) of US pop culture and media. There is no escape.

There’s nothing wrong with empathising more readily with people you can relate to. We’re always more protective of “our tribe”, it’s encoded in our behavioural patterns for survival, even if the definition of “our tribe” has been dramatically transformed over the centuries.

The trick is expanding our empathy and compassion to include people very different from us.

  • A. Asohan, New Media Editor at The Star, can relate to anyone, anywhere in the world who wants Liverpool to win the Premiership!

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