A few days ago, I posted a really interesting article extracted from “The Week” Magazine called “The little dog lost at sea” and posted in February 2010. In this article we can observe and analyze how the human mind reacts to the sufferings of people, and how sometimes, we seem to be careless about many of the tragedies and calamities that often affect our world.
To analyze this article I would like to divide it into some points or questions, which can illustrate its most important ideas.
Do people act carelessly when facing other’s suffering?
Those of you who read the article would probably be happy to know that Hodgek, the little and beloved dog who was rescued from dying in the sea by the effort and generosity of a lot people all around the world, is now having a nice and peaceful life with a family in Hawaii. Nevertheless, when analyzing the backgrounds of the lesson presented in the text, we can see a pretty darker message; people paid more attention to this dog that to the genocide of Rwanda in the 90`s and in many other events of indescribable sorrow. So, do we act carelessly when seeing someone’s suffering and pain? The answer, luckily, is not. Apparently the human mind identifies itself more with the individual suffering that with the collective one, so when we see that one little dog is lost in the middle of the ocean we feel more comfortable supporting that cause than giving money for the thousands of affected in Rwanda. Sad but true.
Why do we behave this way?
The answer to this question has been subject of many debates, but today, for the most part, people believe that it’s just an evolutional failure in our brains (sounds creepy huh?). The truth is that today the human beings are able to know everything that happens around the world, and the world is really big. Our brains, on the other hand, sometimes can`t process that amount of information. In simple words, we are still used to, at least unconsciously, believing that we live in a little community. Basically, our brains don`t know how to react to the suffering of thousands of people at the same time, because until a few years ago, we didn`t have access to know all those facts. That’s why for example; people have felt more touched about the case of Sakineh Ashtiani, the woman who could be stoned in Iran, than about the thousands of people affected by the floods in Pakistan.
What can we do?
Apparently nothing. We can´t go against our mind’s physiology, It sounds sad, but in fact we are programmed to react in a colder way to mass suffering than to the individual.
To end, we can say that even though it sounds cruel that human beings act carelessly when we face sorrow on a great scale, it doesn’t mean that we are a heartless race; it’s only incapacity of our minds. Although, it doesn’t mean that we must sit and see how the world suffers while we watch the news and eat ice cream, we should try to remember that beyond any biological capacity, the human mind is able to discern between right and wrong. It’s up to us to decide who or what we should help. We must have priorities and some ethical standards to decide which situations are more relevant than others.
No comments:
Post a Comment