It's good to see this issue getting some attention - it's not just trauma therapists (secondary traumatization, or vicarious trauma) who experience this loss of compassion and empathy. It seems our culture is sometimes numb to the suffering of others. It's the only way I can explain the way our politicians can gut programs that provide food, shelter, and mental health care for the poor.
Read the whole article.Becoming Compassionately Numb
By BENEDICT CAREY
Benedict Carey is a science reporter for The New York Times.
Do we have no more room in our hearts to care for this Haitian earthquake victim?
ABOUT the only thing tanking faster than consumer confidence and the Greek economy would be the global compassion index, if such a measure existed.
Consider just a few recent news items: Americans are balking at extending unemployment benefits, and even disaster relief was in doubt for a time last week in another of Washington’s budget skirmishes; Europeans are cutting payments to pensioners; and “there’s no mood for intervention” to avert famine in Somalia, according to one diplomat.
At a recent Republican presidential debate, the audience erupted into cheers upon hearing Texas’s nation-leading rate of executions.
Behind such sentiments lie genuine concerns, be they for law and order or personal responsibility, not to mention limited resources and a struggling economy. After all, a lowering tide grounds a lot of rescue boats, literally and psychologically.
Yet psychologists and primatologists have been arguing for years that compassion is an evolved instinct, rooted in the brain’s circuitry. In a new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” the psychologist Steven Pinker calls empathy “the latest fashion in human nature.” Chimpanzees show evidence of compassion, as do some monkeys; even mice seem to feel the pain of close peers. But if current trends continue, rats might become a more appropriate subject of study.
Are people today — are societies — really becoming somehow more callous?
The answer is no, of course not — at least not in any fundamental sense. But compassion is a limited resource, a system rooted in cognitive networks that tire and need refueling. And it’s not always rational.
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