Tragedy and distance

[QuikSand]

This is not a new issue to me, but the recent Korean ferry tragedy has me thinking about it... and for some likely misguided reason, I thought it was worth sharing here.

...

I have been thinking a good deal about this sunken ferry, and both the toll of the event and its coverage/attention over here in "my world." In my response and thinking about this, I am trying not to blame and instead to observe and question... in part, no doubt, because if there's blame to be tossed around then I'm taking at least my fair share of it.

I'm going to use the term "my world" here (and some geographically personalized proxies for flow) to mean a combination of my local media, my online information sources of choice, my water-cooler level conversations, my dinner table, and the like. I happen to be a mid-Atlantic suburban professional - substitute in your suitable demographic as need be, I don't think my specifics are particularly important.


So, at the substantial risk of being callous:

Boat sinks in Korea, hundreds of schoolchildren I don't know die
Response in my world: sad news item, wonder how that happened, now how's the market doing

Boat sinks in Puget Sound, hundreds of schoolchildren I don't know die
Response in my world: deeply moving sadness, days of attention and grief, try to console people indirectly affected

Boat sinks in Chesapeake Bay, hundreds of schoolchildren I don't know die
Response in my world: life basically comes to a halt, community grief stricken for ages, deep family and conversational impact


I'm overstating a little for effect, but you get my point. Almost nobody (ed. - had to go back and caveat that more than initially expected - this is FOFC after all) would fess up and say in plain terms that they honestly "value" a life of someone far away or of a different race or origin as less of a person than someone else... but our actions speak here, don't they? I don't know what it amounts to when we offer a little of our time and attention, or feel some bit of semi-personal pain for those suffering or lost... but on that scorecard, I don't think there are many of us who grade out perfectly.

I know it has to be, in part, just a capacity issue - we can't obsess over every missing child or drunk driving manslaughter across the country, or we'd lack time to do anything else. So each community basically agrees to panic about their own, again oversimplifying.

But this doesn't strike me as merely pragmatism at work.

This is on my mind.

[molson]

I think its ultimately a coping mechanism. Humans have a limit to grieving and even sympathy. It's why police, EMTs, coroners, and others who deal with violence and tragedy on a daily basis develop a "gallows humor" that other people would find appalling - they can't possibly feel and be moved by every bad thing they come into contact with, they wouldn't be able to hold those jobs. It's kind of the same thing on a planet of 7 billion people that are all connected by technology.

I don't think we pick and choose what to grieve and feel for, or assign different value to different lives. We naturally connect with whatever we connect with based on our experiences and proximity to things. I'm really thankful for the times that I am genuinely moved through no effort of my own, whether it be a positive or negative thing. It's what makes me human. I don't take those moments for granted. And ya, sometimes those moments come because of mere proximity - something good or bad happening to someone in my neighborhood or family. But that's not the only factor - sometimes a photograph or story from across the world can connect with you for some other reason. I don't feel guilty about not feeling grief and sympathy equally across the globe in all scenarios. I'm only human, i'm happy for whatever connections I'm lucky enough to make.

[JonInMiddleGA]

fwiw, I've wrestled with this for years to some extent, or at least considered it.
I think I've probably even told this same story before actually but it's significant in how I (learned that I) personally process things.

Many years ago, working in radio, anchored an hourly newscast. Some story involving an earthquake overseas, death toll was some incredibly large number & many of them were children ... which I related straight off the AP wire copy. My mom was on hold during the newcast, after which I picked up the phone for whatever conversation we were going to have & she said something to the effect that she didn't know how I could read stories like that hour after hour, day after day. My honest answer was "they're just numbers, you couldn't function if you thought about them otherwise".

So, honestly & sincerely, I land very much on the side of this being a "capacity issue" more than anything else.

Now, that said, do we (globally) apply some sort of scale of inherent value either consciously or subconsciously. I'd say absolutely so but since I do that on a very micro scale every single day -- in equations like "how concerned am I about X news concerning Y person -- I don't know that I'm particularly bothered by the fact I do it on a macro scale.

[timmae]

Interesting question.. It may come down to "how does it affect my life?". In your example... I am likely never going to take a ferry in Korea. I will likely take a ferry in the Puget. I am almost certainly taking a ferry in Chesapeake Bay. Now it just became very real, very quickly. "I may not have been there today... but I was on that route last week" scenario. Whoa...

A local example for me... innocent child gets hit by stray gunfire 10 miles south of Chicago. Ok... sad, but not really even "newsworthy" anymore (which is sad in its own right, thus the question above). Innocent child gets hit down my block... different story.

And yet another angle... I feel more strongly about the air quality in China and the animal rights issues in Africa than the human lives lost in Korea. Not even close in comparison. Not sure what that says about me but there it is.

[Izulde]

Originally Posted by molson

I think its ultimately a coping mechanism.

This. If we allowed our minds to really think about it, we would go literally insane from trying to deal with it. Which, I imagine, is part of why recluses have a higher level of mental illness - they have more time to think and ponder deeply about things like this and so the protective coping mechanisms get hammered until they start breaking down.

[albionmoonlight]

There is still, I think, a fundamental and hard-to-shake sense in which we are driven by tribal feelings. As you noted, we just feel things more deeply when they have a proximity to us. Why? In evolutionary terms, tribes with members who reacted more strongly to disaster threatening the tribe probably ended up more successful in a Darwinian sense than tribes who did not. (side note, I always feel like a college freshman when I try to make arguments based on evolution and that one time I was assigned to read a short excerpt from the Origin of Species.)

We see a non-proximity-based version of this when there is an event in the media where a white person and a black person are in conflict, or where a Democrat and a Republican are in conflict. One can predict, with a sadly high degree of certainty, how our family and friends will react on Facebook or FOFC or at the Thanksgiving dinner table based on which tribe they support.

I see that as all part of the same thing. Capacity and bandwith are important. And our hindbrains have a great shortcut in deciding how to handle and process conflicts of this nature: The more like us the victims are, the more of our precious time and energy we will give to it.

[TroyF]

This is ALWAYS on my mind. I hope I can describe this clearly enough: This is kind of how flight 370 hit me.

You are dead on that we think in to out. A plane crash happens and the thoughts are usually:

1) Did I have any family or friends on the flight? No. . . move to #2
2) Any famous person on the flight? No. . . move to #3
3) Any American on the flight Yes. (where from, who were they, what were their stories)
4) Oh yeah, there were hundreds of other people on the flight, it really sucks for them. How sad.


This isn't how I intended my thoughts to be. It isn't how I WANT my thoughts to be. For some reason it is.

The other thing that fascinates me on this type of subject is history. I've spent a lot of time studying the holocaust. Been to the museum in DC. Listened to survivors tell their tale in person. Watched movies. Been driven to tears countless times.

The 7 million people Stalin starved to death in the Ukraine? Yeah, I know of it. I've read a little bit about it. Yet it has never had the same impact on me. How many movies have talked about them? How many TV shows have been dedicated to them? There is no doubt the emotion is related to what I have seen and read. The feeling that "I should care about this more than I do" is actually worse for me than the sadness of caring.

I don't know if that made any sense. Anyway, good subject.

[albionmoonlight]

dola:

A related point. I remember reading someone hypothesize why Bill Gates was driven to Africa with his philanthropy. Basically, we all hear things like "500 million children are starving in Africa" and it is such a big number that we just can't and don't process it. We don't know what that really means. So we end up donating our money to the local food bank--because that's a problem that we can comprehend.

Well, the theory goes, Bill Gates, having spent the better part of his life with numbers, really could understand--in a way that most of us cannot--what "500 million" means and how much bigger it is than the numbers associated with more local problems. And, with that understanding of the true scope of the problem, put his resources into solving it.

No idea where I read this or if it checks out from a pop-psychology point of view. But I found it interesting and somewhat relevant.

[path12]

I know that the landslide up here was far more affecting than other tragedies.

It feels wrong to feel that way but it is what it is. The closer you are to an event that shows you how fragile life is, the harder it is to get your head around it.

Capacity/bandwidth has something to do with it, sure, but just as much in my opinion is that death is just so damn hard to fathom that I think it is also a kind of coping mechanism to abstract tragedy.

I've had three people close to me kill themselves in the past year and a half. I don't think this gives me any more insight into death than I had before, but it certainly means that it has been on my mind a lot, and that you never really know what is in anybody's head. That has affected me much more than any other mass tragedy.

tl;dr. Life is weird and we are fragile beings in every way.

[ColtCrazy]

I can understand that feeling completely. I relate just as much to 7/7 in London as I do 9/11 because I was in London when it happened where as I wasn't in New York, but it's my country and I knew people indirectly effected.

[Desnudo]

Without digging into the factors of race and culture, like would a ferry sinking in England affect you more than a ferry in Korea, I think the farther away something is there needs to be a either a very potent personal aspect to the story or the numbers need be on a scale beyond the norm with unusually tragic circumstances. Like if you read a story about one of those kids' last moments on the ferry and some background on their life story, you would feel a whole lot more emotion about the event. Or if the number of deaths was in the thousands and the ferry was blown up by a bomb.

[flere-imsaho]

I think grief can be amplified based on the strength of a personal connection, if it exists. The person connection can rum the gamut from "this person is related to me" to "this person lives in my town / state / country" to even "this person is similar to me."

I think the reason for this is that when we grieve for someone (whom we know) we not only grieve for our loss, but for the loss of what that life could be. This may be a reason why we grieve less (or less strongly) for someone who died peacefully in old age ("he had a good life") than for a child.

Maybe this is part of it.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

tribal feelings

Hmmm.... concise phrasing of a concept that I also think plays in here.

Do we think this might be, in a non-controversial non-political way, a sort of "evolutionary" trait?

[nol]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

Hmmm.... concise phrasing of a concept that I also think plays in here.

Do we think this might be, in a non-controversial non-political way, a sort of "evolutionary" trait?

I think it partly lies in altruism driven by kin selection ("I would jump in the river to save two of my brothers, eight of my cousins, ...") where the cultural memes you have in common with the hypothetical Chesapeake Bay children would make up for the lack of genetic relatedness.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by nol

I think it partly lies in altruism driven by kin selection ("I would jump in the river to save two of my brothers, eight of my cousins, ...") where the cultural memes you have in common with the hypothetical Chesapeake Bay children would make up for the lack of genetic relatedness.

Yeah, I have always rejected that theory in the specific... but in the generic, we obviously respond to "closeness" however that is fairly defined.

[nol]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

Yeah, I have always rejected that theory in the specific... but in the generic, we obviously respond to "closeness" however that is fairly defined.

And for most people, any differences in the magnitude of their empathic response are small enough that society returns to normalcy much sooner than people would think at the tragedy's outset. Even within the affected community, the average person with school-aged children will undoubtedly grieve more than their single, childless peers.

From a biological standpoint, those varying degrees of empathy are probably nature's way of balancing "You need to spend some time thinking about this because you could definitely find yourself in a similar situation" with the issues referred to about allocating your cognitive capacity.

[OldGiants]

A few comments towards points that have been largely absent from above:

1) We've gotten more sentimental over human life in the recent past. Let's not forget parents did not immediately name children until they lasted a year or two in most cultures, lest they become too attached to someone whose chance of living was speculative.

2) I work around Public Safety people. Police, Fire and Rescue folks see death on an almost daily basis. They could not even get through a shift, let alone the work week, if they let that effect them emotionally.

3) Death is all around us. The Korean accident only represented a small percentage of the total number of deaths on that date. Why get worked up over them simply because their death was lurid and spectacular?

[judicial clerk]

I am far from an expert regarding this stuff and my opinions are not based on study or science. Two factors that can come in to play that have not been mentioned:

Post stramatic stress: I think post traumatic stress might be a spectrum and I think our reaction to a current traumatic event can be shaped by our history with similar traumatic events (also I think people suffer a degree of post traumatic stress even when they are not intimately connected to the event);

Harm to children: most people have a much more intense reaction to events involving children than events involving adults (I think I remember reading one time that our brain actually releases endorphins or something when we see children or young animals).

I think these are two of many factors that help shape our reaction to events both near and far.

[StLee]

Unfortunately for me, the Korean ferry incident was a little too close to home. I live in Korea and I'm married to a Korean, with two children who are Korean and U.S. citizens. Though I knew no one on the ferry, my child is in a Korean day care, and they are already taking "trips" where I doubt that safety standards are followed closely. In other words, the Korean ferry incident could be my child, which devastates me even more.

One thing I will try to instill in my children is to never buy into the Confucian system fully. Unfortunately for the children on that ferry, they did what they were supposed to do: listen to someone "older" and "in charge" instead of assessing the danger they were in and getting the fuck out of Dodge. For my children, I want them to recognize dangerous situations and do something about it. It's the way I was brought up, and it's one of the ways I was brought up where I totally buy into it.

[digamma]

Bumping...in light of the really unspeakable school attack in Pakistan juxtaposed with remembering the Sandy Hook shootings almost exactly two years ago.

[QuikSand]

Originally Posted by digamma

Bumping...in light of the really unspeakable school attack in Pakistan juxtaposed with remembering the Sandy Hook shootings almost exactly two years ago.

Had the same thought today, though my mental contrast was with Sydney. Had semi-forgotten about this thread, though.