The world is burning, but remember our sympathy goes only so far

No news is good news, so the saying goes. By contrast, we’re currently being inundated with lots of news, most of it bad: the MH17 catastrophe; a rapidly-growing civilian death toll in Gaza; asylum seekers still stranded in legal, bureaucratic, and moral limbo in the high court and on the high seas; an inquiry into child sex abuse in religious and government institutions; and the recent expulsion of Christianity from Mosul by Isis. It is hard not to feel as though our modern world is, as Bishop Peter Comensoli described yesterday, “the outcome of a trail of human evil.”

How people respond to news of evil, suffering, and tragedy varies on a case-by-case basis. Some are unaffected, others devastated. Some turn to prayer, others take to activism on social media. Most will eventually carry on with their day as usual.

Once we begin to carry on, a creeping thought sets in. Why don’t we feel worse about this? How can we forget so easily? What is wrong with us? We can turn to philosophy to try to answer the question of how we should feel in response to news of evils like those we face today.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume described moral experiences as being ultimately ones of sentiment (feeling). When we witness events, our natural sympathy for fellow human beings prompts a sentimental response. Good actions create sentiments of approval; evil ones generate disapproval.

For Hume, the crucial element in developing appropriate moral attitudes to the world around us is sympathy: the ability to recognise, interpret, and understand what another person is experiencing. Once another person’s experience is known, we interpret it as being beneficial or harmful. The sympathetic person is pleased by the beneficial experiences of others and feels unease at harmful ones.

Those who feel no sorrow in response to tragic news demonstrate a sympathetic deficiency. They are either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the pain of other people. Tasteless jokes, such as Jason Biggs’ tweet in the wake of the MH17 tragedy are not just bad faith, but are failures to act as a good human being ought to. The point is, we should feel sorrow and anger. If we don’t, something is wrong.

However, sympathy will never give us a perfect impression of another person’s experiences. For one thing, experiences are a nexus of character, psychology, environment, and the actual thing that happens to us. We cannot know with perfect accuracy how such a complex interaction might feel until it happens to us.

As philosopher Thomas Nagel explained, we can never know what it is like to be a bat; similarly, we can never know exactly what the asylum seekers stranded at sea are feeling. What we imagine and sympathise with is, at best, an approximation.

Further, the sentiments we develop in response to seeing suffering or evil from which we are far removed are meta-emotions: feelings about feelings. When I hear of a child being killed, I don’t feel the same pain as the child, or of his parents. My pain is a step removed: it is pain about their pain, which is understandably less devastating. Equally, my joy at witnessing an Australian succeed in sport is proportionately lower than the joy of the victorious sportsperson.

This is why we are able to continue with our day while the world burns a thousand miles away. Well-cultivated moral senses are honest – they recognise that someone else’s pain is not mine. That recognition allows us to apportion emotion appropriately. It is why, as Damon Young wrote in 2012, we cannot fight every battle, champion every cause, or feel the pain of the whole of humanity.

Am I just a callous philosopher reasoning his way out of showing compassion for those who deserve it? No. At least, not intentionally. What I am is suggesting that carrying on with one’s day, switching off the news, or tweeting about a chimpanzee’s search for freedom in between horrific news is not necessarily demonstrative of moral vice. It can be though. If we feel nothing when we should, or do nothing when we could, we can’t avail ourselves of the reasoning I’ve given here.

Oftentimes we can’t do anything, try as we might.

When we witness another human being suffering, or worse, being directly harmed by the wrongful actions of another, we tend to respond in two different ways. The first response is to empathise: in witnessing the suffering of another person, we feel a sense of uneasiness, sorrow, or anger. The second response is to "fix": we seek to identify the causal source of the problem and rectify it, thereby ending the suffering.

However, our ability to do so is challenged by the scale of today's tragedies. We witness them from afar, are unable to influence the relevant decision makers, cannot access enough information to identify the cause of the problem or who is responsible, or – even if none of these applies – cannot stop harms that have already happened. Tragedies shatter the illusion of control. We are frequently and frustratingly feel powerless to enact any real change.

For many religious believers, this powerlessness never appears. Prayer claims to be a means of simultaneously feeling and fixing as one asks for help from a power that is not bound by causal or physical laws. As we grow increasingly sceptical of religion, however, many will raise their eyebrows at prayer, but we have developed a modern equivalent. Social media presents itself as a means of reaching those in power, expressing outrage, effecting change, and presenting oneself in solidarity with those who are suffering. Sounds a lot like what prayer claims to be.

Also like prayer, lots of people do it disingenuously, or for the sake of appearances. Evgeny Morozov has elegantly highlighted the phenomenon he calls slacktivism: “feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact”.

Maybe slacktivism is just laziness, or maybe it’s for appearances. Or maybe it, like prayer, tears, or a quiet moment of reflection is just an attempt to deal with the fact that evil exists in this world, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.