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Empathy Is Fickle, but Beneficial
by Martin Hoffman, New York University
 
(Originally published in New York Newsday on April 2, 2001)  

THE ANCIENT Buddha statues in Bamiyan Province, Afghanistan. carved from a cliff 1,500 years ago, were demolished last month by the ruling Taliban. Their leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, said they were idolatrous.

The demolition seemed to show an intolerance for others' beliefs, a willingness to destroy what others had built and a disdain for world opinion.

The act evoked widespread moral outrage.

Some commentators have been struck by the outcry against the Taliban's destruction of ancient art works. The Taliban have been responsible for horrible injustices against the Afghan people for years. Why should destruction of art capture the public's attention and imagination when the starvation and deaths of real people do not? Some wonder whether it reflects the fickle nature of human compassion and empathy, implying that we somehow feel more for the statues than for suffering people.

Research on empathy shows that, when innocent bystanders empathize with someone in distress, even strangers, the bystanders are motivated to help- although they may not always do so. Empathy is undoubtedly a good thing; it may be the glue that holds society together. But empathy has its limitations, and one is that it is fickle. That is, we readily empathize with victims who are present or at least at the center of our attention, while forgetting quickly others from whom we have more distance.

This here-and-now bias can explain our tendency to forget about victims who have long been out of the picture. It can explain our surprising tendency to empathize with people who have harmed others but are now, for some reason, the focus of attention as victims. Remember the 1997 trial of Louise Woodward, the young British nanny? When the 8-month-old child in her care died, there was widespread sympathy for his parents and condemnation of Woodward, who was charged with shaking the child to death.

With Woodward's trial and conviction, the empathic tide shifted. Due to her severe sentence, she became the focus of media attention as a victim and the object of widespread empathy and compassion. Regardless of her guilt or innocence, compassion for her replaced the compassion for the baby and his parents.

Remember the Vietnam boat people? The Oklahoma City bombing victims? With media help, there are always large groups of victims with whom to empathize.

These include the Afghan people: We have empathized with them. But, as with other groups, we forget, shift with the media and empathize anew with the next highlighted victim group. Current attention to the Oklahoma bombing case--centered on Timothy McVeigh's published memoirs--makes the point.

Empathy is like attention: Attention is necessary for learning, but if we attended to everything we would learn nothing. Likewise, empathy may be society's glue, but it is impossible to empathize with everyone. There are too many victims. Again, we must conclude that empathy is fickle.

With the Buddha statues, we empathized not as we would with inanimate objects, but as with victims, such as children, who couldn't fight back. More important, we empathized with what the statues symbolized-the thoughts, dreams and imagination of those people who designed, built and died in the course of creating the statues. And we empathized with those whose lives they gave meaning to, and those who were thrilled simply to look at the statues over the centuries. The Taliban destroyed an important part of all of them. We empathize with them as another victim group and we are angry with the Taliban on their behalf.

The demolition of the statues also brought our attention back to the Taliban's current victims, potentially intensifying our empathy and compassion for them by revealing the Taliban's disdain for world opinion-even for the few Islamic nations that recognize their rule and asked them to spare the statues.

But empathy is only part of our response to the demolition. Our egos, our identities are expanded and we feel larger by virtue of feeling connected to other peoples, natural phenomena (such as the Redwoods), cultures and cultural products surviving the ages.

Destroying them is destroying a part of us-a small part, true, but a part. We're diminished by it and we're angry. We're angry at the Taliban for taking from us what was not theirs to take: Cultural sites belong not to a nation nor its government, but to all humankind.

Finally, there is the shock of seeing monuments that took decades to build and lasted through the millennia destroyed in weeks. It's too vivid a reminder of the evanescence of life. We heard about the cruelties to individuals over a longer period, which gave us time to get used to them.

Not so with the statues.

If anything good has come from the destruction of the giant Buddhas, it's that it focused attention back on the hardships of Afghanistan for a while. I think, sadly, that we'll soon forget the statues. But we should not forget the Afghan people, as their victimization will surely continue.

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