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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