Cultivated detachment in rescue, medical, and social workers can actually help the victims of disaster. Ekman told me about his daughter, a social worker at a large city hospital. In her situation, he said, she can’t afford to let emotional empathy overwhelm her. “My daughter’s clients don’t want her to cry when they’re crying,” he says.
The danger arises when detachment leads to indifference, rather than to well-calibrated caring. Today, we face this problem on a global level. “One of the problems of living in a television society is that every bit of suffering and misery that occurs anywhere in the world is shown to us,” says Ekman—and generally, we can’t do anything about it, at least not directly.
This can make emotional empathy seem futile and hinder the growth of the third kind of empathy, which Ekman calls “compassionate empathy.” With this kind of empathy, we not only understand a person’s predicament and feel with them, but are spontaneously moved to help, if needed.
Compassionate empathy was the vital ingredient missing from the top-level response to Hurricane Katrina—and in responses to many other disasters around the world, including the slow-burning disaster of global warming. Ekman calls compassionate empathy a skill, the acquired knowledge “that we’re all connected.”
This can lead to outbursts of what he calls “constructive anger.” In other words, reacting negatively to injustice or suffering can motivate us to work with others to make the world a better place. Just as empathy has its downsides, negative emotions like anger can have upsides. Staying cool in a crisis might bring some benefits. But sometimes we must let ourselves get hot in order to help.
PART THREE: HOW TO CULTIVATE GOODNESS IN SOCIETY AND POLITICS
INTRODUCTION
Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith
CULTIVATING GOODNESS in ourselves is not just an end in itself; it is also a pathway to cultivating goodness in society at large. In fact, the main mission of Greater Good magazine is to show how the great potential for human goodness extends outward from the individual psyche to the larger society.
As research reveals, the ability to act on behalf of the greater good can not only improve our personal health and our relationships with other others—it can practically or symbolically promote peace in our society and between cultures. As Robert Reich, Steven Pinker, Dacher Keltner, Jan Egeland, and others argue in the following essays, empathy, compassion, generosity, and heroism are not luxuries, “discarded in disaster as one might shed a gold bar while trying to escape a sinking ship” (to quote sociologist Lee Clarke in an essay he wrote for the Summer 2008 issue of Greater Good). They are intrinsic to human nature and essential to our survival as a species.
Reading these essays cannot guarantee that you’ll spring to action the next time you see a pedestrian collapse on the sidewalk or that you will immediately seek solutions to global warming. The inhibitions to action can be overwhelming, and are sometimes justified.
But these essays provide scientific insight into why we so readily, and at times unconsciously, assume the role of the bystander. In the process, they help to displace the shame and confusion we sometimes feel when we don’t demonstrate the courage of our convictions.
Just as it takes practice to cultivate some of the other behaviors and emotions we’ve examined in this book—forgiveness, compassion, empathy—we may have to work to overcome our tendency to sit on the sidelines. But as Zeno Franco and Philip Zimbardo argue in their essay, our capacity for heroism is as natural to us as our inclinations toward apathy; nurturing heroism requires education, inspiration, and opportunities for reflection.
Of course, no cure exists for all the problems that plague this planet, just as there’s no easy fix for a damaged relationship. But the science and stories featured in this book convey that we can always take steps in the right direction. They show us again and again how true political and social progress often stems from changes we can all learn to make in the way we relate to ourselves and others.
WE ARE ALL BYSTANDERS
Dacher Keltner and Jason Marsh
FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, Peggy Kirihara has felt guilty about Stewart.
Peggy liked Stewart. They went to high school together. Their fathers were friends, both farmers in California’s Central Valley, and Peggy would always say hi when she passed Stewart in the hall.
Yet every day when Stewart boarded their school bus, a couple of boys would tease him mercilessly. And every day, Peggy would just sit in her seat, silent.
“I was dying inside for him,” she says. “There were enough of us on the bus who were feeling awful. We could have done something. But none of us said anything.”
Peggy still can’t explain why she didn’t stick up for Stewart. She had known his tormenters since they were all little kids, and she didn’t find them threatening. She thinks if she had spoken up on his behalf, other kids might have chimed in to make the teasing stop.
But perhaps most surprising and distressing to Peggy is that she considers herself an assertive and moral person, yet those convictions weren’t backed up by her conduct on the bus.
“I think I would say something now, but I don’t know for sure,” she says. “Maybe if I saw someone being beaten up and killed, I’d just stand there. That still worries me.”
Many of us share Peggy’s concern. We’ve all found ourselves in similar situations: the times we’ve seen someone harassed on the street and didn’t intervene; when we’ve driven past a car stranded by the side of the road, assuming another driver would pull over to help; even when we’ve noticed litter on the sidewalk and left it for someone else to pick up. We witness a problem, consider some kind of positive action, then respond by doing…nothing. Something holds us back. We remain bystanders.
Why don’t we help in these situations? Why do we sometimes put our moral instincts in shackles? These are questions that haunt all of us, and they apply well beyond the fleeting scenarios described above. Every day we serve as bystanders to the world around us—not just to people in need on the street but to larger social, political, and environmental problems that concern us, but which we feel powerless to address on our own. Indeed, the bystander phenomenon pervades the history of the past century.
“The bystander is a modern archetype, from the Holocaust to the genocide in Rwanda to the current environmental crisis,” says Charles Garfield, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine who is writing a book about the psychological differences between bystanders and people who display moral courage.