A man just came through the lobby in the hotel where we are staying near Detroit, where I am writing this blog in the early morning, having access to the internet. I liked him. That is, I felt a positive response to him, more positive than to the night clerk or the flight crews rolling their suitcases by or the kitchen staff next to me or even the three women who had been sitting at the end of the counter where I am typing now.
Why did this particular man draw a positive response from me? As we look together in this blog at why we help, and why we don’t, please take 12 minutes to watch this engaging video and then I’ll tell you about this woman, and how I’ve processed my preference.
Jeremy Rifkin says that we are “soft-wired for empathic distress”, that we feel others’ pain. But he says that we have created certain “associations”, societies to which we belong, within which we communicate, relate, and within which we empathize. It started, he says, with tribe. Those outside the tribe were alien, which literally means other. The aliens were, tribally speaking, competitive with us, competing for food in hunting-gathering survival needs. Rifkin postulates that as communication stretched beyond shouting distance of the tribe, writing and reading distance stretched us beyond tribal affiliation to religious association, national identification, and so on. He suggests that our built-in empathy is focused within these associations. We feel the pain and joy and excitement and dread of those who are like us, and not those who are alien.
I have been struggling with my own empathy and apathy, feeling and non-feeling, since Bill candidly shared his own lack of joy (no endorphins, baby!) sometimes when he helped. I had been gathering momentum in my morning writing, feeling more and more comfortable with the idea that we help because it feels good, that if we pay attention while we’re helping that the good feeling that we find will keep us going, keep us helping, that we won’t burn out or give up.
The man who came through the lobby was part of the tribe with which I like to identify myself, or perhaps the religion. He was on his way to the gym. And as I type that truth, I realize my filters, how I have not seen the others in the lobby, not paid attention to them as I did to that man. Oh, I’ve seen them, but I have not considered them, not thought of them. Rifkin presented this video to a group of people who try to motivate people beyond tribe, religion, and nation to support their causes, to donate to their nonprofit organizations.
Yesterday our family came together in the pool at this hotel to unwind after two long hard days wrapped up in the wake and funeral for our nephew. We came from the oppressive heat of the day to the cool water, and I watched with Kathy as our kids and grandkids and a few other members of the family added and added and added to the joy and relief by jumping in and splashing and chasing and hooting and laughing and on and on and on for probably half an hour. Their mirror neurons were flashing. They were wrapped up in each other, an amoeba, a Gordian Knot of interwoven psyches, entwined feelings. “We-are-fam-i-ly…my brothers and my sisters and me” one of our daughters came bopping by, singing the song that came to her mind.
What started this series of blog postings on empathy and response, “Consider Yourself Hugged” was a series of comments that looked hard at the idea of embrace as a “right” response as I had suggested, and that in turn led me to invite consideration of the Story of the Good Samaritan.
The story suggests, like Rifkin's hoped-for strategy, that everyone is a member of our tribe, our family, that our mirror neurons should fire equally for aliens.
I have a long way to go. I’ll reflect on that in the gym.
FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Not related to today's blog: I just watched movie "The Soloist," and it seemed to fit in with your thoughts of recent days. I have had feelings that things I'm doing are "not helping" homeless with whom I'm associated, and message of the movie came through strongly to me. We cannot "help" or "change" folks. All we can do is be there as friend. We don't "feel good" when we realize that we are not "accomplishing anything," and that tends to slow us down. If we change our perspective, our goals, and function within "their expectations," set our sights on their level, then maybe we can be fed enough to keep at it. And maybe that can be good for them, too.
ReplyDeletePat, thanks for this. So right. So wise.
ReplyDeletejohn