When We No Longer "Give a Sh_t"

Covid-19 statistics become a blur. Millions infected, hundreds of thousands dead. Slowly what once alarmed us no longer matters as much.

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." These are the words of a woman whose acts of charity and kindness earned her sainthood – Mother Teresa. 

They exemplify one of the most baffling aspects of the human response to the plight of others. While most of us will see a single death as a tragedy, we can struggle to have the same response to large-scale loss of life. Too often, the deaths of many simply become a statistic.

Even now we can see the same strange process happening as the worldwide death toll due to coronavirus rises. The number of lives claimed by the virus has already exceeded 400,000 and more than seven million cases have been recorded in 200 countries. Each death is a tragedy played out on an individual level, with a family left shocked and bereaved. But as we zoom out, can anyone really wrap their head around such large numbers?

This brings to mind Ernie Pyle, America's most beloved war correspondent in WWII. A Japanese bullet killed Pyle just as the war was wrapping up. In a pocket he had folded what was intended to be his last column on the war. This is what he wrote.

"But there are many of the living who have burned
into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men
scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows
of hedge throughout the world.

Dead men by mass production - in one country after another -
month after month and year after year. Dead men in
winter and dead men in summer.

Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they
become monotonous.

Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come to
almost hate them. 

These are the things that you at home need
not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns
of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just
didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque
and pasty beside the gravel road in France. 

We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands.

That's the difference.

And then Ernie Pyle became one of the "monstrous infinity."

Aren't we falling back into this "pit of callous indifference"?

In the US, which reached a grim milestone of 100,000 deaths last month, journalists have reached for ways to help people understand the devastation. The figure is “twice the number of Americans lost during the entire Vietnam War”, and “exceeds the number of US military combat fatalities in every conflict since the Korean War”.

But our inability to comprehend the suffering that such numbers entail can harm the way we respond to such tragedies. Even now, there is evidence that people are suffering from coronavirus news fatigue and reading less about the pandemic. 

This might be due, in part, to a psychological phenomenon known as psychic numbing, the idea that “the more people die, the less we care”. 

“The fast, intuitive gut feeling is miraculous in many ways, but it has some flaws,” says Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who has been studying psychic numbing for decades. “One is that it doesn’t deal with numbers in magnitude very well. If we’re talking about lives, one life is tremendously important and valuable and we’ll do anything to protect that life, save that life, rescue that person. But as the numbers increase, our feelings don’t commensurately increase as well.”

As compassion fades, it exacts a toll - in lives.

Slovic’s research suggests that as statistical numbers associated with a tragedy get larger and larger, we become desensitised and have less of an emotional response to them. This in turn leaves us less likely to take the kind of action needed to stop genocides, send aid after natural disasters or pass legislation to fight global warming. In the case of the pandemic, it may be leading to a kind of apathy that is making people complacent about hand washing or wearing a mask – both of which have been shown to reduce transmission of the virus. (Read more about why people are ignoring social distancing rules.) 

...

“If you see one child, you can focus on the child,” he says. “You can think about who they are and how they are like your own child. You can concentrate more deeply on one person than two. [With two] your attention starts to lessen and so do your feelings. And our feelings are what drive our behaviour.” 

Slovic’s research has also found that the positive feelings associated with donating to one child, or “warm glow”, was reduced when people were reminded about the children they weren’t able to help, a phenomenon he and his colleagues call “pseudo inefficiency”.

Here's the deal. A good many scientists think mankind isn't getting out of this 21st century with a population of more than a couple of billion. We're closing in on 8 billion at the moment. That means that we're going to have to shed two out of three - or more - to bring our species back into some sort of balance with what will be a greatly degraded biosphere, planet Earth.  What can that do but bring back the very worst form of tribalism that posits one group against all others?

What happens if caring and compassion become a burden we cannot bear?