“If you live in a graveyard, you can’t weep for everyone.“
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956.
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Yale professor of Psychology, Paul Bloom’s, words came to mind during one of last week’s morning coffee exchanges, that, “…empathy will have to yield to reason if humanity is to survive.”

It’s an unpopular sentiment among many who take the moral perspective that it’s every human’s ethical responsibility to care for every other human.

Leaving the US for Southeast Asia at the end of the nineties revealed a world that was at once revitalizing, and yet utterly incomprehensible.  Superficially, the hollowness of “productivity” in a big-corporate American sense had been replaced with the more laid-back, “whatever works” attitude of northern Thai, Lanna, culture. But temperament tends to follow like overweight baggage… simply consigned to a later flight.

That baggage would arrive along with a long-term visa as a graduate student in a local university engineering-physics program. And about a year later, it would result in a trip to Phnom Penh, dutifully testing an ambitious idea for the mass-production of a durable knee joint for prosthetic legs.

The project was a summary failure… mostly due to ignorance of the magnitude of what was being addressed. More than forty-thousand survivors of Cambodia’s decades of domestic and cross-border wars were in need of artificial limbs. Meanwhile, the numbers continued to grow as three in every hundred newly-hospitalized were due to landmines or unexploded munitions. Just two-months into a six-month stay, I threw in the towel.

Still, I wanted to do some “good” before returning to Thailand. So following a lead from the French-Canadian director of a food-relief program led to a connection with a Japanese organization seeking to house and to school at least a few of the hundreds of orphaned, abandoned and runaway children then living on Phnom Penh’s largest dump. Eighteen-years on, and I’m still involved with the boarding school’s operations. But this wasn’t the only program to entangle my aspirations in those earlier, more idealistic years.

Another project aimed at getting easily exploited kids off the streets, and a third addressed impending AIDS orphans. Both, however, turned out to be like that graduate project. The street kids had some distinctly different attitudes and dysfunctions when compared to their counterparts from the dump. Many had drug issues or AIDS or hepatitis, and few seemed to have much sense of future. Eventually, the program resigned itself to best serving as a safe, if temporary shelter for when those kids felt the need to come in from the wilderness for awhile.

The latter project merely tore my heart out as it inevitably descended into unsalvageable collapse. It was little more than a hopeless fight against a cultural disaster over which we had no control.  And even our best accomplishments still felt like bailing a sinking ship with a teacup.  But having empathetically attached myself to several individual narratives, it was as if being slowly drowned along with the victims of an insurmountably deeper pathology.

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We’re a fairly diverse, but civil bunch of AM coffee pundits. Though in deference to full disclosure, there’s only one died-in-the-wool Trump supporter in our little caffeine-powered think-tank, and no one who might qualify as an over-the-edge liberal. Yet no one came apart at the seams when I once announced that I agreed with Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding reparations to the descendants of America’s African slaves (if for different reasons than his own). I just don’t think it likely to result in much long-term benefit given the realities of current American social convention.

Likewise examining our latest crop of alleged political leadership, there’s a resolute silence regarding the practical aspects of creating a more compassionate, or at least considerate society. Instead, a nation’s empathies have become fair targets for a collection of moral dog-whistles, each calling its pack into some well-marked corner. Narratives have taken the place of objective reality, even in supposedly balanced forums.  Stories of grief and suffering, injustice, or of utopian alternatives merely appeal to the fallacy of quick and simple solutions for complex problems.

Maybe we’re just hardwired to see the world in this way, natural-selection favoring those who can both easily understand the suffering of others closest to themselves, and vilify a perceived source to that suffering.  We empathize with and endeavor to protect others of our tribes.  But the idea of “community” has vague and flexible boundaries, lines where individual narratives can create a convincing sense of commonality… or of distance.  Regardless, the point at which empathy becomes the sole call to action almost guarantees failure in attempts to address large and complex issues.

The paradox is that when our desires for social compassion are overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude or complexity of a problem, we turn instead to stories with which we can relate at an emotional level.  We see this frequently in political confrontation, such as that which has left America paralyzed within our own complex reality.  Health care, jobs and wages, foreign relations, immigration and border security… all are large and complex issues that will require well thought-out solutions.  And yet they are fundamentally addressed, both by politicians and by media, through narratives.

Irrespective of best intentions, however, the most compassionate solutions to big problems aren’t to be found in individual stories.  Sixty-five million displaced and stateless people worldwide can’t be addressed one person at a time.  Nor can any other great social issue.  Individual narratives deny the realities of larger-scale needs and deeper, causal pathologies, distracting from long-term, wide-ranging humanitarian solutions.  And as difficult as it can be to admit, sometimes there simply are no complete, ideal, or even acceptable solutions.

Quoting Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Compassion–like all resources–has limits.” Cambodia left me with a powerful sense of those limits, of what even our best intentions can accomplish. More than anything else,  approaching great problems also demands a great deal of rational conversation. Every successful, long-term and productive relief program I’ve ever witnessed, whether providing artificial limbs for war victims, or food and basic health care or schooling for impoverished children, has had its foundation set firmly in the realities of genuine need, available resource, and feasibility.

This is what Paul Bloom is saying.  He’s not proposing that there’s something ethically or morally wrong with empathy, only that it can’t be applied to compassionate action on the kinds of scales needed to address large issues.  The most effective of such acts are instead founded in, “…conscious, deliberative reasoning…” Empathy, he argues, is appropriate only to the understanding of a single narrative. But this is a fatally flawed perspective from which to accurately assess broader needs as well as realistic possibilities.

To this day, I still grieve for those children who watched their last remaining parent wither before a force of nature they couldn’t comprehend. Nothing could have prepared me for those narratives…  a mere handful of more than ten-thousand that year alone.  It locked the last of my energies into a futile desperation to find some means with which to alter reality.  And that’s not a good way to express compassion — whether emotionally, or productively.

Images-
1: One of the first children transferred from the Steung Meanchey dump in 2002. Presently in her late twenties, she now holds an advanced degree in a science.
2: A group of boarding students at “CCH” in 2006, most from the dump.  Between CCH and another facility, the dump was eventually emptied of nearly all of its child population.
3: Kids at an open-air school near Siem Reap in Cambodia in 2006.
4: An impending AIDS orphan near Siem Reap, 2009.