Scattered thoughts on empathy, responsibility and living abroad.

Earlier today on a crowded street in the mid-afternoon a small Filipino child, he can’t have been older than twelve, shoved his hand in my pocket in and grabbed my phone. Fortunately for me I noticed and managed to hold on to it, and told him to fuck off with as much anger as I could muster. Nothing has given me as much of a sense of combined irrational fear, anger and guilty self-hatred. I’m one of the richest and most privileged people in the world, and he was likely among the least. What sort of monster would I be to blame him?

Say what you like about the Chinese government (well, at least if you are on the right side of the Great firewall) but I’ve never experienced anything like that in  my last few months of living in China, even in the poorest cities. Due to  a combination of the One Child Policy and aggressive controls on  internal migration you never see children on the streets, and adult beggars are also rare. Of course that isn’t anywhere near the whole story, outside the cities there is rural poverty that would shame anywhere in the third world, with children scraping a living on farms. But the Government has made sure that there are nice safe walled enclaves for the middle class and us expats.

Chinese people are often accused of being cold and unfriendly, though I think that impression is more due to different norms about body language and manners than anything. But there is definitely an element to living in any large city, and even the smallest in China are large by Western standards, of having to train yourself to filter out other people their lives, or else be overwhelmed by a continuous barrage of emotion. It’s worryingly easy to train out your empathy

The Philippines is on the surface much friendlier, everyone you pass will say hello and wish you a good day in English. But they’ll be persistent to the point of harassment in getting you to buy whatever they’re selling, whether it’s the ubiquitous tricycles and taxis, or massages and illicit pharmaceuticals. My ingrained British politeness is at war with the necessity of repelling people in order to reach the other end of the street.

The Western middle class prides ourselves on our empathy. The mark of a good person is giving generously, helping friends, and treating everyone you encounter as equals. With caveats. Its easy to be kind and generous with other people of a roughly similar economic class, you give to your friends and others of your tribe with the implicit knowledge they will return the favour. And on a global scale even the poorest person in Britain is not that far away from you.  But how does this vaunted empathy deal with people so much poorer they could never give anything in return? When your slightest whim can mean a massive difference to their lives. And, worst of all, there are so so many of them that if you were to try and feel their suffering it would overwhelm you.

Faced with that, isn’t it so very tempting to wall them off in your mind, decide that they’re not your responsibility, or they’re not really people in the same way as nice middle class British people. If your lucky they’ll make it easier by looking or sounding different from you, making it easy for you to determine whether you have to empathise with them, with no niggling reminders of people you care about.

I haven’t fallen quite that far, but the temptation is always there.

A quick photo I took here, yes to pretty waitresses, no to firearms in the restaurant. 

When I was 17 I visited Malawi, a poor central African country, with a group from my School. Part of the implicit aim of this was to expose us privileged private school boys to what poverty was like and wat it was like to be a visible minority in another country. It’s cliché to say that a trip abroad changed your life, but this probably did.

Among other things this instilled in me a sense of overwhelming responsibility. People would continuously ask us for money of course. But even worse than that, Malawi like many countries has a system where glass bottles, for coke or Fanta or whatever, are returned for a deposit. Except here that sum was as much as a day’s work for a farmer. So our trash was another’s livelihood. Some of us thought we were doing good by giving them to kids. I was terrified of the randomness of it, how could we ever know who to give to, or know the impact of our actions. So I kept my distance.

The year before us the teachers of the group had given a local teenager some money to pay for schooling, only for him to be beaten and robbed for it in minutes. That’s a particularly shocking example, but there’s a thousand examples of the arbitrariness of western giving resulting in more subtle problems of perverse incentives, imbalances and so on.  How on earth can a pampered western child know how to make those choices? What sort of mad world is it that magnifies the effects of our actions to such an absurd degree?

Of course that terrifying responsibility always exists, not just when you happen to be near enough to the poor people you can affect that you notice the consequences of your actions, or the suffering you fail to prevent. Like the Chinese government keeping the poor away from the pretty western style streets of Beijing, we in the west have built our own comfortable walled cities where we don’t have to see the suffering of the poor.  

Looking at the upper middle class private school kids I grew up with, it seems that the response to privilege is either a sense of entitlement, of believing you deserve everything you got, or a sense of near pathological responsibility, a need to do good to justify all that you have. On the global scale all of us in the west are the entitled posh kids, who by accident of birth have incredible power and privilege.

Back to empathy. Given we can never really know the consequences of our actions when we are in a situation of such ridiculous power and minimal knowledge perhaps its best to separate out our empathy from the actual act of doing good.

I maintain a consistent policy of not giving to people I see in real life, no matter how much my heartstrings are pulled. But I also give a tenth of my income to effective charities like the Against Malaria Foundation (via Givewell), on the basis that they have been assessed as one of the most cost-effective charities in the world at saving lives.

An impersonal donation doesn’t have the same emotional resonance as helping a person in need face to face, but I think that I would rather be as certain as possible that I’m doing good than do just what makes me immediately happy.

This may seem like a slightly soulless way of thinking, treating human lives on a mass scale not as individuals. But I’m not sure what else we can realistically do given the scale and complexities of the world, the alternative is normally that people draw up mental barriers about who they should care about. And I cannot let myself do that.

So that puts me in credit on the utilitarian scales, but I’m still a human being and want to still treat the people I deal with face to face well. That’s harder, the best I can do is just remind myself that everyone has their own inner life as a ward against the temptation to narrow the field.

I suspect having a pathological sense of responsibility is part of my character, it affects the way I deal with people in general and probably ties into the mental health stuff I've written about before. As such I'll never be wholly comfortable being a wealthy person encountering visible poverty. But I think I can live with that provided I can contain it enough that I'm not overwhelmed. On a day to day basis tht means trying not to be a pushover, being kind not beig taken advantage of. Setting an arbitrary level of donation of at 10% of income at which I am doing good but not overwhelming myself helps.

There isn't an easy line to draw between not being overwhelmed with moral responsibility, and still being the sort of person I want to be, someone who does good as much as he can and still feels empathy for others as individuals. Its a bit of a messy compromise but, thats life.




This was originally just going to be about observations of the Philippines and China, but triggered some self reflection so evolved a bit. Please caveat all my comments about other countries with the obvious silliness of making generalisations about large groups of people, and the distorted perspective I have as a foreigner visiting.