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. 

Some uninformed commentary on the UK general election debate specifically Nicola Sturgeon's performance

I'll confess now I haven't watched the whole thing because a) its long and dull b) Youtube is verboten in China, and watching video through a VPN is a pain in the ass. But here's some semi-informed commentary anyway. 

For the most part the debate wasn't that interesting, soundbites were exchanged and afterwards everyone agreed that [their side] was absolutely excellent, persuasive and prime ministerial and [the other side] were lame, out of touch and irrelevant [and Farage is an asshole].

The most interesting part was the general agreement that Nicola Sturgeon came out ahead, leading English tweeters to lament that they didn't have a chance to vote for her. 

So let me share a few thoughts on why that might be the case and the consequences: 

As Scotland has historically been more left wing/liberal intellectual than England it shouldn't actually be that surprising that a politician who is appealing to that electorate would resonate with urban liberals. [If you read politics blogs, tweeted about the debate, etc this probably includes you. Its a position that's probably over-represented online and in the press. So its easy to forget large amounts of the population are anti-immigration, pro-death penalty etc.]

Whereas the Westminster parties have to appeal to stereotypical little Englanders if they want any chance of success. Labour at least has never been totally comfortable with this (see Brown's attempt to sell "British jobs for British workers" with all the enthusiasm of a man self administering surgery). But that doesn't mean it is any less necessary to win, the electoral math leans that way whether we like it or not. This also means they can't do cathartic things like call Farage a racist asshole, since they need to court some of his voters who probably believe the same things. 

This confirms the SNP's shift to the left. 

Not too long ago the SNP could be fairly described as loose coalition of people with little in common other than Scottish nationalism, (including everyone from people who would be Tories were it not for the toxic legacy of Thatcher , old Labour union hacks to ideologically apathetic pro-business technocrats). Now the SNP under Sturgeon is unambiguously a party of the populist Left.

As a left leaning Scot who felt nothing but annoyance and bafflement at Scottish nationalism I'm vaguely in favour of this, but it will be interesting to see the effects on day to day government. One of the reasons of the success of the early SNP years was that, lacking a strong ideology about the shape of the state, they did a lot of sensible pragmatic things, listened to civil servants, followed public opinion and generally didn't fiddle too much. Contrast this to the several thousand reorganisations the NHS in England has gone through in recent years.          

Was this an audition for coalition government? 

The vast majority of people watching the debate can't vote for Sturgeon's party, so why should she bother appealing to them? In the (inevitable) event of a hung parliament the SNP will be obvious kingmakers. Knowing this the conservative press office and their friends in the press have been banging on about how in a potential Labour-SNP coalition Milliband would be in the SNPs pocket (complete with terrible photoshop) and that this would spell doom for English voters (presumably the nationalists will send all your hard earned tax money to my Brethren in the northern tribes, or force you all to deep fry your dinners). 

Truly the pinnacle of
political discourse

That's a much harder message to sell now when Sturgeon has been massively exposed to a national public and received a positive response, making the prospect of a coalition with them more palatable, and hell it perhaps even a selling point in Millibands otherwise dry package. 

[I wonder if Cameron is regretting the single 7 person debate? Having multiple debates, only one of which would have included her, would have split voters interest. Though they probably figure the risk of a Milli-Bounce was worse.]

A slight note of criticism, its probably easier to sell your package when you don't have to answer some of  the more awkward questions. 

The SNP are under less pressure to talk about the national deficit, since its not ever going to be their problem or responsibility. As such they can say popular things about ending austerity, increasing welfare, etc. without the awkward questions on the costs the other parties have to contend with. (They still need some answers for those questions, but its not the make or break issue it is for Labour).