Austin:
Must we have an extreme environment or problem to get an extreme reaction or love for people? With this asked, what is the extent of what we could do if we can get these extreme reactions with out the extreme environments?
Morgan:
Tough questions... I'm a little foggy with all the cold medicines I'm on, but I'll try to make my thoughts coherent...
To answer your second question, the possibilities would be limitless. The number of ordinary environments encompassing our daily lives greatly outnumber the extreme... if we could use ordinary settings to generate the maximum effect, we'd be successfully utilizing the majority of our lives and there would be no limit to what we could do. We could use the most mundane moments of our lives to create tidal waves of love and passion for humanity, and we could accomplish so much through that.
What we should seriously consider here is the effect of desensitization. People constantly hear about extremely bad crises in the media, word of mouth, what have you. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, genocides... it's all there, and we hear about it day to day. The thousands of people dying don't seem like people anymore; they become numbers. Statistics. No souls, no hearts, no minds - just numbers. We hear about the extremes, and eventually they become the norm. Nothing appalls us anymore. The crises have to become more shocking, more bloody, more inhumane, in order to stir any sense of injustice in us; thus, the need for extreme environments in order to get the extreme reactions, which is what you are addressing.
With desensitization in mind, I think it's imperative that we work on changing the attitude and heart of society. If we can somehow make people appreciate every quirk, every thought, every laugh line on the face of another, then we won't need extreme environments to make people feel compassion. They will see each human being as a wonderfully intricate, one-of-a-kind piece of pure art. They'll know compassion already, because they'll value each individual life with fervor.
To answer your second question, the possibilities would be limitless. The number of ordinary environments encompassing our daily lives greatly outnumber the extreme... if we could use ordinary settings to generate the maximum effect, we'd be successfully utilizing the majority of our lives and there would be no limit to what we could do. We could use the most mundane moments of our lives to create tidal waves of love and passion for humanity, and we could accomplish so much through that.
What we should seriously consider here is the effect of desensitization. People constantly hear about extremely bad crises in the media, word of mouth, what have you. Terrorist attacks, natural disasters, genocides... it's all there, and we hear about it day to day. The thousands of people dying don't seem like people anymore; they become numbers. Statistics. No souls, no hearts, no minds - just numbers. We hear about the extremes, and eventually they become the norm. Nothing appalls us anymore. The crises have to become more shocking, more bloody, more inhumane, in order to stir any sense of injustice in us; thus, the need for extreme environments in order to get the extreme reactions, which is what you are addressing.
With desensitization in mind, I think it's imperative that we work on changing the attitude and heart of society. If we can somehow make people appreciate every quirk, every thought, every laugh line on the face of another, then we won't need extreme environments to make people feel compassion. They will see each human being as a wonderfully intricate, one-of-a-kind piece of pure art. They'll know compassion already, because they'll value each individual life with fervor.
My question (and it's basically a layman's paraphrase of what you're asking) is:
How do we break past the desensitization to make people see the value of human life on a moment by moment basis, eliminating the need for an extreme environment to generate extreme love and compassion?
How do we break past the desensitization to make people see the value of human life on a moment by moment basis, eliminating the need for an extreme environment to generate extreme love and compassion?
2 comments:
Great dialogue and topic, as ever, on your site. The exchange immediately brought to mind a memorable insight from journalist turned historian Barbara Tuchman:
"The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to ten-fold. Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts.
"The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena."
Or, put another way, more existentially, by Sister Barbara Hance: "Show me a day when the world wasn't new."
Thanks again for your wonderful blog.
Jeff Brazil
DMLcentral.net
i love this.. "The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place."
gosh - "show me a day when the world wasn't new."
if we just paid attention to that.. how different the world would be..
thanks Jeff.. (if you don't mind - i may add your comments to the kids post on new school.)
Post a Comment