The Internet is Killing a Fundamental Human Skill: Empathy
I lived in India for a year when I was 23, working for a large software company in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.
At one point I had an electrical problem in my apartment, so I asked an electrician to come check it out.
– I’ll come tomorrow. He said.
The next day I stayed home from work to wait for him, but he never showed up.
I went after him and he explained that he got busy. “Tomorrow I come,” he told me.
I stayed home again and again he didn’t come. I confronted him and he explained that tomorrow he’d definitely come over.
The next day I figured (rightly) he wouldn’t show up so I went after him right away. He was just sitting there, doing nothing.
– Dude, what the hell. You said you’d come tomorrow. Today is tomorrow!
He looked at me and taught me a life lesson he knew I’d not forget:
“My friend. In India, tomorrow means only not today.”
This was one of the many cultural differences that aggravated me almost every day of my life in India: “Indians don’t queue right, they don’t drive right, they haggle for everything!”
The problem was that I was expecting every person on Earth to think like me. I thought all humans shared the same basic values.
So naturally, if they were not behaving in the I way I was expecting them to, it was because they’re shitty, unorganised people.
That is obviously not true. And expecting this to be true is a recipe for heartache, especially if you’re a Westerner living in a place like India.
The Bhagavad Gita
I came to realise this when I was reading more about India and came across Gandhi’s autobiography.
I was impressed by how bright he was, so when I learned that his favourite book was the Bhagavad Gita – he read it every day – I was curious to learn more about it.
We can loosely compare the Bhagavad Gita with the Bible. Both work as a disseminator of ideas that deeply influenced the way their societies think.
The Bhagavad Gita is a small part of a larger book about a family divided by the dispute for the throne of a mythological kingdom.
The story of the Gita takes place in the field of battle, just before the fight breaks up. It depicts the mental struggles of a character called Arjuna, who’s facing an internal dilemma:
Should he go ahead with this war and proceed to kill his own relatives over the throne? Or should he drop his weapons and turn away from the fight?
He asks God what he should do. God answers: “Go kill them, you coward!”*
God answers: “Go kill them, you coward!”
I was shocked when I read that. No Western God would ever say such a thing.
The Gita is about dealing with things that are outside of your control. It’s about carrying on with your duty even when everything around you seems to be falling apart. It’s a wise and insightful message.
Understanding this and other aspects of Indian philosophy helped me have a clearer comprehension of why people in India behave the way they do.
It made me love and incorporate aspects of their culture into my own way of thinking, reshaping the way I behave and approach life in meaningful ways.
The underrated skill of taking someone else’s perspective
I think nearly all humans would agree that taking someone else’s perspective is a skill that can be beneficial in life. Especially if these perspectives seem to be completely different from our own.
In the 16th century, with the discovery of the Americas by the Spanish and Portuguese, the fascination with these new cultures was so intense that books detailing how the indigenous from the Americas lived became overnight best-sellers all over Europe.
In 1550, the French went so far as to create some sort of Brazilian indigenous fair. Even king Henry II attended it. They invited (nicely, I hope) dozens of native Brazilians to come and show off their way of life for the French noble class to watch.
The curiosity about different ways of thinking has lead to remarkable knowledge exchanges between different cultures for centuries. It’s been a fundamental driver of human progress.
The fact that we’re losing this foundational characteristic of our species is a sad realisation. Especially when we look back at how hopeful we were about this when the internet came about.
The internet killing our ability to empathise
I still remember how good it felt ten years ago when I watched the then Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, give an optimistic TED talk on the future of the internet (the field I had recently chosen to work in).
“Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally.” — Gordon Brown, TEDGlobal 2009.
The internet had the power to fuel the world with empathy and cooperation in a scale never seen before. We finally had the means to solve the world’s biggest problems.
Forward to 2019 and the exact opposite has come true.
Lower attention spans and the sheer amount of information we’re exposed to every day makes it impossible for us to take a deep enough dive into different points of view.
The irony is that, because we now have access to a lot more information, the amount of different perspectives is so overwhelming that it causes us to shut them down.
When you move to a foreign country, you’re often positively impressed by the novelty of it all. After a while though, the novelty factor wears off and you’re left with a lot of frustration about how different things are from what you’re used to.
To get past this frustrating period you have to take the time to make a deeper connection with this new perspective.
But because the amount of information available online is so overwhelming, we often can’t even enjoy those initial positive feelings we get when we first learn about a different outlook online.
We go straight to the frustration part of the graph.
And because we don’t take the time to understand that point of view either, we never leave the bottom of that curve.
This helps to explain the divisive political climate that so many different countries are experiencing at the same time. It’s also why people with inflammatory discourses — who otherwise would be left on the sidelines — are now taking the center stage in politics and media.
How to fix it
We can counter this issue if we all realise that every culture and every idea has some fundamental truth underneath it. What emerges from this fundamental truth can be something completely wrong or misguided, like the words of a racist, for example. But the emotional experience behind it is true and real.
There’s an emotional experience behind every thought and behaviour that is true and real.
There’s no quick fix for our lack of empathy, I’m afraid. But the future of our civilisation relies on our ability to cooperate at a large scale. To accomplish this we need to be able to see other people’s point of view as valid and truthful, especially when we ultimately consider them to be wrong.
Disagreeing with an idea is OK. Demonising or completely brushing it off as stupid isn’t. Having the ability to empathise with different perspectives is more important than ever, especially when we can’t see eye to eye on fundamental things, such as the meaning of the world “tomorrow.”
Because I can understand where you coming from Mr. Indian Electrician man, but tomorrow means tomorrow, goddammit!
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*Of course this is a gross generalisation of what the book is about. It’s also not the actual quote. Moreover this is a poor use of the word “God”: Krishna is actually an avatar of Brahma, who can only in broad terms be called “God” in Hinduism.
