Rather Suspect

What is required to live with a large group of strangers?

We crave excitement, the promise of the new. But in order to find that among other humans, we must place ourselves amongst those we don’t know. Sometimes that means we move to big cities, filled with opportunity but also traffic, crowds, expense. And over time, we train ourselves to interact with each other in an entirely new way.

One part of this training involves becoming more human, extending a smile to a stranger. But one part involves the opposite of this, the staring blankly into space on the subway so as to not attract unwanted attention.

What should we call this approach, this way of being? For lack of a better word I’ll call it “anti-empathy” — the conscious avoiding of connection with another human. It sounds cold, villainous even — but I don’t think it’s either. Our brains are simply not wired to take in too many humans in a given day.

The philosopher Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do makes the case that we cannot ignore others’ suffering simply because they are distant. To illustrate, Singer uses a thought experiment involving a drowning child. If you walked by a three-year-old in a lake who was calling for help, would you save them? No doubt you would. Now, what if that child were fifty yards away? A hundred? At what physical distance does your moral obligation end?

Singer’s point is simply: if we know there is suffering in the world but we don’t see it in our immediate vicinity, that does not make it moral to ignore that suffering. His claim, in fact, is that it is immoral for any of us to not continually work to alleviate that suffering of as many people as we can, no matter where in the world they reside.

I’d like to add an additional dimension to Singer’s thought experiment, not to counter his approach, but to explore an additional question, one I think maps to an emotional feeling that many of us encounter in the modern world.

Imagine that you came around the bend in the woods and you didn’t encounter a single child drowning in a lake — you encountered hundreds. What should you do in that situation?

At first, you might rush out to rescue one child and bring her to shore. Then, you run back into the water to rescue another. And then another. But then what?

Then, of course — you create a system. You yell for help. You attract others to your cause. Together, you organize. Who are the strongest swimmers? Who can construct a raft, perhaps out of some logs on the shore? How can we approach this problem so that we are working to save as many children as possible as quickly as possible?

We do this all the time in our society of course. We launch non-profits, start government programs, deploy NGOs. We raise money to buy equipment and staff rescue missions. If thousands of children are drowning it is, of course, more effective to save as many children as possible in a way that scales — not one at a time.

No doubt Singer would approve of this approach, as through it we adhere to his “effective altruism” approach to morality — we work to do the most good we can do. But — as we scale our work, I would ask: at what point has our focus fundamentally shifted? At what point does the bulk of our emotional energy turn from saving the child to building the machine?

When faced with large problems, humans are naturally tuned to create tools to solve problems that are just too big to solve one-on-one. We design machines — whether organizational structures or technological advances — to do what we previously did with our own hands. But at what point, exactly, does our focus — our passion, our heart, the core thing that drives us — transform from our “humanity” to our “machinery?”

Because that shift must happen. In order to save thousands of children drowning in the lake, there is no other way to do it. But there is a subtle Faustian bargain that occurs along the way. We don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to keep an eye on each child and still do the best job we can at raising the money, leading the organization, buying the life preservers, outfitting the boats. And when we make that shift — from serving an individual human to constructing a machine to serve as many humans as we can — we transform. We make a trade. In exchange for gaining the power of systems, of scale — we give up our humanity, our empathy. Not out of coldness, or malice — but simply because our brains can only process so much information at a time.

So we trade — intentionally — that empathy for mechanical and technological achievement. We replace love with ambition, care with progress, connection with success. We measure Key Performance Indicators, track to objectives, celebrate the fact that “poverty levels” have dropped worldwide — without actually having to encounter anyone in poverty. We save thousands of children from shore, directing an armada of ships.

Just to reiterate: this is not a judgement. Quite the opposite, it’s simply an exploration of the question: is it inevitable that we must give up our humanity (at least in part) in order to scale? Should any of us find ourselves under a surgeon’s knife, don’t we want that surgeon to treat us cooly, rationally, perhaps almost mechanistically? Don’t we want her hand to be trained by formal systems and rational practices developed over time through rigorous, thoughtful university and healthcare systems? No doubt we do.

So that is not the question. The question instead might be: is it even possible for that surgeon to maintain her personal connection to each of her patients without becoming overwhelmed?

Or, to return to the example of our crowded city: is it even possible, for any of us, to stop each time we encounter someone on the street and help them? Or — in order to help more people, to do the most good we can do — must we trade-in our emotional system, the one that empathizes with a fellow human in pain? Must we put that empathy upon a shelf, to return to it later — so that, right now, we can take off the shelf the cold, rational tools we need to do the job properly?

In order to connect with one fellow human, we dive deeply into our humanity. But to connect with all of our fellow humans, we must connect with our machinery.

We must become emotional cyborgs.