How Compassion Made Us Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Tenderness, Trust and Morality by Penelope Ann Spikins

Author:Penelope Ann Spikins [Spikins, Penelope Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, HISTORY / Ancient / General, Ancient, General, history, Archaeology
ISBN: 9781473860179
Google: elzdCQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2015-05-07T23:52:38.267746+00:00

A lack of a sense of caring for things, people and the world around us can be a dangerous thing. Yet we find a certain insensitivity creeping up on us from the way we live our lives, until all that matters is the next deadline, what we need to buy or what we should achieve. We can wonder when the last time was that we were aware how others felt, had a warm feeling in our hearts or had time to care about suffering or our environment around us. Charlton comments: ‘For most people, even a single day of unalloyed well-being is a rare event. Some unfortunate people probably never experience even a day of well-being, at best managing a few minutes as a kind of glimmering of what is possible.’240

Was the past different? Were people more sensitive, better able to feel? The values of industrialised society teach us that we are the pinnacle of humanity, so much better than what has gone before. We may well be surrounded by even more products of human ingenuity, remarkable inventions, vast stores of knowledge, but I’m still not sure that we should be quite so confident.

Sometimes our societies even create a sense of emotional dissociation deliberately when we want people to switch off from the feelings of others.

In order to make it possible for men to kill for example, military training often depersonalises and dehumanises recruits, numbing their normal emotional responses.

It is normal to find it hard, if not impossible, to kill others. Without such a natural restraint, our modern worlds would hardly be possible. Like Dart, many military commanders in both the First and Second World War mistakenly assumed that a killer instinct existed, both to kill others and to protect themselves, and found that they were wrong.

Joanna Burke describes how our natural empathy makes it remarkably difficult for any of us, all too aware of the souls of those who face us, to kill, even in wartime.241 Many soldiers in the First World War and even in the Second were so loathe to kill that they rarely fired on the enemy.242 When Colonel S. L. A. Marshall of the US Army interviewed men in 400 infantry companies in the Central Pacific and Europe he found that only 15 per cent of men had actually fired at enemy positions or personnel, though nearly all were at some stage within firing distance of the enemy. As Burke explains, at the battle of Makin Island in 1943 American troops with heavy artillery were attacked by Japanese wielding swords and bayonets. Half of the American guns were knocked out and half of the men in forward foxholes were killed. When Marshall interviewed the survivors, only thirty-five men were reported to have actively fired at the enemy with all the weapons available to them. Many men did not even use their weapons in self-defence when their lives were at stake.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.