Being Human: The Power of Compassion
Hotel Rwanda was the most chilling and horrifying movie I have ever watched. But for many people it was a reality of indescribable terror. Nearly a million people murdered by those they had lived side by side with, based on their tribal affiliations.
I was reminded of it a while back by my most favourite human on Instagram, Brandon Stanton, the man behind the lens of Humans of New York. He visited Rwanda and brought his followers stories of survival during the genocide. I followed every post, my African upbringing perhaps making it even more poignant. Every single one of these stories brought me to a complete standstill, wherever I happened to be, incapacitated by tears and struck to my very core by the depravity of perfectly ordinary human beings caught up in tribal hysteria.
The power of mob-think is perhaps the thing I fear most about the human race. It strips away the uniquely human capability of being able to think about one’s thoughts and actions, and make choices, and renders people within the mob indistinct from the animals from which we’ve all evolved. Like all other examples, this particular horror didn’t start overnight. It was stoked by a potholed history of tribal grievances, allegiances and political designs on power. And, in the weeks and months leading up to the genocide, was fed by a constant barrage of propaganda that de-individuated the “other” tribe, dehumanised them and painted them as the enemy.
We are social animals, and our social bonds are central to our wellbeing and security. For the whole existence of the human race we have existed in bands and tribes, the process of bringing offspring into the world and securing their survival has necessitated it. Other people are so important to our survival that our brains process information about faces differently to information about other objects. Our brains make connections and associations from what we see on someone’s face long before our mind has an opinion on things. The “gut feelings” we have of distrust or security emerge in our consciousness, a product of the brain’s calculations, where our minds take ownership of them.
Natural selection has honed us to prefer people who look like us, to remind us where we belong and are safe. But these instincts are maladapted for a world in which tribes live together. They are a legacy of survival on the savannah, where our enemies were primarily not other humans, but other animals, and our capacity for thought was limited to finding food, making babies and keeping our progeny alive long enough for them to pass our genes onto the next generation.
Those seeking power are quick to use the dominance of social bonds, and our tribal instincts, for their own gain. With divisive rhetoric, they play up superficial differences and reshape them as a danger to our place in the world. They use the language of scarcity to stoke up fear and ignite the animal instinct for survival, a team-based competition where there are winners and losers. And the consequences of this are always devastating. It always leads to violence, death and suffering. Leaders of the free world, who have benefited from co-operative societies and the rule of law and order should know better than to play with this sort of fire. But right now it seems that the world is dominated by “leaders” who don’t care for anything but their own egos and authority. When our leaders belittle others, demean and dehumanise them, paint them as the enemy, it is the slippery slope to the mindless animal that exists inside the mass, and the horror that inevitably brings. Pipe bombs to outspoken critics of Donald Trump should not have surprised anyone. He has given permission to hate the other, and continues to stoke the tribal fire.
Peppered between these Rwandan tales of miracles at a time of hopeless despair and suffering are stories of immense courage and hope. People who risked their lives to help. To hide others, to share food and aid escape. This is the power of moral conviction that comes with seeing the “other” as “the same”. On the comments section people praise God for the angels and the miracles (conveniently forgetting about the one million lack of miracles), but these are not gifts from some supernatural entity. These are people, human beings, who have shed the animal instinct of self-preservation for the human possibility of compassion. It must be within our human capabilities to teach ourselves this, and if we want to live in a world of flourishing rather than suffering, it will be necessary to own both our human flaws and our human possibilities. It only takes a little bit of responsible thinking to see that we are safer and more secure when everyone has the opportunity to flourish, and that life is not a zero-sum game. Until we, as humans, can reach across our tribal identities, be they religious, racial or national, and see the truth that we are one species, that we are far more similar than we are different, and that each person matters more than their tribal stories, we are unlikely to ever find peace in our globalised world.
