The only way to help save our world is to care for one another. And for most, that's harder than it should be
In February, Canadians received a rude wake-up call about the lack of compassion of some Ontarians. After a late-night Amber Alert chimed on cellphones signalling the abduction of 11-year-old Riya Rajkumar, some people turned to social media, not to express concern for a child in peril , but to vent about having their sleep disturbed. Others called 911 to complain, jamming lines for people with real emergencies. The angry blowback to the blowback was swift.
The U.S. government has literally institutionalized cruelty, caging migrant children and arresting “Good Samaritans” helping ailing migrants at the Mexican border. Austerity programs, including those in Ontario, are targeting the vulnerable—the poor, children, those on the margins. The divisive, toxic political climate gave rise to the British group Compassion in Politics, founded last fall by activists and academics.
As Doty describes it, the personal and political are deeply enmeshed: “The ills of the world are a manifestation of individuals’ responses to wounds of the heart that haven’t healed,” he says. “When people are hurt and damaged, that has a huge impact on how they interact. You can even take it into the justice system. I say the majority of people are in jail not because they are bad people; they’re in jail because they were not cared for and loved.
Neuroscience—brain-mapping fMRI scans that revealed how compassion and empathy can change us physically and mentally—conferred an evidence-based imprimatur. The discovery that mirror neurons are triggered in our brain when we see someone who’s sad, angry or happy provided insight into empathetic responses—and helped explain the payback of “compassion begetting compassion.” The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, published in 2017, was the first collection of academic research on the topic.
A quick read of compassion research offers a host of selfish reasons to behave kindly: those who do are more self-empowered, happier, less lonely and less prone to anxiety and depression. “Helper’s high” has been linked to the release of the feel-good neurotransmitters dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Just 15 minutes of daily meditation reduces anxiety and decreases the risk of depression, and makes one a more thoughtful, happy person, Bloom says, before adding; “Don’t get me wrong.
Even those in the field don’t always walk the walk. That was seen last year when acclaimed empathy researcher Tania Singer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, was accused by current and former staff of bullying, creating an “atmosphere of fear” and mistreating employees who became pregnant.
Enshrining compassion in legislation is complex but possible, says Hawkins. He cites Scotland’s act to reduce the number of children who live in poverty by 2030 and Wales’s 2015 The Well-being of Future Generations Act, defined in part as the “process of improving the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being.” Ardern’s May budget was dubbed the “Well-being Budget” for promising to foster economic growth but not at the expense of people’s well-being.
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