Response: What, Me Care?

The discussion about the importance of empathy and how it has dropped throughout our fellow man is quite shameful. If people are no longer "understanding" of each other, such as Scientific American suggests, then does that mean we are no better than any other animal? The article "What, Me Care?" describes humans as not the strongest and not the fastest, and if the only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom dwindles, where are we on that pyramid now?

Scientist, David R. Hamilton, wrote a blog entry about a year ago about the difference between empathy and compassion. Compassion is when you feel FOR a person, and empathy is when you feel WITH a person. Empathy is much more personal in that the person being empathetic understands the other person's feelings and suffers with them. It is not just feeling sorry for someone else, or wishing them the luck to get out of their terrible situation; empathy is going through the pain together with someone else. With that being said, there seems to be a real lack of it in the world today; everyone is fending for themselves, and when it comes to someone suffering, others tend not to care. CBS News demonstrated through a long experiment whether children were born empathetic, or if it was a train that was learned through example. I came to my own conclusion that babies are so pure, that they naturally want the "good" thing, represented in this video by a stuffed animal in a different colored shirt. Other studies show that empathy has gone down 40% by 2000. What has caused the statistics to plummet?

Many believe it's technology that is creating this brick wall between ourselves and those around us. Technology is limiting the actual human contact one may usually have if one were to be left without a computer or telephone for say a week. If that person had no technology, that person would then be forced to go out in public and actually communicate with a bank teller to pay their bills, or go to the store to buy clothes instead of ordering them online. Technology has limited interaction, and therefore people do not feel much empathy toward each other as they used to.

Technology is not bad, and that is my disclaimer. I enjoy technology, as many others surely do, but I do also believe in too much technology. High schools nowadays are trying to incorporate as much technology as they can, but that can only limit the students and make them ill-prepared when confronting potential bosses or clients. Everything must be balanced, and that is basically what Jamil Zaki, author of "What, Me Care?" is trying to portray through the article.