Compassion Fatigue

Ho-hum...another day, another NHS cock up, another family's grief intruded upon in order to show a "human interest" story. The family of Wayne Jowett arrive at the inquest into their son's death and are immediately surrounded by a forest of microphones, dictaphones, cameras, and reporters. Never mind that their son died because of a tragic error which led to strong anti cancer drugs being injected into his spine. Never mind that his family had the pain of their son's diagnosis, the uplifting of their spirits as he began to recover, and the crushing mix of anguish and rage that they surely must feel at his needless death. No, we have to know how they feel, have to see it on our screens. In close up. With subtitles.

Is it just me who finds this media intrusion incredibly unwelcome? And not just for the fact that I find the sight of a family's private pain being made public distasteful, but because I believe that lowers our own capacity for compassion. "But wait..." I hear you cry "How can the continual bombardment of images of anguish fail to evoke pity? Please explain!" Okay, I will, but brace yourself because you're going to have to bear with me on this one as I'm going to be using some pretty unlikely sources.

Right; firstly I would say that this overuse of real emotion to get better ratings for a particular channels news bulletin has the effect of rendering us numb to the reality of actual emotion. I would say this for a number of reasons. Firstly, I would quote the example of the Marquis de Sade (told you that you'd have to brace yourself) and his works.

The good Marquis is often seen as an example of the most extreme forms of eroticism, his work representing the pinnacle of sado-masochistic fiction. Having made an attempt to read "120 days of Sodom" I can in fact confirm the following; it is very, very dull. Not dull in a dry and dusty academic way (that in itself would be forgivable) or dull because it is not as graphic and obscene as our moral guardians would have you believe. Quite the opposite, it is dull precisely because it delivers on everything it promises and more. But after reading page after page of beatings, degradation, gratification of bestial lusts at the expense of the pain of another, and all round general depravity, one becomes utterly indifferent to the suffering of the characters. I simply stopped caring about the beatings that were handed out, and was indifferent to the fate of all concerned (hence I only made an attempt to read the damn thing; there are few things more disappointing for a teenage boy than getting hold of a copy of what one has been assured is a dirty book and then finding it duller than ditchwater, but that's another matter entirely...).

The Marquis himself said that his fiction was intended to batter away at the morals of the reader until they were numb to the horror and could thus accept what was going. I myself tend to think that he was imprisoned in the Bastille not for depravity but because he was such an appalling writer, but as I'm using him to back up my point I suppose I should leave him alone now.

I sense that perhaps you take still issue with my point; "Too bloody right we do! De Sade was a pervert and his work dealt with all of mankind’s negative emotions. How can you use him as an example of how seeing grief on the news lowers our own compassion?" Well, partly because I'm a smartarse who likes to show off, but mainly because he exemplifies just how a constant bombardment of images of a particular nature will eventually mean that one can accept pretty much anything of that nature, however extreme, without raising an eyebrow. You don't think so? Then for my next trick....

I would point to the various disaster appeals for famine, flood, earthquake, disease, and war that have been started in the last 15 to 20 years. Now please don't get me wrong; anything that involves man helping out his fellow man in any way is a good thing. However, can anyone tell me honestly whether they would have donated quite so generously had these appeals been straightforward requests for cash rather than the huge events that they are? No? I thought not.

Rob Newman hit the nail on the head when he did a stand-up routine about the Michael Buerk report on the Ethiopian famine. The first time I saw that it was one of the most shocking and horrifying things that I'd seen. By the fourth or fifth time it held my attention for a few minutes and made me think vaguely about how sad it all was. The eighth or ninth time it was a case of "Oh for Gods sake, not this again!" It was an overload of human misery, a glut of upset and yet less than 10 viewings had rendered me immune to the heart wrenching scenes.

I don't think I'm alone in this. We now have huge spectacles (Live Aid, Comic Relief etc.) to encourage us to put our hands in our pockets because there is only so much misery we can endure before we simply switch off. There are few among us who can honestly say that they donate money regularly to charities (lottery excepted) for the good of the people who receive the money. The rest of us demand something for our donation, and the spectacle provides it.

So then, I hope I have adequately demonstrated how constant evocation of a particular emotion leads to its atrophy. This is why I so despise the constant intrusion of the media. I felt nothing but sympathy for the family of Wayne Jowett, but will anyone’s compassion be as strong after a few days of being voyeurs to their plight?