The Boston Bombing, Compassion, and Entertainment
by Benjamin Studebaker
It’s been a tough week for America. A few days ago, the Boston Marathon was bombed. Then, yesterday, a Texas fertilizer plant blew up. At the time of writing, we know the Boston bombing was deliberate, but we do not know who did it. It killed 3 people. We do not know the cause of the fertilizer plant explosion. It may have been an accident or it may have been deliberate. We know it killed 14. In both cases, over 100 were injured. A lot of people said that the stories of heroism and compassion in response to the Boston bombing reinforced a positive view of humanity. I have come away with the opposite impression, and it’s not directly due to any element of the response to the Boston bombing–so far, that response has been, as far as I can tell, quite good. No, this reinforces a negative view of humanity for me not because of the reaction to the Boston bombing itself, but because of the comparative lack of reaction to the Texas explosion. Let me explain further.
I found out about the Boston bombing on Facebook. It was all anyone was talking about. “Pray for Boston” was a common sentiment. There was an outpouring of compassion. We were all part of the conversation. It was and remains a national subject. Even the late night comedians went off their scripts and talked about it.
I found out about the Texas explosion on television. I was watching Craig Ferguson, and a brief “CBS Special Report” interrupted to inform me that it happened. As soon as I found out, I posted it to my Facebook, anticipating a similar outpouring of sympathy, a similar national discussion. The early reports from Texas had put the fatality figures as high as 60, and although we now believe it was merely 14 dead, it’s still several times more deaths than in Boston. The Texas explosion happened overnight, so I went to bed expecting to wake up to a world gripped once again in tragedy.
When I checked my Facebook the following morning, not a single Facebook friend had posted about Texas. Nor had any of the pages who, a mere couple days ago, had expressed so much compassion. Only the news organisations posted about it. No one else. And the size of their comment threads? A mere fraction of what we witnessed in the hours after the Boston bombing. It is not as if I woke up early–this was around 11 AM. And in the ensuing hours since then, as I continue to look at my Facebook, no additional people have posted. Not one single “Pray for Texas”.
Now, I’m sure there are some people on various social networks expressing sympathy for the victims of the Texan explosion. You can find them on Twitter, if you look. The fact remains that their numbers are much, much fewer. Most people have nothing at all to say about the Texan explosion, whereas, just a couple days ago, they had quite a bit to say about Boston. Why might this be? I was curious, so I asked my Facebook friends. The answer?
It was probably an industrial accident, not a potential terrorist attack.
What sort of answer is that? Imagine being killed in an explosion. Imagine it happening in slow motion. In that moment, you don’t know why you’re being killed. You don’t know if it’s an accident or if it was on purpose. You have no idea what’s going on. If you know anything, it is that you are dying. You don’t understand why or how. There is only pain–the physical pain of being blown apart, and perhaps, if you realise what’s happening in time, the psychological pain of leaving the world, one’s family, one’s friends. A terrible, horrible thing has happened to you, regardless of whether someone blew you up or it was an accident. You are no better off in either case. And if you are not dying, if you are merely injured, you are just as deserving of help.
The more of you there are, the more dead or mangled people, the worse the thing that has happened is. The motivations do not matter. If I could save 12 of the 15 dead Texans by making the Texan explosion an act of murder rather than an accident, I would do it without hesitation. It is far, far worse for 14 people to die in an accident than for 3 to be murdered. Assuming none of the victims were directly related to each other, 12 additional families experience tremendous misery in the Texan case. What happened in Texas is undoubtedly much worse.
Of course, this doesn’t change the way most people responded. If people think about it, I’m sure they will agree that logically, the Texan explosion is the worse incident. Nonetheless, they do not feel as badly about it, because “accidents happen” while mass murder is what? Rarer? More random? More captivating? These are all euphemisms. What people are really trying to say, without out and out admitting it, is that the Boston bombing is more entertaining to them. It was more fun to watch on the news, to read about, to talk about. The amount of compassion we give to people has nothing to do with how much misery they’ve endured or how many of them there are. It has nothing to do with who deserves that compassion. It has everything to do with how the event affects us directly, how it makes us feel. In order to feel compassion, we have to be drawn into the tragedy, to the drama, to the stories of heroism, to the narrative. There has to be an evil bad guy who did it, and good guys who helped. It has to be something we could make into a movie, a novel, something gripping. It has to entertain us. The Texan bombing happened in the middle of the night. It looks like an accident. We yawn. We are not entertained. We feel nothing. No compassion. Nothing.
“Pray for Boston”. A lot of the people saying that genuinely believe in the power of prayer. If you think prayer works, how can you reserve your prayers only for cases in which you are entertained, in which your own compassion, your own feelings, happen to have been engaged? Many more people have prayed and are praying for the Boston victims than for the Texan ones. If one prays for Boston but not for Texas, if one refuses to use one’s power of prayer to help victims of incidents that do not entertain or engage, if one picks and chooses who you help on the basis of one’s compassion and one’s compassion alone, one denies aid to the deserving. One commits a grave injustice. Imagine the Christian god, listening to all of these people pray for Boston but not for Texas. Does he withhold help for Texans on that basis? Perhaps he is too loving and caring for that. But you know what he might do? He might note all of the people who only prayed when they were entertained, and when the time came, he might send them all to hell.
As for myself? I am not the Christian god. Human nature is the way it is, and I don’t blame people for it. I don’t hold it against people. It’s the way we are. But I do think it represents a remarkable indictment of compassion, of using our emotions and our intuitions to guide our morality. If we only help or care when we feel compassion, and never because helping or caring is reasonable, we will only help when we are entertained, when we are captivated, and we will deny help to many who deserve it. We owe it to ourselves and to the victims of all miseries and maladies to question our intuitions, to question whether our compassion or lack thereof really is justified, and to change our behaviour if we find the reasoning behind our emotions wanting. Caring when we feel compassion is easy. It’s nothing special. It’s not particularly moral. Most everybody does that. It’s no achievement. It’s nothing to feel good about. Caring when we don’t feel compassion, when perhaps we do not even like the victims, that’s hard, that’s valuable, and that’s worth aspiring to.
Benjamin Studebaker 
compassion is defined as the understanding or empathy for the suffering of others. while I agree with the gist of your last statement I think feeling compassion and caring are one and the same, and therefore your argument is better understood as we should aspire to have compassion for victims who we may not even like, and by doing that we care for them. How can we care if we don’t feel compassion or empathy?
There is a distinction between intellectually recognising something to be bad and in need of amelioration and reacting emotionally with compassion. We can feel compassion when rationally we shouldn’t, and not feel compassion when rationally we should.
“In order to feel compassion, we have to be drawn into the tragedy, to the drama, to the stories of heroism, to the narrative. There has to be an evil bad guy who did it, and good guys who helped. It has to be something we could make into a movie, a novel, something gripping. It has to entertain us. ”
Isn’t this sort of a fake compassion then, or not even compassion at all by the true definition of the word? seems more like a thirst for drama and therefore the focusing on the victims is more an act of morbid fascination than compassion.
When do people feel compassion without the event in question either directly affecting them or people they love or know when there is no narrative of some kind, no entertainment factor? I don’t think this is fake compassion, I think what we call compassion really is merely this.
I guess the narrative for some people could be i that it was a mass casualty event and humans identifying with the mass suffering of other humans. Is that not compassion and empathy? I thought you were the one who doesn’t like to presume people’s individual motivations. I agree with your post, but you can’t generalize it to everybody under the sun.
Huge numbers can die every year of say, heart disease, but something like 9/11 makes a better story, so we care more about the latter than the former despite the fact that the former is exponentially more lethal and harmful. In every case, our compassion is dictated by our level of entertainment. This is a generalisation, but one that I think holds true. Do you have a counterexample?
I don’t think its because its a better story. I think its because 9/11 happens all at once. You can’t report on every death from heart disease everyday and it happens over the longer term. It also has to do with the stories the dominant media primarily focuses on. We live in a culture where so many are under the thumb of the dominant media’s hypersensitivity to big events like the Boston bombing, but I don’t call that compassion. Do you call it compassion when CNN claims that arrests have been made, when in fact arrests have not been made? A media constantly jumping on their first tip without verifying sources, obsessed with being the first one to report some information no matter whether its accurate or not. Personally, I don’t watch the dominant media’s reporting of these events. I think their constant “entertainment-focused” hours and hours news coverage of these events is the opposite of compassion. I don’t need to watch videos of when the bomb went off over and over again. I don’t need to see images and videos of people running and screaming over and over again. So I do not fit your mold presented in this post and neither do you. I think both events are equally tragic and I gave both my attention There ya go. You can’t generalize to everyone under the sun, even if its just you and me who are the exceptions. There’s your counterexample.
some people are more aware of what you are talking about here than others. i’m not saying its most people, but some people those people will not discriminate.
The Texas deaths happened all at once, and there were more of them than in the Boston case. The only explanation anyone has been able to offer can be reduced to “the Boston bombing was more entertaining”.
Blaming the media is a cop-out. The media does not decide that we are going to pay attention to Boston and not Texas. The media gives the public what it wants, what it will click on and is willing to buy. Any perceived bias in the media is a reflection of our nature, not an outside force impacting it.
I do agree that not everyone will care more about Boston than Texas–how could I disagree, given that I am writing to support the view that Texas should have equal consideration? It is nonetheless the case that most people will not, and this is because most people do not have compassion when they are not entertained by the incident and determine what they care about purely on the basis of what engages their compassion.
Haven’t fully digested your thoughts on the relationship between the compassion and entertainment, but I did have several thoughts about prayer that you may or may not find enlightening. When I first saw your post about TX last night, I thought “He’s definitely right about that.” But my next response was simply to pray, rather than post.
Then, when I read this, I got to thinking about the way I pray in general, and two things occurred to me. First, I recall my personal response to a community prayer we make every Sunday at mass to bless those who have given their lives in service to their country and those who love them. Since I first realized that this was a weekly prayer, it occurred to me that I, at least, am also praying the same prayer for those who are on the other side of the conflict, which brings that whole “love thy enemy” idea to the fore. The second is that I also regularly pray for “the souls of the faithful departed” and “bring all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy” — rather egalitarian prayers that don’t seem to value one particular set of victims over another. So (perhaps self-righteously enough to negate any personal benefit from such prayers), I clearly felt like maybe prayer in general isn’t as seemingly hypocritical as its Facebook manifestation might suggest.
I have shared a similar reaction to yours in a related curiosity to the FB impact of the Boston wall posts, though. The universal accolades for those “running toward the explosions to help” manifested primarily through Mr. Rogers memes and repost of that Peter guys post about humanity being f-ing awesome, or whatever. I agree that ordinary citizens/fellow runners leaping to each others’ aid in a surprise moment of inexplicable tragedy is laudable. It pales somewhat in comparison, in my eyes to guys who suit up, every day, with the idea that “If that fertilizer factory goes up, I’m gonna be first through the door.” Men and women who make a decision to base their livelihood on risking their lives to protect the lives and property of others will always hold a level of admiration from me that eclipses the momentary heroism of someone acting bravely and doing the right thing in a time of unexpected crisis.
Anyway, I don’t know to what degree this response is similar, different, or interesting compared to yours, and it certainly finds its share of tangential wandering a through the morass, but it’s always edifying to me to know when my thoughts or words elicit a response from others, and this is how yours played out in my tired brain.
Looking back at this this morning to see if I stumbled on anything resembling a cogent point, I think it’s this: I think your reading of the social media reaction to the two tragedies regarding compassion is accurate, but for many the role of prayer in such issues is deeper than the FB versions may indicate. Also, apparently, firefighters are brave.
A good point–while lack of FB postings indicates less public interest, it may nevertheless be the case that, in private, the Texan victims are getting similar attention in prayers. Is a prayer of greater moral value if it’s publicised than if not? Perhaps, but only if publicising the prayer increases the number of people praying, and we cannot be certain of what prayers people offer in private.
And agreed–planning one’s life to be of constant public service in the face of danger is more meaningful than doing it in the heat of a moment a single time. If anyone doubts this, one need merely look at the numbers. Most people in the heat of a crisis will put themselves in some danger to help their fellows, but only a small percentage will choose to do this regularly even when no immediate crisis presents itself. It’s the passion of the moment that moves ordinary helpers to help, not a rational decision to serve.
There’s also a fair bit to be said for virality. This is connected to your point but slightly different: People didn’t care because we just had a similar tragic event occur.
Remember Rebecca Black? “Friday” got massive view counts. The next song she released was a major flop. “Gangnam Style” didn’t result in another foreign song growing or even the same artist’s next song being very popular. People on the internet see something, digest it, and move on. More of the same is boring.
And more deaths following deaths is boring.
A sound point–no doubt this contributes to the lack of entertainment provided by the Texas event in comparison with the Boston, and the correspondingly muted public response.