deaths in 11th century
March 20, 2011 11:59 AM Subscribe
we feel sad for people who died a decade before, or maybe even a century ago, but we do not feel anything for the people who died in ten centuries ago? is there any specific term for it?
Sounds like ingroup bias or recency effect. Either way, it's that we sympathize more easily with people who we feel are more like ourselves.
posted by skewed at 12:20 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by skewed at 12:20 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Agreeing with Dasein. But also because people's lives ten centuries ago weren't terribly well-documented, so it's much harder to find some piece of their humanity to grab and be able to think "I could've known/cared for/been this person."
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:34 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
posted by Jon_Evil at 12:34 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
Some of us don't feel sad for anyone who died by natural causes. I don't think there's really a universal "we".
posted by dobbs at 12:35 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by dobbs at 12:35 PM on March 20, 2011
Response by poster: Well, in fact I did not expect any answer for my question. Thank you all. Even for me, the question appears cloudy, and not well defined. What I meant by "we" was humanity. But, now I can clearly see that if a case is well documented, as in Pompei example, my question seems terribly cruel. On the other hand, as skewed said "it's that we sympathize more easily with people who we feel are more like ourselves". So, what I was looking for was a definition, or an explanation about the changing feelings in the historical flaws, or historical perception. In short, I still think that "it's much harder to find some piece of their humanity to grab and be able to think "I could've known/cared for/been this person." (see Jon_Evil"s comment). Can we say that documentation makes a huge difference in our perception? Thanks again.
posted by azar at 1:00 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by azar at 1:00 PM on March 20, 2011
I know I've posted this on here before, but David Mitchell actually addressed this at one point.
posted by you're a kitty! at 1:17 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
posted by you're a kitty! at 1:17 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
Best answer: I would imagine it's related to the concept of monkeysphere, a way of keeping your Dunbar number low enough to deal with the people closest to you.
posted by Iteki at 1:25 PM on March 20, 2011 [3 favorites]
posted by Iteki at 1:25 PM on March 20, 2011 [3 favorites]
Have you ever read a well-written biography of a figure from several centuries ago? (If not, the latest Cleopatra biography is a good place to start!) Learning about them, engaging with their life stories and their tragedies, can make you weep.
At the same time, I can learn about someone who died five minutes ago without feeling the same sorrow. "Someone just had a car crash." That's true, right? Well... I'm not weeping. Why? Because I'm not really thinking about it. Tell me some details, sure, I'll feel sorry, but the bare fact that someone who lived near in time to me died is not enough to make one sad.
If you're curious about some of the research into the nature of emotions that tries to account for this sort of thing, MeMail me. I don't know much specifically about the importance of time to how we respond, but I know some vaguely related stuff.
posted by meese at 1:30 PM on March 20, 2011
At the same time, I can learn about someone who died five minutes ago without feeling the same sorrow. "Someone just had a car crash." That's true, right? Well... I'm not weeping. Why? Because I'm not really thinking about it. Tell me some details, sure, I'll feel sorry, but the bare fact that someone who lived near in time to me died is not enough to make one sad.
If you're curious about some of the research into the nature of emotions that tries to account for this sort of thing, MeMail me. I don't know much specifically about the importance of time to how we respond, but I know some vaguely related stuff.
posted by meese at 1:30 PM on March 20, 2011
Best answer: Can we say that documentation makes a huge difference in our perception?
If documentation means anything we know of the person/people that makes their life or death resonate with us in some way, then I'd say yes. But I don't think that more documentation = greater identification or caring. This is probably different for everyone, but I know that I can read about a person who lived 2000+ years ago, and maybe we only know one or two facts about them and their life was completely unlike mine, but for some reason that little bit information I read makes me care about them. But then there could be someone who died within my lifetime, who I can see photos/videos of and read tens of thousands of words about, including their autobiography and their bank statements, and maybe they even lived in my city or had a life much like mine in other ways, and I wouldn't give a damn. So I'm not sure that time has anything to do with it neccesarily.
On preview, what meese said.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 1:37 PM on March 20, 2011
If documentation means anything we know of the person/people that makes their life or death resonate with us in some way, then I'd say yes. But I don't think that more documentation = greater identification or caring. This is probably different for everyone, but I know that I can read about a person who lived 2000+ years ago, and maybe we only know one or two facts about them and their life was completely unlike mine, but for some reason that little bit information I read makes me care about them. But then there could be someone who died within my lifetime, who I can see photos/videos of and read tens of thousands of words about, including their autobiography and their bank statements, and maybe they even lived in my city or had a life much like mine in other ways, and I wouldn't give a damn. So I'm not sure that time has anything to do with it neccesarily.
On preview, what meese said.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 1:37 PM on March 20, 2011
Isn't it just called distance - emotional, temporal, geographical, social etc?
posted by MuffinMan at 1:38 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by MuffinMan at 1:38 PM on March 20, 2011
It's a variant of the notion that Comedy = Tragedy + Time.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:51 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 1:51 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
Like others upthread, I disagree with the premise, but I can understand why someone might feel that way. One thing to consider: photography. We've had photographs of ordinary people going back about 150 years. Photography has an immediacy that previous forms of expression lack (IMO). When we see photos of soldiers dying in the US Civil War, or women jumping to their death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, that has an effect on us (well, me, anyhow) unlike that of a narrative account, a painting, or a fresco.
posted by adamrice at 2:00 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by adamrice at 2:00 PM on March 20, 2011
If we can extend this to emotion in general, I give you the perennial heartbreak of Abelard and Eloise
posted by IndigoJones at 2:04 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by IndigoJones at 2:04 PM on March 20, 2011
Best answer: Stalin is credited with saying that one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic. We can't allow ourselves to grieve every single death we learn of, because it would drive us insane. So we grieve for those we know, and we grieve for those with whom we can identify. And we grieve for a few others, but we cannot grieve for everyone.
This doesn't mean we are evil or heartless.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:15 PM on March 20, 2011 [5 favorites]
This doesn't mean we are evil or heartless.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 2:15 PM on March 20, 2011 [5 favorites]
In general, I think it's true, and it's got to do with the monkeysphere thing as well as how we normally come to knowledge of such old things... in books and classrooms as stories being related to us. Just another step of removal.
On the other hand, I've done some intensive study of some old tymey dudes, and while I can't really say I still grieve the death of Caravaggio or Archimedes I would say that they exist in my monkeysphere. If it counts, though, I'm still pretty tore up about the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
posted by cmoj at 2:20 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
On the other hand, I've done some intensive study of some old tymey dudes, and while I can't really say I still grieve the death of Caravaggio or Archimedes I would say that they exist in my monkeysphere. If it counts, though, I'm still pretty tore up about the burning of the Library at Alexandria.
posted by cmoj at 2:20 PM on March 20, 2011 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: You know that schadenfreude is a German word, and it is not easy to translate it into other languages. Is word schadenfreude a living proof that German language is less sympathetic or heartless than others? No it is not! I thought that maybe there was something like that, a word, a term, or a phrase. Thanks for all suggestions and comments.
posted by azar at 2:59 PM on March 20, 2011
posted by azar at 2:59 PM on March 20, 2011
Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being, analyses this question at length.
To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to "befog" evil's specificity. Any blurring is dangerous, if inevitable, because the deaths of a few hundred scholars or ten thousand people or one million or thirty million people pain little at diminishing removes of time and place. Shall we contemplate Chinese scholars' beheadings twenty-three centuries ago? It hurts worse to break a leg.posted by heatherann at 3:00 PM on March 20, 2011 [4 favorites]
What, here in the West, is the numerical limit to our working idea of "the individual"? As recently as 1894, bubonic plague killed 13 million people in Asia—the same plague that killed twenty-five million Europeans five and a half centuries earlier. Have you even heard mention of this recent bubonic plague? Can our prizing of the human life weaken with the square of distance, as gravity does?
Do we believe the individual is precious, or do we not? My children and your children and their children? Of course. The 250,000 Karen tribespeople who are living now in Thailand? Your grandfather? The family of men, women, and children who live in central Asia as peoples called Ingush, Chechen, Buryats, and Bashliks? The people your address book tracks? Any other group you care to mention among the 5.9 billion persons now living, or perhaps among the 80 billion dead?
There are about a billion more people living now than there are years since our sun condensed from interstellar gas. I cannot make sense of this.
Another thought - at the end of the battle of Waterloo there were thousands of wounded and dying on the field, friends and comrades to the survivors. The slaughter had gone on all day and was so exhausting emotionally and physically that most of the survivors were simply too drained to do anything on behalf of the dying. Not that the survivors were awful, they had simply reached their limits. (T.S. Eliot did just say, mankind cannot bear too much reality.)
Pity for the wounded, since local peasants spent the night looting the bodies, and dispatching those wounded who resisted. False teeth for decades after were referred to as Waterloo Teeth - which raises the interesting question of what thoughts the owners had in wearing them.
TO the question though - not sure there is a single word for it, even in German. T.S. El
posted by IndigoJones at 4:29 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
Pity for the wounded, since local peasants spent the night looting the bodies, and dispatching those wounded who resisted. False teeth for decades after were referred to as Waterloo Teeth - which raises the interesting question of what thoughts the owners had in wearing them.
TO the question though - not sure there is a single word for it, even in German. T.S. El
posted by IndigoJones at 4:29 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 12:11 PM on March 20, 2011 [2 favorites]