Humanising the de-humanised

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Cheryl Lawrie, project worker for the Uniting Church, has a fantastic excerpt from an article in The Age on the blog she writes — Hold This Space. Here’s a small sample about homelessness — go check out the post on hold :: this space and have a read.

Princeton professor of psychology and neuroscience Susan Fiske offers an insight into why Australians couldn’t help but rally to the aid of homeless bushfire victims — “people like us” — while remaining strikingly indifferent to the 100,000 or so people who are homeless on any given night. Her research suggests that people of low status register differently in the brain. “The part of the brain that normally activates when you are thinking about people is surprisingly silent when you’re looking at homeless people. It’s a kind of neural dehumanisation.” The normal neural response is only restored, she said, when people are asked to think about what soup the homeless person might like to eat, which requires them to think about them as a person with human wants and needs. Similarly, when we are confronted by cases that break the conventions of the stereotype, such as the former executive who finds himself homeless, our empathy is engaged.

While I believe that this is true, I wonder how much of this is biology, and not familial or cultural, social conditioning? There are cultures, most of them considered primitive, where it is the norm to care for the members of the tribe. Perhaps the issue is that within our society we have grown too large, and the individual has been swallowed by the consumer culture, where if you don’t fit into the consumer driven norm you are ignored and frowned upon.

Hold this space tells the story of an alternative worship project in the Uniting Church in Australia, Synod of Victoria and Tasmania.