A case for human compassion

Jairo Ramos/Contributing Writer 

They must have not believed themselves when they first walked outside and saw that the world had ended. Typhoon Haiyan had swept its wrath through the streets of Tacloban and left behind only remnants: broken statues, skeletal trees and tall clusters of wooden debris looking like hills. The survivors must have shivered out of body when they first saw the corpses, piled up like bricks, cold and distant under the morbid wind — like the city, no longer reminiscent of their former selves.

As I read stories of the Asian disaster and saw their faces on the news, I thought back to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I still remember my first walk around the ravaged neighborhood that day and the unshakeable sensation of being in a movie set… perhaps that of “Twister.”

Back then, the idea of a tragedy of such magnitude had seemed so distant I could only connect it to fiction; it was no different now. The tears inside the television set, the half-naked children running, dirty, through the remains of Tacloban, they all seemed like parts of a separate reality — parts of myself that I longed for, yet hardly found within my grasp.

The struggle of the individual to connect deeply with the suffering of others has existed since the first notions of self and nonself gained the slightest level of concreteness in human society — the search for compassion.

Naturally, in times like this when such struggle grows heavy, the question arises: just what is the role of universities in guiding their students through this understanding? And just what is their duty in the face of tragedy?

Of course, as basic human institutions, colleges have intrinsic leadership positions in any efforts to provide aid to those in need. But this is not enough. Online donations and campus fliers are all essential manifestations of compassion, clearly, but they are not the feeling itself. What we can give is always significant… but, in terms of humanity, it is limited by our understanding of our fellows’ suffering.

Schools are, above all, human workshops and, as such, it should be their responsibility to aid students in their quests for the universal connection. Man searches for his part in the world stage through the eyes of others but often, amidst the disconnection, he peeps through the lenses only to find a void. It is here that universities would come in.

But can compassion really be taught?

Tibetan Monks have long believed so, and they have used their own members and methods as examples of such cognitive process.

In 2008, 16 monks were part of a study by University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Psychiatry Richard Davidson and Associate Scientist Antoine Lutz which revealed that the areas of the brain related to “empathic” feelings were much more developed for them than for regular subjects. Consequently, regular subjects who had undergone a two week long “compassion training,” showed significantly more development in these same zones than those who had not. These outcomes are further supported by experimental studies performed in various universities, including Harvard University, which have come up with consistent behavioral results.

Today, Emory University has an established partnership with the Dalai Lama and the order of Tibetan Monks which focuses highly on “Cognitively-Based Compassion Training.” Their method employs meditation and other techniques in order to turn “empathic emotions” into automatic responses, hence making these more accessible.

The question, then, is: why do other universities not encourage such practices? Why do college societies promote “leadership” but not “compassion” in their slogans?

Perhaps it is a matter of pragmatism.

Yes, compassion might not carry the highest weight in a curriculum, nor be itself the solution to any problems; however, in a free world, it is the root from which all these solutions stem and the bridge that shortens the gaps of distance, time and being that separate our lives from each others’.

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