Empathy Sans Borders
It’s the same story everywhere: suffering ignored, excuses made, as long as the victims aren’t “us.”
Quite some time ago, I was watching a podcast episode called What Now with Trevor Noah. In this podcast, Trevor was speaking with Ta-Nehisi Coates, the acclaimed author of Between the World and Me. Coates’s latest book, The Message, deals with many things, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their conversation touched something raw in me, something I haven’t been able to shake off.
At one point, when they were discussing the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Trevor used a metaphor to describe moral decision-making under pressure, and it struck a nerve:
Trevor Noah:
“Superman, man. I want to go after Zod, but the building is falling, and it’s full of people. So now, I have to save them. I can’t let them die just because I’m busy fighting Zod. I mean, I know I should save the people. It’s obvious, right? But the thing is, in real life, very few of us can get past our fear and do the right thing.”Ta-Nehisi Coates:
“Yeah. And the thing is, the building is filled with people who are not you. So the real question becomes: how do you have empathy beyond yourself?”
This conversation kept replaying in my head. In fiction, it’s easy. The hero always makes the right choice. They save the people, no matter who they are. But in real life, we don’t act that way. In real life, most of us only care about the people who look like us, believe what we believe, or share our skin color and nationality. Everyone else? They can suffer for all we care. And they do.
Look at Gaza. In the genocidal Israeli onslaught, over 71,000 people are dead, including over 20,000 children. And The Lancet warns that this might be an understatement; the real number could be as high as 186,000. You can watch the suffering in Gaza in real time on social media: Palestinian families obliterated, parents cradling lifeless children, homes reduced to dust. It’s all there, live-streamed for the world to see. And yet, for the majority of the Israelis, it’s just another day. They move on without batting an eye. Add to that the mind-numbing reaction of the West. Far from doing anything to stop this historic crime, they make excuses justifying it.
It’s not just them. The bombs that fall on Gaza are made in the USA and funded by American taxpayers. But in the halls of Washington, policymakers sleep soundly. Christian Zionists cheer from the sidelines, framing it all as part of some divine prophecy. And the rest of the world? A few hashtags here and there, then back to business as usual.
“The building is filled with people who are not you. So the real question becomes: how do you have empathy beyond yourself?”
But here’s the thing: it’s not just Israel, or America, or Christian Zionists. I see the same indifference across every community, including in my own. Why do some of us, as Muslims, stay silent when people outside our sect suffer? Many Shia Muslims celebrate Iran’s involvement in the destruction of Syria, while many Sunni Muslims say nothing about the Saudi-led nightmare in Yemen. When Israel’s attacks kill people in Iran, the arabs can’t be bothered to care. When Iran’s clergy regime kills its citizens for straying from the script or helps keep a brutal dictator in power elsewhere, the Shias around the world rally behind the regime. The people of the Gulf and its wealthy rulers couldn’t care less about a genocide that’s underway in Sudan. Because the people dying violently aren’t Arab. UAE would much rather extract gold and transport it over the blood and graves of the victims of RSF, whom it supports. While we look away, over 10 million people have been displaced, and the death toll in a single city like El Geneina is estimated to be between 10,000 and 15,000, but the world can not be bothered because it doesn't fit a convenient Western or sectarian narrative.
It’s the same story everywhere: suffering ignored, excuses made, as long as the victims aren’t “us.”
And so I ask myself: Is this just human nature? Are we wired to care only about our own people and let everyone else burn? Does watching the horror through a screen make it feel distant, somehow unreal? I’d like to think that’s not true, that I’m being too cynical. But the world keeps showing me otherwise.
There’s plenty of research on why we do these things to each other, why humans carry out monstrous violence against people who look just like them. Social psychologists speak of "Moral Disengagement," the mental gymnastics we perform to keep our conscience clean while others suffer. It begins with the Dehumanization Ladder. We don’t just see the "other" as different; we strip away their agency, then their unique emotions, and finally their very humanity until they are nothing more than a statistic, a "threat," or a "pest." Other times, it’s about imaginary borders or ideological purity. Sometimes, it’s just greed, power, and wealth, which are as much fantasy as anything else. But none of these reasons, not one of them, is an excuse for the horrors we inflict on each other.
And that brings me back to Coates’s question: How do you have empathy beyond yourself? Because if we can’t, if we can only care about people who look like us, worship like us, or speak our language, then we are silently marching to oblivion. Humanity will keep spinning in these same violent cycles, over and over, until we destroy ourselves completely.
I want to believe that things can change. That empathy doesn’t have to be a luxury. History gives me a few glimmers of hope. There have been times when people crossed lines of race, religion, and ideology to stand together. Activists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide have fought for peace. Humanitarians, without any stake in the conflict, have thrown themselves into war zones to save lives. Add to that the International solidarity rallies for Gaza that draw hundreds of thousands of people from across cultures, religions, and races, Doctors without Borders, and various other ground-level organisations, and we may allow ourselves some cautious hope. But these movements are few, too few to make me feel hopeful for long.
And that’s the truth of it. In the end, we are all just trying to save our own, our own families, our own people, our own skin. Maybe that’s human nature. Or maybe it’s fear. Maybe we’re all just scared, unlike Superman in Trevor’s metaphor, who is an alien and doesn’t have a "tribe,” which allows him to be a universal savior. In real life, we are burdened by our origins. So caught up in fighting our enemies and losing sight of everything else, that we let the building collapse, killing the people inside. Because saving the people in the building often means sacrificing our safety, reputation, or our “standing” within our own “tribe.” And most of us aren’t capable of making that choice.
I don’t know. All I know is that if we can’t find a way to see others, no matter how different they are, as human beings, we are headed toward extinction. And when that happens, it won’t matter who was right or wrong. All that will be left is silence.