The Kindness of Strangers | EXTRACT

Altruism is unique to the human species, and as it turns out, over the last 12, 000 years, we have become more and more altruistic. This is despite the fact that, the majority of the time, our minds are still breathtakingly indifferent to the welfare of others.

Read this extract from Michael McCullough’s The Kindness of Strangers, in which he examines this oxymoron in greater detail:

Are humans hardwired to care about strangers? Glancing over my bookshelves, titles such as Born to Be Good, The Compassionate Instinct, and The Altruistic Brain remind me that many of my scientific colleagues answer this question with a resounding yes. Each of these books, in its own unique way, teaches that the animal designated Homo sapiens has evolved for compassion. Caring about strangers is just part of who we are. If it doesn’t come effortlessly, all it takes is some patience and some practice. Attend a workshop. Volunteer at a homeless shelter, so you can see the face of destitution. Read some fiction, so you can learn how to empathize. Meditate. Compassion is inside of you. You just need to coax it out.

These days, many social scientists are positively exuberant about our innate potential for generosity toward strangers. Their optimistic outlook on the kindness of strangers reminds me of a story I’ve heard on many occasions. Perhaps you know it as well.

The parable of the Good Samaritan, from the Christian New Testament, is a story Jesus tells after being confronted by one of the local religious scholars who is trying to get the better of him. The scholar challenges Jesus to explain what the biblical commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself ” actually means. Jesus replies with a story:

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

The parable of the Good Samaritan is nothing if not optimistic about the human potential for compassion. “Open your mind. Drop your prejudices. Reach out. You can do this.”

But there is a competing parable bouncing around out there, of more recent vintage. You’ve probably heard this one as well. It comes our way from two New York Times reporters who wrote about the sexual assault and murder in 1964 of a young woman named Catherine “Kitty” Genovese. The Genovese case became a national sensation not because of Genovese’s death, exactly, or even because of the viciousness of the attack, but because of the supposed apathy of the witnesses from a nearby apartment building, who knew something was amiss down at street level, yet did nothing to help her. Two weeks after the murder, Martin Gansberg wrote a Times piece about the people who saw the murder:

“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. Twice, the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again. Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.”

Later that year, a second Times reporter named Abe Rosenthal wrote Thirty-Eight Witnesses, a book in which he decried the witnesses’ apathy and lamented what it seemed to reveal about human nature:

“She died in the early hours of March 13, 1964, outside the small apartment house in Queens where she lived as neighbors heard her scream her last half hour away and did nothing, nothing at all, to give her succor or even cry alarm. . . . A great many hard things have been said about these thirty-eight, and I am sure they are bewildered, and I know they are resentful. But it is important to say this—that what they did happens every night, in every city. The terror of the story of Catherine Genovese is simply that by happenstance all thirty-eight did that night what each alone might have done any night without the city having known, or cared.”

No Good Samaritans showed up to help. At least, that’s how the parable of the thirty-eight witnesses goes. In fact, a few of the thirty-eight did try to help. Enough people called down from their windows to scare the assailant away following his first attack. Several people actually did call the police. One neighbor even rushed down to try to help Genovese as she lay dying. The thirty-eight witnesses hadn’t been as apathetic as Gansberg and Rosenthal made them out to be. Even so, the Genovese story has been immortalized in books and films as a watchword for human indifference. The parable of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, if not the actual facts of the case, features in virtually every social psychology textbook of the past half-century.

The parable of the Good Samaritan and the parable of the thirty-eight witnesses could not be more different from each other in what they say about human compassion, but they do have one feature in common: both remind us that there are strangers out there who could use our help. But are we Good Samaritans, or are we unresponsive bystanders? Once we have stripped away any illusions we might be harboring about the basic human potential for kindness, what will we find?

To read more from Michael E. McCullough’s The Kindness of Strangers, pre-order your copy today!