The Vicissitudes of Nature
Recently an advert by a UK Internet company had to be withdrawn because of complaints from customers. The advert showed a wildlife sequence where a lioness chased and caught a wildebeest. People complained about the graphic nature of the advert showing the wildebeest being brought down.
People brought up in cities have often lived protected lives. Shielded from the vicissitudes that nature imposes, they grow up with exaggerated views of life, death and pain. Most people living in Western cities would consider the conditions that people lived in just a generation ago as being subhuman. I was brought up in the East End of London. A family of five living in the upstairs of a house with no bathroom, in conditions that would be considered a slum nowadays.
In an interview with a soldier who fought in the D-day landings during Word War
2, he said that he developed a survival instinct. When they arrived on the beaches
they had to climb over dead bodies in order to disembark. After the war he became
detached from suffering. As he put it, if someone was killed crossing the road
his response was simply ‘why weren't they more careful?’ This contrasts strongly
with the litigious attitude of blaming someone else, or a large corporation, for
your problems. There is an abhorrence of physical pain, even though pain is a
part of nature. In many countries parents can be prosecuted for hitting their
children. A culture where pain is a part of life would not have this distorted
view.
This may be mistaken for callousness and being unfeeling. This is not necessarily
the case. In fact, as I've pointed out before, those who make the most noise about
compassion and feeling are often cut off from their emotions. Talking about feeling
and compassion can be a compensation for the real thing.
The ideal is to feel compassion, to the extent where you feel as if you were the person suffering, but you remain detached enough to realise that the suffering is an essential part of learning. Parents often see their children mixing with the wrong company and making what seem to be catastrophic mistakes, but they are powerless. Anything they do seems to make the situation worse. They eventually learn to be detached. Of course, it’s often the case that had the parents punished the children when they were younger they would not have got themselves into the situation. Pointing it out to them would not help the situation.
