Here’s a post by Darrell Lackey, a pastor challenging Christians to get save their energy and frustration for the right kinds of things. He begins the post with this statement that Tony Campolo has been known to use when addressing Christian audiences:
I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact I just said “shit” than you are that 30,000 kids died last night.
There is some good food for thought for all of us in this post, whether or not we are religious (I am not). For example, many of us often get much more upset about the minor irritations of our own local lives than the enormous suffering and stark injustices over the next hill or the next continent. For instance, our own country has been bombing many countries in the Middle East for many years. We’ve been bombing Afghanistan since 2001, and according to reliable sources, we have been killing many innocent civilians in a “war” regarding which we are utterly unable to articulate any meaningful objective or metric of success. Therefore, that “war” goes on, largely unchallenged and unnoticed, our news media almost never mentioning that we are even at war. Out of sight, out of mind for most of us.
If we want to be morally cohesive, we need to use unceasing effort to make certain we are focused on the things that matter. That is often not easy to do. Trying to stay focused on important things in a sustained way wears us down. It’s not easy to be moral. It’s much easier to complain about that the microwave burned the popcorn.
To live moral lives, we need to stay focused on important things, and focus is another word for attention, a psychological resource that humans have in short supply. Attention is like a spotlight. When we look at a thing, we often exclude attending to most other things. that’s how we are wired; we are almost the opposite of omniscient, even though we want to believe that we are generally aware of most things that are important.
Because attention is so limited, our attentional decisions and habits (maybe we should call this our “attentional hygiene”) gives us great power to define our “world.” Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, we are capable of manipulating what we pay attention to, and whatever we choose to ignore simply doesn’t exist for us; if we are not paying attention to something, it holds no moral sway over us because our attentional choices turn it into nothing at all. Most of us aren’t at all bothered by world starvation most of the time because we are not thinking about that horrific problem. Further, human animals are capable of not paying attention to things that are right in front of us. This is especially true when we are emotionally motivated to not see. See no evil and hear no evil functionally means that there is no evil.
I have long been fascinated by this confluence of attention and morality and, in fact wrote a detailed paper on it, drawing from many domains of cognitive science: “Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention.” Feel free to take a look, if you find this general topic compelling.
