The correlation in this study was measured by self-reported survey data, a self-test and heart-rate measurements on how they felt after watching certain videos and a partner exercise in empathy for a counterpart going through a job interview. At the end of the day, the lower-income students scored higher in the compassion and empathy scale on all three of the tests.
I suppose much of this isn't all that surprising, because the greatest teacher of the discipline of compassion is personal experience. For a person who has known nothing except a life where food, clothing, housing and even non-essential materials possessions are summoned on demand either with a walk down the stairs or with a swipe of a credit card (or daddy's credit card), the concept of living in want is foreign and inexplicable. Without personal context, there's no benefit of firsthand experience which provides an emotionally connecting narrative on how situations like that happen. All are left with are sterile explanations such as "post-housing market bubble economy" and "manufacturing job outsourcing" at best, and callous rhetoric such as "poor people are lazy and dumb" at worst.
The study points out that it's not the super-rich (or the so-called 1%) that can learn or thing or two about compassion, it's the upper-middle class. I would actually submit that everyone who has never been "poor" doesn't really get the benefit of the difficulties of the struggle of living without material possession, and the resulting emotional intelligence in terms of being more inclined to be compassionate.
A buddy of mine referenced an article, which in part, made the point that "money can't by happiness", but the answer is a little more nuanced than the cliche. The article notes:
Research shows that money has diminishing marginal utility: “Anybody who says money can’t buy happiness has never met someone who lives in a cardboard box under a bridge,” Gilbert said. “But anybody who tells you money buys happiness has never met a very very rich person.” Money makes a big difference when it moves you out of poverty and into the middle class, he explained, but it makes very little difference after that.
So once you've crossed the income level in which you're no longer living in poverty (or the cardboard box), the excess money probably won't mean a heck of a lot of difference in terms of your happiness. I would also submit that having less of it won't make you any more compassionate, because there's very little that differentiates the "struggle" of a hedge fund manager's kid and the middle class manager's kid.
What this means to me is that my kids - even though they're not being raised in an über-rich environment. We don't have butlers or even nannies and family vacations are to Lancaster and the Jersey Shore, not to Paris or Hawaii - are absolutely prone to being caught in a web of entitlement leading to a callousness towards those who have less or have fallen upon more difficult circumstances. Thus my responsibility as a father is to model compassion and grace, first by making absolutely clear that the blessed life that we live has much less to do with the immediate visible evidence of their parents' degrees and even "hard work", but that God (at least for this season) has been gracious to enable us to make a living unfettered by tragedy, disease, disability, others' evildoing or any other thing beyond our control that might otherwise alter this current reality. And as members of a broader community, we must lend a hand to our brothers and sisters who have fallen into difficult circumstances.
It comes down to grace - blessings given to us from God which are unmerited. Our own understanding of this necessarily colors our whole view of whether what we do is charity... or Kingdom justice.
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1 comment:
amen brother
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