#WIP

I was rearranging some things on this site and adding "Moira v Schitt's Creek Town Council" to the list. I couldn't remember what day August 8, 2025 was.

It was a Saturday.

I typed it into Brave Search, which led me to "Current Events: 2025 August 16", Wikipedia's current events portal. I didn't know Wikipedia had a current events portal, but what struck me was that it skews towards the tragic. Yes, we know news headlines often highlight disaster, but what happens when you ask normal people, What are the significant events of today?

First thought

We are pained by other people's tragedy or the news of other people's tragedy. Unless they are a close loved one, we are less inclined to experience other people's joy in the same way. In fact, we think it embarrassing if we catch someone wallowing in the feel-good reel feed, the online content creators that churn out stories of saved puppies, kind hearted lions "taking care" of a stray calf, or a cancer child having their wish granted. That's the stuff mom's and grandma's like on Meta, right?

But what about a genuine feel-good story. How do we differentiated that? Let's call it a "gratitude" story. It might go something like this,

"Today, a small town in eastern, rural China celebrated their 400th anniversary, and their 6th year of high-speed, mobile internet."

That kind of headline should fill anyone with fascination and wonder, or at least very least, joy. But most would find it boring, because many of the reasons to celebrate social achievements belong to the "unseen," which means it takes a little bit of mental effort to discern. The journalist Henry Hazlitt (1946, "The Lesson") wrote that

[It] is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects.

He wrote that about economics policies, but it's true of human perception in general. There are, indeed, a million reasons around you to live in wonder, and they rarely gain our attention. It's not that we're too distracted to see them—the most common answer. It's because these things are generally hard to see; they require sustained attention, especially when our brains are wired to watch out for pain. The watch-out and fix-this sensors are much sharper and highly attuned than the observe-this-with-fascination sensors. It in some ways is related to the very length of the titles. "Fatal car crash" immediately evokes an "oh shit" response. "Safe arrival" evokes ... nothing. You'd need to add more context, and even when you do, we're still likely to respond that this isn't really "current events." Take for example,

"Old man brews his 13,546th cup of instant coffee

Today, August 16th 2025, an old man brewed his 13,546th cup of instant coffee, paired with a simple, puffed pastry, for people in his town. Even though there is no laughter ticker displayed at the register, the porch-front of his shop has been filled with at least 2 to 3 times as many laughs as coffee cups. His persistent labor—which most people tend to think of as being stocking cigarettes, 2oz bottles of liquor, and not the small cups of coffee—has brought a once rare pleasure to his neighborhood, if we remember that in the not-to-distant past, coffee was a luxury for people in the States. Less immediately perceptible, and taking an economist's keen eye, his actions have supported a symbiotic relationship that supports people and their jobs around the world—people he will never see or think to care of."

It's not that we don't want to share in the joy of others. After noting our ability to enter into other people's tragedy, Adam Smith (1759, "Of Propriety") observed,

Neither is it those circumstances only, which create pain or sorrow, that call forth our fellow-feeling. In every passion of which the mind of man is susceptible, the emotions of the bystander always correspond to what, by bringing the case home to himself, he imagines should be sentiments of the sufferer.

We learn from story that it takes some groundwork for us to sympathize with the joy of others. That is, it takes more than a headline. Headlines work for tragedy because all it takes is the briefest description of the cause of suffering. A little lower in his essay, Smith (ibid.) notes that

"sympathy ... does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it."

So, here is my thought illustrated in examples:

• "4 dead and 10 wounded in mass shooting"
  • It elicits sympathy for people we don't even know yet. We don't need to be told the toll already taken on that community; we can imagine it.
• "4 children swim in water for the first time"
  • It sounds cheap, especially if it's in the same paper as the above headline. It's also harder to discern the emotion we're supposed to sympathize with. At least one of those children probably cried; some of the parents probably wanted a happy, splashy photo but were a little disappointed when the child threatened to go nuclear if so much as a toe were put back into the water. There are too many possibilities and a mix of emotions that could be felt. Remember when your parents, with fond memories, smiled and showed you a photo of you as a toddler balling your eyes because you dropped your ice cream or hated the pool? Such a simple happening like a chid swimming in water for the first time is something to wonder at: The human animal, dressed in bright colors and wrapped in balloons, introducing its young to a tamed, micro replication of the abyss, painted blue at the bottom instead of black to hide this fact. Humans are fucking weird in their joy. How do you evoke that in a headline?
• "4 children giggle at a puppy"
  • We know the above is too hard to headline, so when it comes to joyous headlines, we often have to include the emotion we're directly trying to evoke. And it feels like a cheap Hallmark movie.
• "4 children born into safe homes and 10 adults celebrate more than 50 years of a mostly happy life"
  • It sounds like the beginning of a report full of numbers; it could be a fascinating book for nerds. To sympathize, you would have to hear their stories told. You have to write essays and stories to evoke joyous sympathy. You can Tweet out tragedy.

Second thought

I open Wikipedia's current events page, and I'm struck by how many of the events around the world parallel the headlines that have recently dominated our own public discourse. Flash floods, helicopter crashes, shootings. It is the case that, while we are more sensitive to tragedy than we are to celebration, we also tend to think that when, a tragic event happens to us, it must be unique and eminently more worth our attention. This insight goes at least as far back as Epictetus.

After proposing that all of China were swallowed up in one great cataclysm, and the foreigners upon hearing the news would certainly feel the tragedy, Smith (1759, "Of Duty") noticed the same caveat:

The most frivolous disaster which could befall [a person] would occasion a more real disturbance [for himself]. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw [all those people who are now dead], he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.

The question is why this propensity or color of the human mind does not ruin our local relationships. Well, it can and does, but why not more so? If you think "because of the power of loving our neighbor, of human connection," Smith (ibid.) thinks you're wrong:

It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters.

Smith ties this to something he calls the "impartial spectator." This spectator is in neither of the two major moral schools. The first are "those whining and melancholy moralist who are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery." The second are those who seek to move us "by diminishing our sensibility to what peculiarly concerns ourselves." The former wants us to amplify our alertness to other's pain; the latter wants us to reduce our sensitivity to our own.

The impartial spectator is worth more space than I gave to the first thought above, but for now it reminds me of the misreading of Jesus's statement about loving our neighbor. There is no need to harmonize Smith with Jesus; they said things at different times and places. But we tend to misread Jesus. We know that the Jewish reading of "You shall love the Lord" and "You shall love your neighbor" offered by Jesus was old and relied on the Jewish interpretive principle of gezerah shavah. To love your neighbor is to love the Lord. But we misread it when we read, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," as "Love your neighbor in the same way you love yourself." Or in today's language where almost everything is a right, as if Jesus is saying, "People have a right to equitable treatment from you between them and yourself." It's clear that in Jesus' mind the passage said "You shall love your neighbor who is like yourself." Loving others because they, too, are in the image of God is a common strain of thought in early Judaism. It more easily resonates with the opening command: "Be holy because I am holy." How am I to be holy? By loving my neighbor. Is it the virtue centered desired, to be something, the motived us to love others.

Finally, there isn't enough time left in my afternoon to continue on to

The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.

Hopefully the point is obvious. Hopefully we don't just feel outrage or fear at the removal and mistreatment of the strangers in our land. Hopefully we see it as ugly, dishonorable, a defect. I do think Smith was right on that point. It's much harder to get people to feel outrage and fear at an injustice when it is likely that people have competing fears. That is the political tactic: paint the stranger as dogs, rapists, and mongrels. Make sure this fear is louder than government overreach, violence, and political power. In that space is left a more powerful moral sentiment, one that politicians do not (can not?) use.

We can help people to see the ugliness, shame, and defection in these things. How unholy they are. I do think people avoid that because they want to use political power; they would like to brow beat others into fearing the right thing, their thing.

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Hazlitt, Henry. 1946. Economics in One Lesson. LVMI.

Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edinburgh.