What happens when we stop thinking of people as people and start thinking of them as statistics? In an increasingly online world — where many interact with people online more than in real life — the subjective experience of others is being forgotten. In this piece, Nicholas Smyth argues that the internet and other modern trends have created a new, modern dysfunction. The antidote is to re-emphasise the subjective experience of others.

Writing from California in 1916, Alexander Berkman offered this observation:

There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China. It is not … that a feeling of national kinship with the waif impresses us the more sincerely with his plight. It is merely that the mind is unable to grasp suffering in the gross. Suffering is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation.

Here, Berkman put his finger on an important fact: the ethical significance of actions and events changes dramatically depending on which of two perspectives we take on them. In what follows, I’m going to try to convince you that this distinction—between the personal and impersonal perspectives—is both central to ethical life and crucial for understanding a distinctively modern form of dysfunction.

Let’s begin with the personal perspective. From this perspective, we engage with the lives of particular people. In the case of the New York waif, we grieve for the victim and for their loved ones. Or, in the case of the landlord whose policies starved the poor kid to death, we feel indignation and rage. Either way, we remain focused on an identifiable person with a unique identity and history, and our ethical responses are sensitive to those particularities. 

SUGGESTED READING Musk's town square will be chaos By Eleonora Maria Mazzoli But it is psychologically impossible to engage in this personal way with a million deaths. And we should be very glad that this is impossible for us, because any human being who actually internalized that much sorrow would go insane. It would be worse than any psychological torture ever devised.