Being Ready To Care and Act

One balmy summer’s evening in the late 1980s, I was on my way from the Vaudeville Theatre in London to catch a train, walking down Villiers Street, up steps and across Hungerford Bridge. About 30 metres ahead, I saw a dishevelled young man looking down over the barrier at the full tide running dark below. I took in that he had a loaded British Airways travel bag slung over his back. The shape and weight told me there were house bricks in the bag. He clambered onto the barrier and dropped into the River Thames. If I’d run straight away, could I have pulled him back? I’ve asked myself that question many times.

I had no mobile phone. I knew there was usually an attended police river boat moored under the bridge. It took me less than a minute to reach the South Bank and look back. No boat had launched. I had read the situation, but had done nothing to help. Perhaps you’ve experienced something like that. Do you know what your response would have been?

We have increasing exposure to news and mobile-phone video clips showing that some people respond quickly and bravely. Could it be that now many of us are better prepared to intervene in a crisis?

Conscious preparation and practice make it likelier we’ll be ready when the need arises. Perhaps you’ve been trained or you’ve rehearsed what to do in your head or in conversation.

A good number of us sense we have a better chance of being safe and well when our fellow human beings are safe and well. Wanting to do something for someone else and for the common good springs from an empathic impulse and social conscience. Caring is the opposite of narcissism and dogma. It is a part of wanting to work in war zones, emergencies, search and rescue, aid and charity, education, and for security, judicial, mediation and reconciliation, medical, welfare, social and end-of-life services.

     The writer and broadcaster Madeleine Bunting (Madeleine Bunting’s essay ‘Crisis in Care’ was broadcast in 2016 on BBC Radio 3 as The Essay, Episode 4) said that professional caring draws on ‘instinct and judgement’ as well as on ‘competence derived from rigour and emotional engagement with the individual’. It ‘rests ultimately on a combination of training, organisational culture and the disposition of an individual and their personal motivation’. When circumstances allow, the intention is to make a connection with whoever needs care because ‘caring involves a relationship over time’. Bunting said its hallmarks are ‘continuity, spontaneity and autonomy’, but not at the expense of diligent planning or coordination. Holding those capabilities in fruitful tension is something we have to work on. It goes wrong when carers exploit the power or opportunity the role gives them to abuse susceptible and vulnerable individuals or groups, or when providers forget or misunderstand their essential purpose.

It seems that we discover in the moment whether our first response to alarm is to freeze, flee or fight. This was identified by the physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon and explained in his Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage, published in 1915 by Appleton-Century-Crofts. And, in the case of bigger social, environmental and climatic problems, there are issues of consensus-building, funding, administration and collaboration between organisations to contend with. Turning fellow feeling into practical action is a challenge. Caring that expresses both empathic spontaneity and consideration feeds into altruism.

     The professor of literature Brian Boyd wrote about this in his On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, published in 2009 by Harvard University Press. In Boyd’s analysis altruism works when we:

 

       Have sympathy for one another

       Are grateful for kindness

       Are remorseful when we fail to respond to others’ needs

       Treat one another as we would like to be treated.

Negative emotions, such as regretting our own omissions and failures and speaking out against unkind behaviour or poorly managed essential services, are a vital part of our caring and becoming altruistic, just as adversity is crucial to our becoming resilient and not knowing inspires us to learn.

Boyd described how, when we try to do the right thing, conflicts arise because some of us vehemently oppose what seems ideal to others. We don’t all agree on how to go about what we want to achieve, and there may always be some of us who exploit cooperative efforts for their own selfish ends and ‘accept the benefits without paying their share of the costs’. Where there are beneficiaries of generous and social initiatives, there may also be freeloaders, some of whom exploit privileged, powerful positions.

Our evolution equips us for and counteracts our empathising and cooperating. Our feelings about ourselves aren’t always in harmony with our most thoughtful values, and our instincts sometimes precipitate actions against our longer-term interests. We realise our better selves by cooperating, and we cooperate well when we are honest with ourselves, disciplined and consequential. So we need to:

       Be as prepared to challenge wrong-doing and injustice as we are to celebrate kindness and fairness

       Check our observations and ideas against reliable facts and verifiable sources of information

       Be as alert to our medium- and long-term goals as we are to our initial ideas about what to do

       Notice what goes well as much as what doesn’t go well

       Review and update our routines.

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