The Lives of the Othered

Are some people worth less?

A few years back I found myself sitting on a train in tears after someone shared video footage of a Syrian man hugging his two dead daughters killed in a gas attack. One looked just like my own dear daughter, the same age, the same hair colour. I remember the day because I was on my way to a wedding in Sussex to meet up with my wife and children. I found it hard to stop thinking about the tragedy, but the next day, dozens more children were probably dead in Syria and I moved on.

There is too much horror in the world to contemplate and, if we thought about it much, we would be in tears all the time. This is one of the themes of the charming and very funny Jesse Eisenberg comedy A Real Pain, which features a scene where the descendants of Holocaust survivors walk around Lublin old town arguing about how to process the world’s vast supply of misery. I tend to side with Eisenberg’s uptight and conventional David Kaplan, who thinks there is little point wallowing over the endless suffering in the world rather than just getting on with our lives, against his more emotional cousin Benji.

A Real Pain

Inevitably, because human suffering is unlimited, we tend to restrict and discriminate in who we cry for, yet those of a more universalist and empathic nature also believe that we must view every life not just as sacred, but also as equal. Why are the deaths of a few strangers in a western country more newsworthy than a thousand or ten thousand deaths below the Sahara, or in other distant parts of the world. Why do we value humans based on nationality or – it is said or implied - skin colour?

In this they are the moral descendants of William Godwin, the 18th century philosophical anarchist who first suggested that we shouldn’t mourn the loss of our own children more than equally valuable humans whom we do not know.