The Globalisation of Empathy

Empathy is the capacity to share in another's happiness or sadness, and is therefore dependant on proximity to the other. This is one reason why some people feel intuitively that charity should start at home; one has more solidarity with one's family than with one's countrymen and more again than with the people of distant nations. And yet, most people would agree that the person more deserving of charity is the more needy, irrespective of where they live or who they are. That is, most feel that a starving stranger should be fed before a near-content friend.

The benefits of (peaceful) globalisation are well documented (as are the undesirable consequences), and includes the wider dispersion of empathy. Once, literature made it possible for a nation state to form and integrate. As this video explains, the internet may continue this trend:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g (Jeremy Rifkin and RSAOrg).

Both helpful and harmful resources and information are peddled subjectively through the internet, but certain ideas are objective in that they are true independent of conjecture; democracy, human rights, equality, and so forth. The internet is the wind through which these truths might find fertile minds, and germinate.

Also on that on wind is empathy. Shared video especially, since humans are intrinsically visual, abets the forming of narratives that cut through to the conscience.

In the short term, though, I fear that the benefits of the internet will be out of reach to the developing world, where they are most needed. I feel that economic development and technological endowment of the developing world should be of equal priority. The latter is certainly easier and cheaper to implement, and certainly would help sustain all other progress made.