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Ever decreasing circles pose a threat to us all:

In a society of strangers, the bullies will rule

by Simon Longstaff

The death of John Hammond, a courageous and selfless man who went to the aid of a stranger confronts us with ethical questions that go to the heart of how we define ourselves as individuals and as a community.

Hammond's decision to attempt to stop a bag-snatching in Sydney, which resulted in him being stabbed to death, was remarkable for the nobility of spirit it exemplified.

It was also remarkable for its rarity. The unhappy truth is that for every John Hammond and Ferdinand Bast, who was shot dead while trying to prevent a robbery at a Townsville pharmacy, there are dozens of us who turn a blind eye to other people's distress. Why should this be so? And what does it tell us about the ethical fitness of our society?

It seems there are two main reasons for our failure to act.

First, there is the fear of being harmed. Given that most attacks involve the strong ganging up on the weak, this is reasonable. A decision to get involved invariably requires a conscious act of courage.

However, the deciding factor might not be the issue of personal safety. A brave person may be inclined to help yet still turn away, driven by a genuine need to protect the interests of their family, friends and so on.

Few people, if any, can fail to be moved by the plight of the families left behind by Hammond and Bast. If they had known their acts of bravery might lead to death, then who could have blamed them for putting their families first by choosing not to get involved?

The trouble is, bullies and thugs trade on the likelihood of our choosing not to challenge them. If we all acted in concert, then the bullies of this world would not dare to raise a hand against anyone. Alas, our instinct to act as a community has been progressively blunted so that we have become strangers to ourselves.

This leads to the second reason for our tendency to look away. A person might be brave enough to act in almost any situation yet choose not to do so because it is 'none of their business". That is, they may not recognise any kind of obligation to the person who is in trouble.

There are many recorded instances of people hearing screams for help (frequently during bouts of domestic violence) yet doing nothing. It's not just that people may feel reluctant to interfere in the lives of others. At a more fundamental level, the stranger screaming for help might fall outside our circle of concern.

Some take the view that our first and only responsibility is to look after ourselves. Others would recognise an obligation to family members, to a local community or even to a nation. Still others would expand their circle of concern to encompass all human beings, all life or all creation.

The way we draw these circles has a profound impact on the way we relate to others. Those left outside the circle are far less likely to be cared for when they are in trouble. By leaving some people and some things outside we are in effect, saying they just don't count in our calculations about how we should act. They are, for all intents and purposes, ethically invisible.

It is against this background that we need to consider how we should respond to the distress of our neighbours. But who is our neighbour? How are we to respond to the sight of a person being mugged in broad daylight? How are we to respond to the sight of a person being mugged in broad daylight? How are we to respond to the victim of domestic violence whose cries pierce the night? How are we to respond to the plight of the battered and scarred people of places such as East Timor and the former Yugoslavia?

Do we look away for fear of what might happen to us if we got involved? Do we look but fail to see anyone within our circle of concern? I wonder how a person such as John Hammond would answer such questions. Perhaps he would simply say that there are no strangers.

When people give into their fear and accept a narrowly circumscribed circle of concern, then the consequences can be truly horrible.

Any person who has visited the Jewish Museum in Sydney will have been struck by the fact that the vast majority of images depicting the Holocaust and genocide show large numbers of people standing by and watching the organised brutality of the Nazis.

Some would have been paralysed by fear. Some would have been indifferent to the fate of the Jews, a people they regarded as the perpetual stranger in their midst. Others would have consciously supported unspeakable acts of inhumanity.

They all stood by and watched!

The museum includes a number of inscriptions that try to capture the core messages the survivors of genocide want the world to learn and understand. One that stays locked in my mind comes from the pen of Edmund Burke. It is a simple phrase that stands as a remarkably powerful challenge to us all.

It reads:

All that is needed for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

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