Forget Me Not: A Lesson About Valuing Lives of the Many and the Few

Forget-Me-Not. Photo credit: John Postlethwait.

By Paul Slovic

On a beautiful Sunday morning, I went for my usual mix of walking and running on a bark trail in the middle of the city. Later, on the way to the gym for some additional exercise, I stopped for coffee and a cinnamon roll at my favorite bakery to fuel up for the next workout. As I was leaving, a woman approached with a young child in hand, likely her daughter. As they neared the sidewalk leading to the bakery, the child reached out to pick a pretty blue flower from a scraggly plant in a raised bed by the walk. “No,” shouted the mother, pointing to a much larger cluster, with dozens of the same flowers on the other side of the walkway. “Remember the story of the many and the few,” she said. “Take one of those. There are many. It won’t matter.”

Being an arithmetic of compassion devotee, I immediately recognized the importance of what I had just witnessed. I had thought that psychic numbing was wired into our brains, a consequence of the inherent limitations of our attentional capacity and the inability of our feelings to appreciate that a life that is so important to us by itself or if it is one of few should not feel less important to protect when it is one of many lives at risk. Now, listening to the mother, I learned that psychic numbing can also be taught. Although the curtailing of a single flower’s life is certainly not a tragedy, psychic numbing, when applied to lives of people and other creatures, enables episodes of genocide, war, species extinction and other societal harms that are indeed catastrophic, with many victims whose identity is not recognized and respected. Ironically the blue flower whose life seems no longer worth maintaining is named Forget-Me-Not.

I took a few photos to document this moment of insight and went home, immediately googling the story The Many and the Few, of which I had been unaware. To my surprise, it seemed not as directly about psychic numbing as I inferred from the mother’s admonition. Rather, it was said to originate in a poem by J. Patrick Lewis about the courageous act of Rosa Parks when she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger, demonstrating that actions of one or a few courageous individuals can have profound impacts for many. This is a more optimistic message than that of psychic numbing. It combats another troubling tenet of the arithmetic of compassion, pseudoinefficacy, whereby people are demotivated from helping others because there are many they cannot help. As we say on this website, “even partial solutions can save whole lives.”

I knew there was a good reason to go to the bakery every day.

The few. Photo credit: John Postlethwait.

The many. Photo credit: John Postlethwait.

The author with his new favorite flower. Photo credit: John Postlethwait.

The Many and the Few

For Rosa Parks, Part-time Seamstress, Montgomery, Alabama, December 1, 1955

It was an Alabama day

For both the Many and the Few.

There wasn’t really much to do;

No one had very much to say.

Until a bus, the 4:15,

Drove by. But no one chanced to see

It stop to pick up history.

The doors closed slowly on a scene

The quiet seamstress paid her fare

And took the one seat she could find,

And, as it happened, just behind

The Many People sitting there.

The Many People paid no mind

Until the driver, J.P. Blake,

Told the Few of them to take

The deeper seats. But she declined.

Blake stopped the bus and called the police;

And Many a fire was set that night,

And Many a head turned ghostly white

Because she dared disturb the peace.

To celebrate the ride that marks

The debt the Many owe the Few,

That day of freedom grew into

The Century of Rosa Parks.