My grades from my first exams are trickling in, and so far they haven’t been the signs from heaven I wanted — nothing great, but nothing terrible, either. I’m going to stick it out and leave my work schedule unchanged.

My Great Texts class has recently read some of Plato’s dialogues about the life and death of Socrates. I’ve found them fascinating, and the Apology, in particular, has been inspirational. (I won’t summarize it — if you know Socrates’ story, you should read at least the last part yourself, and if you don’t, I recommend reading the whole thing.) Having read it, I finally appreciate why literature and music classes are required for most undergraduate degrees, even when the degree is designed for a career like mine, in which familiarity with classic literature is of no help at all on the job. Instead, what these classes offer is an opportunity to improve yourself as a person, if you’re interested. I’ve found Socrates to be an amazing figure, and thanks to this “pointless” class I now have another role model for my life.

“The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

This week my small service organization is selling chocolate chip cookies for $3 a package and giving the proceeds to an effort to educate college-age citizens of Sudan, the hope being that educated Sudanese youth will be instrumental in ending the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. (There’s a “Why Sudan? Why Scholarships?” article at the project’s site.) Our choice of charity was made at a group meeting I wasn’t able to attend, but it seems like a good one to me.

This afternoon I helped hawk our cookies at our table in the student union building. Our poster mentioned Darfur and included a photograph of a Sudanese mother with her child, both clearly malnourished. Most of the people who walked by saw it. Almost all of our “Want to buy some cookies for a good cause?” lines were met with polite but hurried “no thank you”s, insincere half-smiles, and shakes of the head, and almost everyone walked by without even pausing. Their responses were disappointing from my side of the table, but I’ve done precisely the same thing to spokespeople for some charities I’ve encountered in my busy day-to-day life.

As I sat, I wondered what thoughts were passing through the heads of the people passing us by. I’m sure more than one person had doubts that the money we took in would really go to the cause we advertised and not to some general-purpose social activities fund. That’s an important concern, of course, because some charities are much better than others at getting donations to the people who really need them. But I doubt anyone who turned us down went home to look up and donate to a charity they did trust — judging from my life, when someone thinks “It’s probably not a good charity” or “I doubt much of my money would make it to the right place”, it’s usually an excuse to keep their conscience dulled until they can round the corner and start thinking about something more important, like their homework or shopping list.

Why the apathy? What is it in someone that allows them to see a photograph of a bone-thin family and walk by without breaking their stride? One answer comes from a 1973 study meant to help determine why we respond (or fail to respond) when we meet someone in need. In the study, 40 students of Princeton Theological Seminary were given speaking topics and told to walk across part of the campus to another building to deliver their messages. Half of the students were to speak on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and those in the other half were given the more mundane topic of job opportunities for fellow seminary students. In each group, half of the students were told they were a few minutes late, and the other half were told they were a few minutes ahead of schedule. None knew they were participating in an experiment.

As they walked to the building where they would be speaking, each student came across a poorly-dressed actor slumped motionless in their path. Each time a student approached, the actor coughed twice and moaned. Surely you would stop to help — right?

You might not be surprised to know that not all students stopped to offer the stranger aid. Still, you might expect those ruminating over the Good Samaritan parable to be more likely to show concern. That was true, but the difference was statistically insignificant. Instead, whether a student was thinking about a story of compassion or the economics of the job market, their willingness to help was most influenced by whether they were in a hurry. Regardless of the topic of their speech, 63 percent of the students with time on their hands stopped to help, but just 10 percent of the students who were “late” did the same. Some people stepped right over the needy figure at their feet. The psychologists didn’t have to work very hard to reach their conclusion: compassion takes a back seat when we think we don’t have any time to spare. On this busy campus, it’s no wonder that our cookie table didn’t draw more people.

There’s another factor: in general, we care a great deal for ourselves, our family members, and our friends, but very little for people we’ve never seen in countries we’ve never visited. This is as true of me as it is of anyone, and I once heard a pastor lament in a sermon that he really didn’t care a whole lot about the people of Darfur, even though he knew he ought to. It should make sense that we’re concerned for people close to us but not for complete strangers, but it should also be disturbing, and I don’t know what to do about it.

There were several people who stopped to buy cookies, and one donor in particular got my full attention. Most of the people milling around in the building were students, but some were professors, and some were janitors and other non-academic employees. One of the food service women came up to our table without being asked, paused, and listened as we said it was “for a good cause”. Before we had explained the charity, she looked at the poster and said “I understand. I’ll take a package.” She pulled out a roll of small bills and gave us $3. We thanked her, she thanked us, and she took her cookies and walked away. I know that she can’t be making very much money, and the cost of that package of cookies was probably close to what she makes in half an hour, but she gave anyway. And when she left, the stream of well-fed, well-clothed, unconcerned students continued to rush by.

It’s something to think about.

Update: Part of the story has a happy ending: we started the week with 88 packages, and we sold out Thursday afternoon. That helps our cause, of course, and it makes my view of our collective conscience a little less bleak. The rest of the story, the story of the refugees in Darfur dying from treatable diseases right now, is unfinished, and it’s not the only tragedy in the world.