Is Survival Selfish? PDF

Is Survival Selfish? Argument by Lane Wallace...

Is Survival Selfish? Argument by Lane Wallace If forced to choose, whose life would you save: NOTICE & NOTE As you read, use the side Your own, or someone else’s? margins to make notes about the text. © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Image Credits: ©Cavan Images/Getty Images 1 W hen the ocean liner Titanic sank in April of 1912, one of the few men to survive the tragedy was J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of the company that owned the ship. ANALYZE ARGUMENTS Annotate: In paragraph 1, mark After the disaster, however, Ismay was savaged by the media and the the topic the author introduces general public for climbing into a lifeboat and saving himself when with an anecdote. there were other women and children still on board. Ismay said he’d Analyze: Consider the title of already helped many women and children into lifeboats and had only this selection. Why might the climbed in one himself when there were no other women or children author have chosen to begin her in the area and the boat was ready to release. But it didn’t matter. argument with this example? His reputation was ruined. He was labeled an uncivilized coward and, a year after the disaster, he resigned his position at White Star. 2 The “women and children first” protocol of the Titanic may not be as strong a social stricture1 as it was a century ago. But we still tend to laud those who risk or sacrifice themselves to save others in laud moments of danger or crisis and look less kindly on those who focus (lôd) v. to praise. on saving themselves, instead. 1 social stricture: behavioral restriction placed on society. Is Survival Selfish? 23  ANALYZE ARGUMENTS 3 But is survival really selfish and uncivilized? Or is it smart? And Annotate: In paragraph 3, mark is going in to rescue others always heroic? Or is it sometimes just a statement the author can build stupid? It’s a complex question, because there are so many factors on to create a full claim. involved, and every survival situation is different. Analyze: How do the rhetorical 4 Self-preservation is supposedly an instinct. So one would think questions in this paragraph set up that in life-and-death situations, we’d all be very focused on whatever the author’s claim? was necessary to survive. But that’s not always true. In July 2007, I was having a drink with a friend in Grand Central Station2 when an underground steam pipe exploded just outside. From where we sat, we heard a dull “boom!” and then suddenly, people were running, streaming out of the tunnels and out the doors.! 5 My friend and I walked quickly and calmly outside, but to get any further, we had to push our way through a crowd of people who were transfix staring, transfixed, at the column of smoke rising from the front of (tr!ns-f"ks´) v. to captivate or make the station. Some people were crying, others were screaming, others motionless with awe. were on their cell phones... but the crowd, for the most part, was not doing the one thing that would increase everyone’s chances of NOTICE & NOTE survival, if in fact a terrorist bomb with god knows what inside it had CONTRASTS AND just gone off—namely, moving away from the area.! CONTRADICTIONS 6 We may have an instinct for survival, but it clearly doesn’t always When you notice a sharp contrast kick in the way it should. A guy who provides survival training for between what you would expect pilots told me once that the number one determining factor for and what you observe happening, survival is simply whether people hold it together in a crisis or fall you’ve found a Contrasts and Contradictions signpost. apart. And, he said, it’s impossible to predict ahead of time who’s going to hold it together, and who’s going to fall apart.! Notice & Note: Mark details 7 So what is the responsibility of those who hold it together? in paragraph 5 that indicate an unexpected event or situation. I remember reading the account of one woman who was in an airliner that crashed on landing. People were frozen or screaming, Evaluate: Does this unexpected but nobody was moving toward the emergency exits, even as smoke event support or refute the author’s claim? began to fill the cabin. After realizing that the people around her were too paralyzed to react, she took direct action, crawling over several rows of people to get to the exit. She got out of the plane and consume survived. Very few others in the plane, which was soon consumed by (k#n-s$m´) v. to completely smoke and fire, did.!And afterward, I remember she said she battled a destroy or eradicate. lot of guilt for saving herself instead of trying to save the others.! 8 Could she really have saved the others? Probably not, and certainly not from the back of the plane. If she’d tried, she probably berate would have perished with them. So why do survivors berate © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (b"-r%t´) v. to criticize or scold. themselves for not adding to the loss by attempting the impossible? Perhaps it’s because we get very mixed messages about survival ethics. 2 Grand Central Station: a large commuter-rail and subway terminal in New York City. 24 UNIT 1 ANALYZE & APPLY  9 On the one hand, we’re told to put our own oxygen masks on first, and not to jump in the water with a drowning victim. But then the people who ignore those edicts and survive to tell the tale edict are lauded as heroes. And people who do the “smart” thing are (∏´d∆kt) n. an official rule or sometimes criticized quite heavily after the fact. proclamation. 10 In a famous mountain-climbing accident chronicled in the book and documentary Touching the Void, climber Simon Yates was © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Image Credits: ©Phonix_a Pk.sarote/Shutterstock attempting to rope his already-injured friend Joe Simpson down a mountain in bad weather when the belay3 went awry. Simpson ended up hanging off a cliff, unable to climb up, and Yates, unable to lift him up and losing his own grip on the mountain, ended up cutting the rope to Simpson to save himself. Miraculously, Simpson survived the 100 foot fall and eventually made his way down the mountain. But Yates was criticized by some for his survival decision, even though the alternative would have almost certainly led to both of their deaths. 11 In Yates’ case, he had time to think hard about the odds, and the possibilities he was facing, and to realize that he couldn’t save anyone but himself. But what about people who have to make more instantaneous decisions? If, in fact, survivors are driven by instinct not civilization, how do you explain all those who choose otherwise? Who would dive into icy waters or onto subway tracks or disobey orders to make repeat trips onto a minefield to bring wounded to safety? Are they more civilized than the rest of us? More brave? More noble? 3 belay: the securing of a rope to a cleat or another object. Is Survival Selfish? 25  ANALYZE 12 It sounds nice, but oddly enough, most of the people who RHETORICAL DEVICES perform such impulsive rescues say that they didn’t really think © Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Image Credits: ©sezer66/iStock/Getty Images Plus/Getty Images Annotate: In paragraph 12, mark before acting. Which means they weren’t “choosing” civilization over the sentence that appears to instinct. If survival is an instinct, it seems to me that there must be contradict the author’s argument something equally instinctive that drives us, sometimes, to run into about how people behave in a danger instead of away from it. crisis. 13 Perhaps it comes down to the ancient “fight or flight” impulse. Analyze: Why is this an example Animals confronted with danger will choose to attack it, or run from of fallacious reasoning as far as it, and it’s hard to say which one they’ll choose, or when. Or maybe confirming the author’s claim about bravery versus selfishness? humans are such social herd animals, dependent on the herd for survival, that we feel a pull toward others even as we feel a contrary pull toward our own preservation, and the two impulses battle it out within us... leading to the mixed messages we send each other on which impulse to follow. 14 Some people hold it together in a crisis and some people fall apart. Some people might run away from danger one day, and toward it the next. We pick up a thousand cues in an instant of crisis and respond in ways that even surprise ourselves, sometimes. 15 But while we laud those who sacrifice themselves in an attempt to save another, there is a fine line between brave and foolish. There can also be a fine line between smart and selfish. And as a friend who’s served in the military for 27 years says, the truth is, sometimes there’s no line at all between the two. 26 UNIT 1 ANALYZE & APPLY