The world grew a little colder, and larger, last July when the BBC revealed that “‘six degrees of separation’ may be the academic equivalent of an urban myth.” The phrase had come from a famous 1967 experiment in which the sociologist Stanley Milgram asked a random sample of people in Kansas and Nebraska to deliver a letter to a ‘target’ in Boston, using only people they knew on a first-name basis. Each messenger wrote their name and address on the package so that Milgram could trace the routes each letter had taken and assess the average number of nodes between members on a social network. The results were said to show that even large populations, like the United States, could be linked in six steps-hence the phrase. The ‘small world’ connectivity which the experiment seemed to prove was infectiously optimistic. Perhaps only a handful would make it to the top, but the rest of us were just a few introductions away. And so the phrase became one of the only scientific ideas known widely enough to be used in general conversation. Then, alas, Judith Kleinfeld, a psychology professor examining Milgram’s original research notes, discovered that only one in twenty of the letters in the original experiment actually had reached their target. Suddenly we all seemed a little more separate than we had been led to believe.
A recent experiment at Columbia University has shown that two e-mail users can often be connected in seven steps, but there’s no denying that e-mail is a poor substitute for the romance of hand-delivered letters. So, in the absence of other evidence, is there anything to suggest that we are the neighbourly planet that we once hoped we were? Well, yes, there is. Two recent stories from New York City, a famously busy, dog-eat-dog kind of place, have shown the unselfishness and heroism which the man in the street is capable of, when suddenly placed in a crisis.
Two weeks ago, Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker was taking his two young daughters home before going to work. As they stood waiting for a train at 137th Street, a young man collapsed nearby, his body convulsing in a seizure. With the help of two women who had also come over to give first aid, Autrey used a pen to prevent the man from swallowing his tongue. Then, as the fit subsided, the three kind strangers helped the man back to his feet. Almost immediately, their good deed seemed to backfire, for 20-year-old Cameron Hollopeter, then stumbled forward onto the railway tracks. Autrey later told the New York Daily News: “I had a split-second decision to make. Do I let the train run him over and hear my daughters screaming and see the blood? Or do I jump in?” He jumped, and despite Hollopeter’s resistance, managed to press both their bodies into a two-foot gap between the rails so that an oncoming train passed harmlessly over them. The clearance from the track to the bottom of the train is 21 inches; pressed together the two men’s bodies reached a height of twenty and a half inches. Hollywood would hardly have dared to script the scene, it wouldn’t have dreamed up the men’s ensuing conversation either. ‘Am I dead?” Hollopeter asked, after the train had stormed over them, “Am I dead?” “No,” replied Autrey, “we’re under the train. “‘You’re touching me. You feel me touching you? We’re very much alive.'” Both men emerged with only minor injuries.
Less than forty-eight hours later, two men in the Bronx noticed a baby dangling from a fire escape four stories above the sidewalk. Timothy Addo, three years old, had already climbed down one flight of stairs from his baby-sitter’s apartment on the fifth floor, after sneaking out of a window when she had gone to the bathroom. Now he was losing his grip and was about to fall. Passersby had noticed the situation by the time the men rushed over, but nobody was able to enter the building or to climb the fire escape in time. So Julio Gonzalez and Pedro Nevarez decided to do the next best thing, and they positioned themselves to catch the child. When he fell, Addo was struck a glancing blow by a tree near the fire escape, then he slammed into Nevarez’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Somehow, Gonzalez reached over in that split second after this impact and caught the child-who weighs about forty-five pounds- safely before he hit the ground. Again, miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt.
We have grown accustomed to bad news nowadays. Terrorism, war, famine, disease: misery and death peep out at us from each news cycle, making it easier to fear the world beyond our immediate lives. But there is a different world out there too, one that rarely makes headlines. A world of unexpectedly kind strangers, people who help you cross the road, hold a door open, or share a kind word on an otherwise depressing day. Under pressure, they may even risk their lives for you. There is something wonderful in the most ordinary people, and occasionally circumstances conspire to exhibit this heroism to the world. New Yorkers learned all about that five years ago, and they have seen it happen again, twice in a single week. Are we six degrees away from one another, twelve, or twenty? Does it matter? When strangers catch falling babies and jump onto railway tracks to save one another in one of the world’s largest cities, there is still hope for all of us.
