In the hours following the December 26 tsunami, feelings of compassion tore across the globe, with the possible exception of the US, whose initial reaction was disappointing. This was not such a bad thing, really, as the ethical lapse allowed lesser nations to enjoy a few heady moments of moral superiority. The world was not left rudderless for long, though: the self-declared 'greatest nation in the world' soon swooped in to reclaim the lead. Now that the natural order of things has been restored, mostly to the benefit of the needy, it is interesting to consider the charity question beyond the headlines. Among Asia's hard-hitters, China has pledged US$83 million, while Japan was at US$500 million, plus sending navy vessels. Charity still begins at home in China. Japan is richer and has more sophisticated global pretensions. Giving is rarely disinterested, and never so at the government level. True, unconditional kindness is richly rewarding. It is a useful, naturally selected impulse, according to evolutionary psychologists, but one necessarily limited to saintly individuals. This is not a condemnation of human nature. It is just that, ultimately, emotions serve survival. Compassion is necessarily selective. It favours the well-being of those instinctively or explicitly 'chosen' as deserving, mostly through projection - the psychological mechanism by which one sees in other people a reflection of some aspect of oneself - maybe one that is normally avoided. Faced with catastrophe, people cast around for meaning in what happened. They cobble together an intellectually plausible but, more importantly, a psychologically comfortable account - a sort of story, if you like, that 'packages' events. The purpose is to calm the otherwise disorienting scatter of thoughts, images and emotions that disasters leave behind. This is true of all experiences: we tidy up in our minds what happened at work today; we construct and reconstruct the story of our lives as we go along. But crisis ratchets up the psychological stakes. In the case of September 11, mental chaos was contained psychologically and made possible to understand partly by the adoption of the universally popular good-versus-evil, them-versus-us interpretation - for those capable of accepting this reading of the situation. It is harder to reconcile into some sort of satisfactory psychological order the disaster of thousands of African children dying every day of curable diseases. One reason is that we can all be held responsible. The intransigence of the tragedy and the complexity of solving it has left us lurching dishonourably between eagerness and 'empathy fatigue'. Most of us cope by switching off. The tsunami provoked an unprecedented global feeling of unity because of the accumulated effects of globalisation in general and because of its particularly provocative features: the amateur-video footage, the number and diversity of victims and survivors, their 'innocent' ill-preparedness and the force of Biblical proportions let loose. The sheer arbitrariness of natural disaster is a great leveller because it is beyond human control. (Warning systems, some say, will serve mainly psychological purposes, at least for the 100 or so years it will take for similar geological pressures to build up again). Being at once widespread, dramatic and 'natural' sets the tsunami apart from other catastrophes that have marked the global psyche, such as September 11 and the chronic tragedy of preventable deprivation. Our compassion is pure; unsullied by the hatred and blame that struck the hearts of so many witnesses of the terrorist attacks; devoid of the defeatism and guilt associated with dying African children. At least, so far. Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation