Empathy Update

 

In a recent post, I cited a book by Frans De Waal that described research showing that behavior expressing empathy--or at least its building blocks--wasn't restricted to humans but was present in a range of primates and other mammals.  That far from either a strictly human accomplishment or evolutionary aberration (depending on your bias), empathy is a natural tendency across species.  

That book (The Age of Empathy) was published back in 2009.  But just this week the New York Times featured a story about more recent research, focusing on the phenomenon of animals other than humans who express and even cultivate caring relationships with members of other species.  Who, in their journalistic shorthand, treated them as pets.

As the caption to the above photo summarized: "Scientists examined 427 interspecies interactions across 88 primate species finding that every primate, regardless of species, held some behavior that could be linked to pet-keeping."

The story by Taylor Mitchell Brown was derived from an article published in the scientific journal Primates.  As with earlier research on empathy, this behavior flies in the face of gene-centric evolutionary theory, or even strict versions of the laws of natural selection.  But then, humans and their relationships with pets has always challenged the same simplistic laws.  Brown quotes a scientist not involved in this new research: "Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary stake in seems to make no evolutionary sense."

Yet we do, and apparently so do some chimps, gorillas, monkeys, etc.  Every primate species studied showed some signs of caring for another animal, which included mice, marmoset, lizards, birds, a chicken, squirrels, even a small deer and yes--dogs.  It happens in the wild as well as in captivity. Often the behavior was fleeting--grooming, for instance--but sometimes it was "outright adoption."

Perhaps as unexpected as the behavior of the keeper is the acquiescence of the "pet." Both sides understand the relationship, and a bond is established.

Once again, as in the research on empathy, the evidence has been out there for a long time, but given the professional bias of that prevailing interpretation of evolution as all against all, nobody was brave enough to study it. One scientist explained that the behavior was often observed but always ignored, because it was deemed inappropriate for peer-reviewed journals.  "Someone might get a photograph and post it on social media," he said, "but you don't write a scientific paper about it."

That in this study, such kindness to other species was seen more often from females and juveniles but not so much among adult males--and adult male humans having dominated scientific paper writing as well as evolutionary theory--may have something to do with this learned ignorance.

Now somebody has written a scientific paper about it.  Some of the scientists speculated on reasons for the behavior (loneliness was one) but surely a major conclusion is that it is behavior natural to at least primates, and perhaps other animals not studied yet.  Further evidence that empathy doesn't decrease chances of survival, but may very well enhance it.  As well as just contributing to making life worth living.
 

Christmas Messages

 

Regardless of religious beliefs, the story of Jesus is a crucial contribution to the cultural mythos. Partly this is because it is so different. According to the story, he is not a king, not a hero who performs great feats of physical strength or cunning, not a warrior in battle who vanquishes enemies. Jesus is born of poor parents in a barn (or a cave) far from home. His birth is witnessed not by princes and priests but by animals.

Jesus goes on to preach that “the greatest of these [virtues] is charity.” His Sermon on the Mount stands as a bold statement of personal and social values, unique in our mythologies.

The Church of my youth was divided (though not as starkly as today) between those who emphasized institutional rules and kept company with power, and those like Dorothy Day who stood with humble workers and “the least of these.” For all the corruption and cruelty within organized Christian churches, there were always those who dedicated their lives to helping and being with the hurt, the needful, the oppressed and otherwise forgotten.

This past year we have seen a new challenge by purported Christians to the core message of Jesus, and we have seen it enacted at a horrific scale. The challenge is the outspoken denial of empathy. Two prominent Evangelicals write and talk about “toxic empathy” and empathy as sin under circumstances that are familiar for the extreme right.

 

The most prominent exponent of empathy as a weakness this year was Elon Musk, who when given the keys to the entire federal government, virtually destroyed the infrastructure and the support that addressed the life and death needs of the world’s poorest people. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 people—most of them children—have died this year directly because of this action, with many more suffering with the consequences. Given Musk's rhetoric, there's a scary likelihood that this was intentional. 

The ongoing war on immigrants of color (from Mexicans to Africans to Asians) by the federal government is a stain on the nation’s soul. Even apart from the naked racism, the cruelty and brutality is extreme. Mothers have been torn away from sick babies, an attack dog set upon a man who simply stepped outside his own home, and children as young as six years old have been imprisoned alone. There were no circumstances under which a six year old is imprisoned in America, until now.

All of this is being done in defiance of law and basic norms of conduct, with people disappearing into a growing network of for-profit prisons and foreign hell holes, all supported by tax dollars.  And this administration is proud of it--they make videos highlighting their brutality and splash them all over social media.

But they aren't convincing everyone--in fact, they're turning many, many Americans against them. Empathy has not ended. Empathy is a personal and a social virtue, the ground of cooperation, which is the basis of society and anything we care to call humanity.  And even with a cowardly Congress and corrupt Supreme Court, it is being affirmed where people live.

We can see empathy in action in protests and protections and actions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Charlotte, Columbus (Ohio), Oakland (California), Pontiac (Michigan), Pueblo (Colorado), Bentonville (Arkansas), Padukah (Kentucky) and in multiple communities in Minnesota, Colorado, California, and other places overlooked by national reporting.

The protesters against the brutal raids of the Border Patrol and ICE say they are defending their neighbors. “Compassion Melts ICE” is the message on one of the many similar signs.

This ethic does not depend on any pronouncement by anyone who is given transcendent authority by some. It is in vital ways inherent in the nature of social beings, and now (as long ago, on this very American soil) recognized as inherent in the interdependence of life on this planet, including what we do not normally consider as live beings.

The young woman protagonist of Tom Stoppard’s 2013 radio play “Darkside” wrote this:

“The earth is a common.

You can’t save it for yourself but

you can save it for others, and

the others will save it for you.

The other is us, and we are the

other. We are of a kind, we are

natural born to kindness, which

means to act to our kind, as

kin to kin, as kindred, which is

to act kindly. What is the Good?

It is nothing but a contest of kindness.”

What these protests show is that some of the ongoing expansion of what qualifies as "us" has taken root.  They defend their neighbors.

The role of government as an agent of compassion representing the will of the nation goes back most conspicuously to President Lincoln, and in a new way was institutionalized during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who after his ground-breaking first term with the New Deal, accepted renomination in 1936 with these words: “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”

Indifference is the usual position of a conservative Republican regime, though since FDR, precedent has retained the decency that had been institutionalized. But the current presidency is not indifferent: it is pointedly, actively, aggressively and ferociously cruel, as well as shamelessly corrupt—which also has its costs to compassion, decency and justice.  Instead of ice, we have ICE.

So millions of Americans this Christmas will worry deeply about the help withdrawn that will skyrocket their health care costs in the new year, on top of more expensive everything that results in nearly half of Americans struggling to pay for basic needs: food, shelter, energy, transportation, clothing as well as medical care. 

Health insurance prices are sharply increasing but that’s perhaps just the start. I’ll suggest two things: that despite a record Black Friday, the Christmas shopping season will turn out to have been weak, and retailers and grocers who held back price increases in December will enact them in January.

 Many people are turning their compassion for others as well as their own grievances into political action. Americans in the street are standing up for who they believe we are as a country, and they are saying that empathy, compassion, kindness and charity are part of that.

Though this needs no formal authorization or religious corroboration, it can be seen as an extension of the so-called Golden Rule, as expressed by Jesus. That mythos should mean something, especially this time of year.

At 73: Further Thoughts on Hope and the Future

There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."
Susan Sontag

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."
Peter Matthiessen
The Snow Leopard

“It is important to work for future generations, for our descendants. We must be proud to do something, even though people do not usually know its value.”
Shunryu Suzuki
founder of San Francisco Zen Center

We live in many kinds of time. We experience time differently, especially according to our age,  and the contexts of our experience are shaped by cycles we know, and that we don't know.  So any speculation on the future is bound to be vague, provisional and a bit of hit and miss.  But this is what I feel about the relatively near future, beyond my time.

As outlined in my previous post, the context of coming decades is likely to be dominated by the effects of the climate crisis, named or not.  Those persistent effects and the new contexts they create will change what people do and how they live.

When that happens in a widespread way (for it is already happening in relatively ignored parts of the world) depends on the climate.  What happens, and how it happens, depends to a great extent on future generations--probably beginning with those who are now young, who are now children.

Right now the impetus for efforts to address the climate crisis--such as the proposed Green New Deal in the US--is coming largely from the young.  Their leading edge is represented in government, and presumably in other influential institutions.  If their awareness becomes the standard for future generations, then responses can become more conscious and deliberate.

 But one way or another, the climate crisis will change just about everything, perhaps in the next few decades, probably by mid century, almost certainly by the end of the century.

There are two major aspects to the climate crisis: there are the causes, and there are the effects.  Societies may choose whether or not to address the causes of future global heating, such as greenhouse gases.  There will be less choice in whether or not to deal with the effects: the sea level rise, heat waves, droughts, floods, shortages, disease outbreaks, and the likely secondary effects of relocations, mass migrations and armed conflicts will demand attention--first local, and then as resources stretch and more people are involved, beyond that. Yet how societies and especially individuals choose to deal with the effects will make all the difference in how people live their lives.

There are those who imagine possible futures, mostly as stories.  While these stories may be visions that include new technologies and/or old forms of human society, or they may be mostly "what if?" explorations, cautionary tales or metaphors of the present, they offer a range of possibilities that cannot be dismissed.  I offer here only a few elements of a future I can imagine and foresee.

There are aspects of that future that can begin right now.  The young can prepare for the meaningful work of that future.  Many of the concerns of today will evaporate.  The consumer economy cannot be the focus of so many lives.  The emphasis will be on meeting needs, rather than in inciting and manipulating wants.

There will be increasing interest in finding technical means for addressing both causes and effects of the climate crisis.  The young can prepare themselves to participate in such research and development.  If I were advising adolescents today, I would suggest examining areas of study and possible occupations by asking the question, what will a climate crisis society need?

At this point, a stubborn refusal to surrender to some sense of the inevitable is healthy for the young. But denial is not.  They can dedicate themselves to possible means of addressing the causes as well as effects of the climate crisis.  But developing means to address future effects is also worthy and important.  In this way--the only meaningful way--they enact hope.  Hope is no longer principally a feeling.  It is a commitment, a set of activities, a life.

In terms of anticipating and dealing with effects, my guess is that the future will need managers of teams and resources responding to individual problems, and to develop strategies to address problems before they occur.

The future will need a greater proportion of dedicated individuals with skills for actions that today are often grouped under the name of first responders.  The future will need engineers and others in specific areas not yet prioritized by society's reward system.

The future will also need dreamers and storytellers, visionaries and critical minds, but using means and applying themselves in incalculable ways.  More broadly, when many occupations that today seem important eventually fall away as useless and wasteful, the need for currently undervalued skills will come forward.

Other needs will become the focus of more jobs, and even with increasing difficulties, those jobs can be more meaningful to communities and the individuals who do them. The perils and pains of this future may be great.  But individuals may find new purpose. Life may be harder, but less absurd.

This future, when so much that seems unavoidably important today fades into the sodden inventory of this failing period of history,  offers new opportunities for individuals to make basic commitments.  Some of these will be instinctive, but many personal commitments and choices will need to be made consciously, because they will be hard to make.  It will even be hard to know they can and must be made.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives."
Howard Zinn

“Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There seem to me to be two essential mysteries about humanity and its history.  One is whether humanity as a whole would develop in time to meet challenges of the changing present, particularly those very large ones that humanity itself has set in motion.  So far, when applied to the climate crisis, the answer seems to be no.

The other in some ways underlies the first.  It is the nature of human nature.  Is human nature based on selfishness, greed, lust, fear, envy, anger, the will to dominate and the passion to destroy and to kill?  Or is it based on understanding, a moral sense and sense of justice, compassion, empathy, courage and generosity?  Or is it an uncertain mix of both?

That last view is expressed in a fable, attributed to several Native American peoples, and may be familiar to some from the under-rated film Tomorrowland.  A version of it goes like this:

A grandfather talks to his grandchild. "A fight is going on inside me," he said. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." 

"The other is good," he continued. "He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith."

 "The same fight is going on inside you," grandfather said, "and inside every other person, too."

The grandchild thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

 "The one you feed." 

Under greater pressure and in starker terms than perhaps we can imagine, people of the near future will face this choice.  Their choice may not alter the ultimate future that comes after them--perhaps centuries later-- but it will help characterize their present.  Human civilization is some ways has been a struggle to inculcate a fair degree of personal freedom and justice for individuals while meeting the needs of community.  Freedom is based on choice, and community is based on a sense of common humanity, fairness, decency and shared fate.

 How the needs of the individual and society are both met is an ongoing test of humanity as a social species.  Individuals need the support of community, as community needs the commitment of individuals.  Apart from institutional constraints, the balance is achieved by a sense of responsibility, empathy, compassion, generosity and kindness.  The ethic of "you'd do the same for me" is perhaps the most basic human statement.

Even in his bleakest scenario for the future, HG Wells kept reminding readers than nothing will prevent at least individual human beings from exhibiting qualities of courage and love.  In adverse times, the need becomes even greater for "mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindness."

Redemption is a curious concept in this context, but there is something to it.  If humanity can't quite redeem its past by fixing its future, it can at least to some extent redeem itself.  Wells expressed his preference that, if the end is truly coming, he "would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack."

Humanity can go down fighting, and it can go down loving, both.  Perhaps it will even endure.  But its time of testing need not be one of unremitting pain and degradation. It can be a time that includes creativity, challenge, commitment and character, in which life is lived to the fullness of the moment.  For we live in many kinds of time.

The Time Machine.7: Evolution of Empathy

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination;"
P.B. Shelley

"The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope."
Henry Ward Beecher

When the forest fire approaches, most of the Morlocks run off in all directions. The Traveller is safe. Or is he? He sees several coming at him, and he "struck furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more."

But then, even in this frenzy of defending against an apparent onslaught, he realizes they are not really attacking him any more. They are blind, at least in the presence of the fire's light, and they are simply blundering towards him in their fearful frenzy to escape the light and heat.

And then the Traveller stops. "But when I had watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them."

In the physical details of this sentence, and in the words "moans" and "misery," the Morlocks are "humanized" to a new extent. But the Traveller also concludes that they are helpless.  Killing them when they were attacking him, regardless of how good or bad it might feel, was justified and necessary self-defense. To kill them now, however good it feels or however angry he still is, would be murder.

John Huntington notes this sentence, this "I struck no more of them" and a later passage in which the Traveller is mourning the death of Weena and considers revenge ("a massacre of the helpless abominations") but "contains" himself, as key examples of how the Traveller's humanity is different from these species: he can exert self-control.

"It is his ability—a distinctly human ability—to bridge distinctions, to recognize an area of identity within a difference, that sets him apart,” Huntington observes. “The Time Traveller is able to assert an ethical view in the face of the evolutionary competition that rules the future."

The ethical view, beginning with an insight of empathy, that is the human difference. This was the position of Wells' teacher, T.H. Huxley, going back some 30 years but expressed most eloquently in his lecture “Evolution and Ethics,” his final and summary statement which was delivered and published while Wells was writing The Time Machine.

Huxley concedes that natural selection is mostly a brutal process, and that as animal life, the human species has been subject to it. But at this point in its evolution, humanity has developed both consciousness and civilization, which will be the basis of its particular "artificial" evolution.

Huxley didn't believe that evolution meant progress or guaranteed human triumph. Like other species, humanity would naturally peak and then decline, perhaps becoming extinct. But before the earth dies or some outside force suddenly overtakes or wipes out the human species, humanity can exercise a great deal of control over its fate. That will require some counter-force to natural decay, or new skills that will keep humanity going.

Technology is the obvious example of a new skill, except that technology without conscience and conscious control is the best candidate to be the instrument of humanity’s self-destruction.

Huxley believed that the counter-force would be human ethics. Humanity could change the rules of evolution by the ethical decisions to work for the betterment of all:

"The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue," he wrote, "involves a course of conduct which in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows; its influence is directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence."

Both Huxley and Wells recognized the importance of cooperation and altruism in biological evolution. Huxley used examples of bees and ants, and Wells wrote in an 1892 essay (“Ancient Experiments in Co-Operation”) that the idea that competition alone causes changes in biological evolution is “a horrible conception, as false as it is evil.”

Some (including G.B. Shaw) would note that in certain circumstances, human self-restraint does enhance survival, and that human reason and ethics add to the fitness of individuals and the species, so they are actually features of human evolution, though perhaps not yet in a Darwinian timeframe. Intelligence, self-knowledge and ethical behavior are successful adaptations for the species.

Nevertheless, even without these assertions, ethics were important to Huxley because they define the human. That’s why it is important that humanity fosters “the survival of the ethically fittest.”

The ethics themselves define the human, but so does the intelligence and creativity to formulate them, the expression of freedom and the act of will to choose them.

So the meat-eating Time Traveller who exults as he strikes and kills, controls the expression of these responses and feelings, by using his ethical conscience. In this case, the situation doesn't require a lot of soul-searching and analysis, as it might in others. Not killing the helpless is recognizably an aspect of English "fair play," and the Traveller's quick decision, which he seems to feel will be obvious to the upper middle class Englishmen listening to his story, suggests that civilization can help to make ethical restraint nearly as reflexive as fight or flight.

Still, the pattern of thought is fairly sophisticated. He realizes that the violent emotion he is feeling towards the Morlocks is not necessarily the same emotion the Morlocks are feeling. He realizes that because he finds the Morlocks loathsome, hateful and threatening at that moment, they don't find him so—if only because they can't see him, and have other things on their minds. They are not a danger to him just because they are ugly and strange. They endanger him only when they attack him.

His decision not to wreak revenge later also seems dependent on this idea of the Morlocks as "helpless," though very soon they prove not to be completely so. Still, there are plenty of real cases, and many stories and feature films, in which violent revenge (or "payback") is a reflex that does not take the current helplessness of the original perpetrator into account at all.

In The Time Machine, Wells subtly undermines the use of science to justify selfishness and conflict. By dramatizing the way evolution works—not as inevitable progress, or progress based on Social Darwinist or racist principles—he shows that left to its own process, natural selection does not necessarily favor the survival of humanity as a conscious, intelligent species.

The science that led up to Darwin had a close relationship to the industrial era. The Darwinian process of natural selection itself, extended as a general rule, sees nature as a kind of machine.

But in Wells’ story humanity achieved the perfection of a machine by dividing, and ending itself. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been,” the Traveller thought. “It had committed suicide.”

At first a divided society seemed to work out for everyone, he speculated, in harmony with its environment until it became “a perfect mechanism.” By becoming parts of this machine, the elite and the servile became their roles, their unchanging functions. Humanity created its perfection by apparently following the Social Darwinist and possibly racist lines, and separating the species.

It worked for awhile, the Traveller speculates. But they "had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute permanency." The environment changed, and the two halves of humanity no longer had the intellectual versatility to cope, other than in the awful way the Morlocks and Eloi did. "There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change," the Traveller says.

That versatility is energized in part by humanity's struggle to persist in its environment, but also by the internal energy of differences within humanity that challenges the mind, quickens the heart and deepens the soul.

Intelligence in these terms includes imagination and empathy, which is the imaginative act of understanding the emotions of another—or the Other.
Taking into account the information the Traveller acquired through empathy helped guide his actions. It’s a very human thing to do.

“Empathy” was not yet a known word in English when The Time Machine was written—its first instance is early twentieth century, although it was based on a German word coined a half century earlier. It was first applied to understanding the emotion in works of art, or the aesthetic appreciation of people.

Another feature of the human response that the Traveller applies to this future world is the aesthetic response itself--the appreciation of beauty. 

For example, as he rests among the Eloi after his battle with the Morlocks, he reflects on the beauty of the sunny morning, and on the beauty of the Eloi as they again laugh and play by the river.

The scene may remind us of others in which the Traveller sits and observes the beauty around him. Beauty was the first virtue of this future that he saw, and now it seems to be the last.

It was on the hill as he gazed at the stars, thinking with some awe about the sweep of cosmic time, that he realized what the Eloi's relationship to the Morlocks was. It was then he looked at "little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars." With this Wells makes an instant connection between the beauty of the cosmos and the beauty of this frail child-like creature.

Some critics and readers have found the presence of Weena to be cloying and embarrassing, if not faintly perverse. But the childlike quality of the Eloi is metaphorically apt, as well as producing a certain tug of sentiment. Children as a rule are beautiful. It is not only a physical attribute but resides in their affection, trust, curiosity and delight in the world. It is in their eyes.

Otherwise weak and helpless, it is their beauty and the effect it has on adults that makes it their chief survival mechanism. This beauty is common to children of all ethnicities, genders, classes.

As they grow a little older, children reach out to other children, regardless of any distinctions. They have to be taught to judge by skin color. Children naturally get angry and act aggressively, but generally they must be taught to hate.

While ugliness alone is not enough to justify violence, beauty alone is worth preserving. The Time Traveller's impulse to take the beautiful child back with him is an impulse to honor the only living form of value he finds in the future. And though he cannot take Weena, he accidentally takes with him two white flowers that she had placed in his pocket.

It is these flowers that the narrator—the witness to the Traveller's tale—holds onto, "to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man."

But before the Traveller can return home, he must retrieve his time machine. There is one more battle to fight, and a series of brief but memorable glimpses into the farthest future.

To be continued...For prior posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.

The End of Empathy?

According to various surveys, Americans spend an average of something like 3 hours a day on their mobile devices.  A survey of women at one college found they spent about ten hours a day on their smartphones.  75% of young people (18-24) in yet another survey said the first thing they do upon waking is check their phones, presumably for text messages or Facebook updates.

All this worries Sherry Turkle, a very prominent and popular analyst of computerish things, for a number of reasons.  One of them is that this involvement in interconnection on a social media level somewhat paradoxically means that young people are losing the ability to empathize.  She cites a study saying that, according to standard psychological tests, there's been a 40% drop in empathy among college students in the past 20 years.

Whether or not this can be quantified, it's not easy to read online comments and discussions and mentally combine empathy and the Internet.  (And no, emojs don't count.)

The reason she suggests also seems paradoxical but to me rings true, at least in part: the absence of solitude.  "It's the capacity for solitude that allows you to reach out to others and see them as separate and independent," she writes.

But apparently we have nothing to worry about, according to another quote I read in the same issue of the New York Review of Books in which I saw Turkle's.  This one is in an essay on the new psychologists, particularly the mechanistically inclined evolutionary psychologists that seem to have taken power within the "profession."  It's an alarming piece for many reasons (such as the dependence of certain psychologists on Defense Dept. money, including those who helped design and run torture programs, and generally their arrogance) but this is a quote illustrating the point of view of a popular psychologist, Steven Pinker, in his popular book The Better Angels of Our Nature.  

While Pinker argues encouragingly that, taking the long view of our society, violence has declined and things are getting better, he takes the currently fashionable view in psychology that this is due mostly to an increasing reliance on rationality rather than feeling.  While empathy may have helped account for social progress in the past, the "ultimate goal should be policies and norms that become second nature and render empathy unnecessary."

I don't argue at all with the idea that society can and should create (or "evolve") norms that become second nature, because that's what they do.  Nor do I argue against applying reason, and increasing individual and societal consciousness, though I'm suspicious of the narrowness of the word "rationality" in these folks' mouths.

I do not however believe that empathy will ever be "unnecessary," as long as we are human beings anyway.  Empathy is near our essence.  It is an act or function of that other essential human quality: imagination.  Imagination is why empathy requires, if not solitude, an independent individual process of thinking and feeling that can happen in conversation or while watching a movie or listening to a talk, or observing others. (Eventually some solitude is probably required to complete it.)

It is even possible, as playwright Arthur Miller does in his autobiography, to correlate empathy with intelligence.  Miller (a Jew) writes about visiting the parents of his first wife (a Catholic) in the early 1930s. He notes that her mother "had intelligence: she was able to identify with people who were not Catholic."  Whereas her father could not.  Miller referred to this simply as "Stupidity, the want of empathetic power..."

It's a different kind of intelligence than these psychologists measure or perhaps even allow.  And it's striking that Miller offers one definition (though not a sole or exhaustive one) of stupidity as the inability to empathize.  It is a kind of intelligence that combines "rationality" (thinking, reason, logic, logical categories and correspondences, etc.) and feeling.  It's the kind we need, especially to meet the challenges of the future, which is already in progress.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.  The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

Shelley
(a quote I copied in a notebook in 1966.)

Fair Warning

Politics and politicians have been so extreme in recent years and especially in recent weeks that it's seemed this is all moving fast to some extreme moment.  That moment could be soon, as Washington has only about two weeks to resolve the debt limit crisis before it takes on a horrible life of its own.

As action that may be swift and strange begins after the holiday in perhaps the decisive act in this drama, it's worth stepping back to get in focus who we are.

It's been the conventional wisdom that as a species we are programmed to be selfish to the extreme, always aggressive and destructive, and ready to react to fear with unbridled and irrational violence.  But for all the considerable evidence that history holds, human societies and human beings--as well as animals and animal societies--have another side.

This was noted in one way in yesterday's New York Times--and intentionally timed to our current situation and debate.  Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive  is the headline for the Natalie Angier piece, which offers examples from several cultures to make the point that "Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively..."

In particular humans have a tendency, reflected in various societies, of a balance in which some may have more than others, but nobody has way more than others.  This is a general rule that contemporary America breaks, with its multimillionaire CEOs at a time of decline for most and hardship for many. It is this sort of American exceptionalism  that GOPers are pushing with such fervor.  And it is the failure to push back on Wall Street excesses, Frank Rich maintains, that has weakened President Obama politically.

Other research supports the notion that innate tendencies towards helpfulness, kindness, fairness and sharing have survival value, for individuals and societies--or even species.  This crisis requires both a sense of reality (of causes that have effects, regardless of which party says so) and a sense of empathy for those who will be most hurt by yet another economic blow.  We don't have to invent these capacities, or virtues.  We need to value them, and bring them to bear.  Right now.

Memphis Information

"And finally, with the right education, both at home and at school, you can learn how to be a better human being. For when you read a great story or you learn about an important moment in history, it helps you imagine what it would be like to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to know their struggles. The success of our economy will depend on your skills, but the success of our community will depend on your ability to follow the Golden Rule -- to treat others as you would like to be treated.

We’ve seen how important this is even in the past few weeks, as communities here in Memphis and all across the South have come together to deal with floodwaters, and to help each other in the aftermath of terrible tornadoes.

All of these qualities -- empathy, discipline, the capacity to solve problems, the capacity to think critically -- these skills don’t just change how the world sees us. They change how we see ourselves. They allow each of us to seek out new horizons and new opportunities with confidence -- with the knowledge that we’re ready; that we can face obstacles and challenges and unexpected setbacks. That’s the power of your education. That’s the power of the diploma that you receive today."

President Obama
commencement address
Booker T. Washington High School
Memphis TN  
More photos here, and this school's remarkable story.

Headline: Mockingbird

On Sunday I posted a lot about To Kill A Mockingbird on the 50th anniversary of its publication, mostly re-purposing old posts at Stage Matters and Boomer Hall of Fame. But for the Monday give-it-to-me-in-a-Twitter post, here's the "takeaway" (apart from the Harper Lee quote):

The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the children in the novel, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.

There are a lot of reasons, or sources of arguments against racism, which animate different people to different degrees. But the principle of empathy was very powerful in the late 50s and early 60s among whites who saw the Civil Rights movement mostly from a distance. As it came closer to home, if empathy was well established, then barriers to racial equality were easier to overcome.

Empathy is likely to be a key necessity, a community and civilizational survival skill, in the difficult future, as it is today in various political wranglings with real consequences for real people, who often aren't party to the "debate."

Connections

I still scan Daily Kos, though it seems to have become a kind of political social networking site, and the Kos Borg seem way younger and not often that interesting, when they aren't maddening. But there's usually something that catches my eye, and the place in general does redeem itself every once in awhile.

Like this week, when it seems to be the most prominent place on the web that is consistently following the hardships on Native American reservations, especially in South Dakota, where the very bad winter has hit very hard. With the single-disaster media attention split between Haiti and Snowmageddon in the eastern U.S., nobody is noticing the emergency needs of people within our borders who are living close to the edge anyway.

But at Kos, there's been a recommended diary every day, with lots of information on how individuals can help. The latest one has a little more--in fact, it's less about the poorest and now coldest places in the country--in South Dakota--than one of the wealthiest, in northern Virginia.

Yet this diary weaves a story with multiple connections. It tells us just enough about a few people to imagine them beyond what their job descriptions or ethnicity would suggest. And there's kindness, a sense of rightness and justice, even a kind of heroism, along with unexpected connections.

This story resonates with me for another reason. When things get tough--as they do in temporary emergencies like these snowstorms, or the mudslides in southern CA or the hard cold in the Dakotas, or earthquakes wherever they happen--and as they will in the coming Long Emergency of the near future, brought on by the Climate Cataclysm--these are the kind of connections we will all depend on.

We will depend on kindness, compassion, empathy. On cooperation and spontaneous organization--I've heard more than one story about neighbors getting together to dig themselves out of the snow.

We will depend on making alliances with former strangers. We will depend on people who know how to do things and have the tools to do them, and who see the need for their service and respond. On being willing to use our skills and strengths to help those who need them. And we will depend on the fuel of gratitude.

The people in this story not only made a connection, they discovered an existing one. Six degrees of separation will come in handy, too, once we discover what it means when we need a service, or need to provide one.

On "Hero-Worship"

Then-Senator Obama poses in front of the Superman museum in Illinois, conveniently illustrating the post below, in which I respond to the "charge" of hero worship.

I'm taking a little flak here for writing too much and too enthusiastically about Barack Obama, most of the comment being good-natured so far. I mentioned the North Coast blogger who links here not with this site's actual name but as an Obama blog. Now "cousin Lemuel" (old joke, between two old jokers) has broadened the charge in a comment, referring to my "propensity for hero worship of charismatic personalities." Could it be he's still sore because I backed Bobby Kennedy over Gene McCarthy?

On the more general charge, I'll say this: I've never been successfully accused of being an optimist, nor do I have a record of being uncritical (I do dispute "cynical" however). But I have shown evidence of preferring pop culture heroes and phenomena that represent the light over the dark, hope over despair, the commitment to good over the bad boys: from Superman to Spiderman and Harry Potter; Star Trek and Doctor Who over those s/f stories that are predictably described as "gritty." I even chose the Beatles over the Stones.

Whatever this says about me, here's what I say about context. The dark, the apocalyptic, the "gritty" are said to better represent reality and human nature. But it's not just half-empty or half-fullness in how you view this.

A century of Darwinism made the Social Darwinist analysis of ingrained, genetically programmed selfishness and cruelty in the struggle for survival into dogma, so dog eat dog capitalism, the rich preying on the poor and the sectarian violence serving the greed of those who make weapons for profit etc. have become enshrined as unalterable Human Nature.

This conveniently supports the rationale and lifestyles of militarists (and their video games), capitalists (who pay good lecture fees for intellectuals supporting this view) as well as TV and film writers who can't come up with a plot that doesn't depend on violence and the same old motives of jealousy, greed and revenge.

But now that even evolutionists are admitting that humans and other animals are also cooperative, caring, empathetic, compassionate, altruistic and yes, heroic creatures, human nature has room for all of this. Human behavior and the culture that supports it become matters of emphasis, of the value placed upon behaviors. But even those disposed to good may need models, and a sense of possibility. Heroes can personify those possibilities.

As for the function of charismatic figures in real life, particularly in politics, they can be powerful forces for bad or for good. But they are powerful, they do get things done. Here in the U.S., we had a series of Democratic Party candidates who would have made decent to very good Presidents, but they weren't, because they couldn't get elected. Barack Obama had the charisma, if you want to call it that, to inspire people to action.

Bobby Kennedy had two advantages over Gene McCarthy: he could have been elected, and he could have been a transformative President.

In Barack Obama (as in JFK and RFK), I value what I perceive as a complex intelligence, which includes complex feelings and a consciousness monitoring it all. I trust him and his judgment accordingly. But I don't worship him. I don't think he's infallible. And neither does he. That's partly why I have confidence in him.

Let me put it another way. I have long been interested in the insights of Eastern religions, but I had enough of priesthoods in my childhood, and my suspicion of gurus and their true believers probably stopped me from finding even a teacher. But I admire the Dalai Lama, partly because he doesn't believe in gurus either. He doesn't believe he's always right. Yet he has strong views and commitments, strong abilities to communicate, and--something else I value highly in RFK and Obama--a great sense of humor, including a saving sense of irony.

But here's the main point: we're up against a terribly crucial moment in human history. Humanity sliding into self-destruction and a long Dark Age is a very live possibility. Things in the U.S. are particularly dangerous. What happens in the next decade may tell the tale for America and quite possibly the world for centuries to come.

At least at the moment, the President of the United States is in many ways the psychological king of the world. Everyone projects onto the President their hopes and fears, and especially what they won't face about themselves. I've seen this with every President but of course it is more obvious to me when the President is one I voted for. I saw it clearly with Bill Clinton, who I kept called the President of Projection.

Though uncharismatic leaders can do just about as much damage, charisma in a leader can be dangerous. I was more than immune to Reagan's charisma but apparently he had it, and there wasn't another politician alive who could counter it. We got through that decade only by the charisma of writers and (for some of us) musicians. The critiques of the age came in songs by Joni Mitchell, Sting, Jackson Browne, Paul Simon, etc. They inspired us to hang on, by giving form and voice to our intuitions and observations.

But all charisma is not created equal. Barack Obama is a positive role model and a force for good in so many ways. We're going to need every ounce of his charisma, his ability to speak and inspire, the personal power to make and effect positive change and to hold off the gathering forces of evil.

He's the best hope going and I'm sticking with him until convinced otherwise. And because I trust his judgment I'm going to give him every opportunity to explain and convince me he's right, or at least that he's made the best possible choice.

I choose to emphasize the good he does, though some expect him to never disappoint them, to do everything they want immediately. Who is being unrealistic then?

I am not going to attack him and try to weaken him, as some on the left are now doing, because he isn't measuring up to their preconceptions of what he should be doing on some particular issue that's important to them. He isn't Bush. I don't see that weakening him is ultimately a positive.

Is that hero worship? I don't think so. I may look for the good and underestimate the bad, but I am not deluded and I gave up worship a long time ago. A couple of other dangers in hero worship are passivity and narcissism. I'm not passive, at least beyond my own fatalism, laziness and personal self-delusions. I believe that people find direction and hope by identifying to some degree with heroes and role models. Sure, I see the danger of such identification becoming psychotic, especially in this celebrity-crazed culture, but let's not throw out the planet with the bathwater.

We follow the leader who is leading in the direction we believe in, and in whom we have confidence. We follow what in a hero defines for us what we value, what we want to be, where we want to go, who we are committed to being. For those defined by their fears there is Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and a host of others, mostly to the right, but also left and center. For those defined by their hopes, there are lots of quiet heroes, lots of role models past and present, but mostly, there's Obama. Or maybe I should say the Obamas, because women (among others) are inspired by Michelle, and children (among others) are inspired by Sasha and Malia.

It's all a matter of emphasis. I'm for tipping the delicate balance towards equality, compassion, empathy, freedom, "truth, justice and the American Way." Technical adjustments may be necessary to get there, but we need more than technicians. There are powerful forces in opposition that are inside us as well as arrayed in the shared world. This looks like a job for the Superman inside. Out there, too, we need all the heroics we can get.

Though this photo is from awhile ago, it's been a moody, rainy start to May so far. So why not more empathy in politics talk, in the posts below? And happy Cinquo de Mayo!

The Other Side of Empathy

Empathy is not just about identifying with the good guys. It's also getting into the heads of people who do destructive stuff. PBS just finished running the latest BBC dramatic version of Little Dorrit, the novel by Charles Dickens, and Dickens made a living getting into the heads and hearts and souls of heroes and villains, and especially the people who switch between being one to being the other.

President Obama has a contemporary novelist's approach when he talked to a writer for the New York Times Magazine on the subject of the financial future. He started out being deftly analytical, saying that the financial sector is not going to be the same even after recovery. But when asked whether we'd "miss it" he went straight to the kind of detail that a novelist would notice:

"We will miss it in the sense that as a consequence of 25-year-olds getting million-dollar bonuses, they were willing to pay $100 for a steak dinner and that waiter was getting the kinds of tips that would make a college professor envious. And so some of the dynamic of the financial sector will have some trickle-down effects, particularly in a place like Manhattan. "

It's a portrait of a culture of excess that Dickens would appreciate. We can laugh at that 25-year old, or react with envy, anger or satisfaction that this will change. But Obama knows that for these people--the young executives and the waiters--life is going to change in ways they may not like or be prepared for. It's a human problem, for them as well as for the unemployed auto worker in Detroit, or the young and sincere starting their careers and their families in companies and jobs that are going to change, having nothing to do with anything they personally did or didn't do.

But Dickens, like Obama, would also see the larger picture. (A key plot point in Little Dorrit after all is a financial bubble and a Ponzi scheme, with familiarly devastating effects.) Obama continued:

But I actually think that there was always an unsustainable feel about what had happened on Wall Street over the last 10, 15 years.... Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the ’70s and the ’80s. It just won’t be half of our economy. And that means that more talent, more resources will be going to other sectors of the economy. And I actually think that’s healthy. We don’t want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader. We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want some of them to be going into computer design."

He also talked about some of the kinds of jobs in the new green economy that use skills that mean something of value to the people who have them, like jobs "where you’ve got a bunch of welders and tradesmen who are now retrofitting buildings. They’re not performing the same kind of manufacturing that their fathers might have, but with similar skill sets they are now making hospitals and schools and office buildings much more energy efficient, and then that’s providing enormous value to the economy as a whole."

There's empathy that informs ideas of what's needed in a positive sense, but also a kind of empathy to understand the impacts and therefore the resistance to change. This means that President Obama doesn't just listen to the point of view of opponents as different positions on issues, but from their perspective as people. This is a key to two-way communication. He may not convince every corporation that enjoys tax havens overseas to support his proposals to close those loopholes, announced Monday. But he's going to convince some--especially those who are doing it because their competitors are doing it.

Having empathy with someone doesn't mean therefore you're going to change your principles or policies. It isn't weakness, though our conflict-driven media storylines would like to depict it as such. It's part of understanding, that informs intelligent action, and helps to both form policy and communicate the need for it.

The Justice of Empathy

President Obama speaks frequently about the need for empathy. He did so in outlining the qualities he will be looking for in choosing a new Supreme Court Justice to replace David Souter, who announced that he'd like to retire at the end of the current Court term in June.

Even before he named the usual judicial qualities--respect for the rule of law, deep understanding of the Constitution, President Obama said:

"Now, the process of selecting someone to replace Justice Souter is among my most serious responsibilities as President. So I will seek somebody with a sharp and independent mind and a record of excellence and integrity. I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives -- whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.

I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people's hopes and struggles as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes..."

Obama is likely the first President to repeatedly use the term "empathy." The "pathy" part (from the Greek) is about feeling. The "em" (also from the Greek) in this case means "to cause [one] to be in [another.] Sympathy is close but different, both in practice and in its roots. "Sym" is a prefix similiar to "co-," so it means "with" or "together."

Sometimes the difference is described as: "I feel sympathy for what you are going through." Whereas empathy is more like "I feel what you are going through." Sympathy may be more general, but empathy--while it can lead to wider action--begins with the very specific. As the terms are used, sympathy often implies pity, assuming the superior position of one over another. Empathy implies equality.

Both sympathy and empathy require acts of imagination, but the imaginative identification for empathy is arguably stronger. Empathy often requires the power of story. President Obama reads ten letters from Americans each day, to learn their stories. He renews his empathy.

But often the stories that evoke empathy in many of us require imaginative telling as well as hearing. This is why good storytelling--in dramatic and literary forms--is as important to a sense of justice and a society that values equality as any legislation or social or political action in a democracy. This special kind of dreaming is important to the soul of the future, which must cultivate, value and commit to empathy.

In a recent Times Literary Supplement review of a novel by Nobel Laureate J. M. G. Le Clezio of France, Natasha Lehrer wrote: "If empathy is at the heart of the novelist's undertaking, then there is no doubt that Le Clezio deserves his accolades." This sense that empathy is at the heart of the novelist's undertaking is a salutary thought for all of us, including novelists.