Saturday, January 1, 2011
Empathy for Evil
If evil may be considered to consist in the absence of empathy, social incompetence may be considered to encompass an excess of sympathy. Sympathy for entititlement mongering of Progs is destroying America. When empathy consists in seeing oneself in others and then justifying it at all costs, that would seem to be more a form of narcissism than of empathy, whereby you are not really empathizing with the other person in respect of his relation with any higher context, but you are simply discounting him as a spiritual being and projecting your own solipsistic gratification into him. Empathy must consist in more than just seeing yourself in others; it must encompass an intuitive respect for Something higher in the context. Empathy must consist in an appreciation of our shared feedback and accountability before a superior and reconciling God. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLddJ1WceHQ
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7 comments:
Dlanor
Empathy is more that just a philosophical idea, it has a biological basis. We are biologically wired for empathy. We have mirror neurons that are the basis of empathy.
Mirror Neurons
A recently discovered system in the brain may help explain why we humans can get so worked up watching other people
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html
See the work of Frans de Waal.
http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Experts/Frans-de-Waal.htm
Edwin,
Sounds interesting. I will take a look. I suspect there is a built in capacity for perspectives of consciousness to appreciate one another within the singular Field out of which all of our reality is manifested. As those condensate (particles, or perspectives of conscious will) couple and organize, complex qualities for communicating intelligence may be enhanced. Those qualites may be organized and enhanced at a level of what may be termed selfish or altruistic genes. And they may be enhanced at a level of wiring, as for mirror neurons. The more organized such qualities become for expressing and appreciating consciousness, the more we recognize them as being integral to the condition of being intelligent human beings. I differentiate between consciousness and intelligence.
As we become more adept at interpreting and experiencing mirror representations of representations, and as our coupling and organizing of particles of conscious will becomes ever more leveraged for manifesting intelligence, no doubt we will begin to toy with ways to enhance qualities of intelligence, empathy, and suitability for membership within civilized communities. Unless politically restrained, we will move beyond techniques of psychological conditioning, and we will begin to experiment with ways to alter our very dna, brain wiring, and capacities for feeling and identifying with plights of others via mirror neurons. Who knows, we may eventually become adept at enhancing even more abstract representations of mirrors, to enhance our empathy for decent, sustainable, meaningful qualities of higher civilization.
Meantime, we retain a need for a word that goes to the philosophical quality of being. We need a word that goes beyond mere measurable, biological manipulation of mirror neurons. It is in that philosophical sense that I would reserve the word "empathy" (as opposed to sympathy or even mirror sympathy): to relate to a philosophically innate capacity for experiencing an immeasurable, qualitative aspect of feedback among and between all perspectives of consciousness and the Field of which they are condensed. I would do this so that one should not need to differentiate between "good empathy" and "bad empathy." IOW, I relate to sympathy for the devil, but, to me, empathy for evil remains fundamentally oxymoronic.
Thanks for the interesting comment. I will review the referenced material! Mirror neurons as a biological basis for representing aspects of oneself in others sounds quite intriguing. I think a philosophical point remains valid, however, that it is more narcissistic than good merely to represent aspects of oneself in one's perception of others. That is, unless one takes oneself to be the gold (or god) standard.
Regarding Mirrors -- see a quote from Wikipedia concering Richard Rorty:
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror") a mind-independent, external reality. If we give up this metaphor, then the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided. A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge.
To enhance our relation with God, we need to speak out against all artificers --- psychologists, humanists, priests, and mullahs alike -- who seek to confine the relation with God under their authority as divisive interpreters. In Psychology, the discovery of mirror neurons, while very important, must not be taken as a means to a social cure all. On the individual level, the discovery can help us recognize a physical basis for social deficits among some. On the social level, we must not forget that many people are easily disposed or conditioned to use such concepts to play the victim card well beyond excess. (As in, "Don't make me out to be responsible, because the responsibility is in your failure to respect my entitlement to be treated for my physical condition or sickness.")
Presently, many of our social institutions have been hijacked by persons who either fail to apprehend that, or who are easily misled by advocates for professional victims. We have a pandemic of abortionists, irresponsible parents, empire building bureaucrats, and social delusion artists. This can be adventitious for opportunizers, but it is the way of death for a civilization.
Our challenge pertains to how to establish boundaries, institutions, and customs to build on individual dispositions for empathy, without conditioning our populace to become easy prey for professional victims, assorted sociopaths, and useful dupes. Given the easy availability of mass marketing and the enticing profits in exploitation, this has become a challenge that we are not meeting.
Humanists tend too often to see the solution in seeking to ridicule and replace all religious based institutions. However, that increases a vacuum that easy money is altogether too ready to exploit. Further, it fails to recognize that we can no more expunge religion than we can expunge God or Beingness. Indeed, humanism itself is filled with religious implications and methods. Since we cannot expunge God, we need to come to terms. We need to apprehend that there may well be a real basis for god beliefs, but that God, being omni-singular, cannot be confined by us behind some ridiculous wall, to some corner, limited to some expiation of air through vocal cords, or reduced to a literalistic interpretation for blessing any transitory culture.
For responsible, middle class society to hope to devise customs and institutions that can be a bulwark against a prevailing and unholy alliance of professional victims and their victimizers, we will need more than talismen devised from law and the science of mirror neurons. We will need a more realistic, assimilating, sustainable, civilizing notion of God. Suggestion: We need to apprehend that God is the Field of consciousness of which each of us is but a perspective. We need to apprehend that God and we seek a directly intuitive dialogue, provided that we choose a path of being innately empathetic enough to listen. We need to apprehend that such is the stuff upon which civilizations can be built and sustained. As things stand, most all our social institutions are opposed to such apprehension, and the maleducation and unsustainable, sissifying codependence of the next generation is only increasing.
We need to retain ways for addressing situations that did not necessarily arise, but that simply abide. God abides; empathy in respect of God abides. Empathy, per se, may best be considered as neither good nor bad, but the actions and persons implementing it may be. Empathy as practiced may be bad. Empathy that falls short of respecting the person in whom it is invested as a morally responsible being is, as practiced, bad. That "falling short" can become endemic to an entire society. When it does, we wind up reducing the morally responsible middle class to tax slaves for armies of passive-aggressive professional victims and America haters. Thus, we become a morally insane, unsound, unsustainable society, at a tipping point. I can understand feelings of sympathy for the devil, but exercising empathy for evil should remain fundamentally loathsome for decent society. Seeds of social demise tend to be sown when scientists no longer apprehend the philosophical aspect of empathy, but imagine they can entirely replace it with empirical based study of mirror neurons.
Many of the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein -- some of the most influential thinkers of the previous 175 years -- seem substantially tilted in respect of Hegel's dialectic, now morphed to a notion that all our experience can be synthesized under a proper comprehension of materialism, as in dialectic materialism. These ideas would be fine -- if limited and related to a proper and reasoned sphere. However, greedy materialism now goes so far as to suppose, incoherently, that we "ought to give up on oughts" (i.e., any notion of a moral order).
Responsible parents will immediately recognize symptoms of tantrum-throwing acting out. This social predilection (sickness?) has now weaved into the fabric of most all our institutions. Indeed, it has gone so radically viral as to threaten the republic. When the moral order falls because no one is accorded legitimacy to lead a moral order, who, then, will troglodytes blame, and under what moral hazard will they usher in the NWO?
Why is empathy, per se, moral? Why is diversity moral? Why is unfettered sexual expression moral? Why is educating our children to see nothing wrong with unfettered sex, drugs, familial irresponsibility, and border and boundary jumping moral? Why is tolerating the proliferation of mosques and nukes among 7th century proponents of apocalypse moral? Why is everything that is toxic to the American republic moral? Why is nihilism moral, while promoting a society that will avail and defend freedom of expression and enterprise is not moral?
Why do Progs seem to find all these things, per se, moral? Show me the dialectic proof, reduced to pure materialism. Or, if Progs do not find all these things to be, per se, moral, then show me, Progs, how you mean to draw, enforce, or allocate the burden of proof for changing existing mores and lines.
If you thought life was hard when we believed in morality, just wait until we don't. Instead of Progs, maybe we should be referring to moral nihilists as Trogs. Or bums, which is what they are.
Does urging moral behavior cause children to rebel, in order to experiment with immorality? Or is the ineffectiveness of any war on immorality a consequence of our brains and society having become marinated through and through with the notion that we are entitled to all manner of immediate gratification? What institutions have we decimated, to allow such a process to have become a flood?
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