The War on Empathy

by: mattw

Fri Feb 09, 2007 at 21:28:36 PM EST

• Shays going berserk on a woman whose son - a military contractor - died in Iraq for want of promised body armor and other protections;
• The FIC and similar groups opposing the Compassionate Care bill, mandating that rape victims be offered emergency contraception at any hospital providing emergency services;
• CCSU editors cracking themselves up promoting rape as a public good, among other shocking displays of misogyny;
• The lashing out against extending marriage rights to same-sex couples;
• Haranguing Obama over being educated in an Indonesian school for part of his childhood;

It can seem frustrating to progressives (it certainly frustrates me!) to debate these matters with those who seem congenitally incapable of understanding the "other side" of the matter: Shays manages to gloss over the lack of promised safety materials in his rush to pin blame on those killed in Iraq, FICers are unable to comprehend how difficult it might be for a rape victim to get to any treatment facility (and how unreasonable it is to force them to "shop around" to avoid a pregnancy by their rapist), why same-sex couples might want the rights of marriage, or even something as simple as how cultural conditions in other societies influence the sorts of schools available for children.

What we're watching is a conservative war on empathy - where the ability to understand and identify with an unfamiliar situation is being systematically beaten out of public discourse.

Of course, the ongoing crises in Iraq and New Orleans are iconic of this specific moral failing; however, that local governments see the officially-sanctioned treatment of Julie Amero and Ken Krayeske as acceptable illustrates that this is not a problem limited to the world of national politics, but is pervasive even at the most local levels.

There's a phrase (coined by Atrios, I think) to the effect that some of our pundit class are men with "broken brains and souls," and it is shocking that those who feel that the sex lives and reproductive choices of others should be society's top priority are able to see widespread suffering as being simply unworthy or notice, or irrelevant.

But I think it goes beyond that: conservative maxims like "the world is a dangerous place," "every man for himself," contrasting a "moral hierarchy" with "moral relativism", the link between wealth and righteousness, the presupposition that competition is at the root of our well-being... all of these things point to a remarkably inward-looking way of looking at the world, where everything external to one's own identity is treated as an adversary. And the more I see this war on empathy in action, the more I'm convinced that the "cognitive development" approach to politics has especial merit in our current political climate.

This is where George Lakoff comes from in his writing, especially in "Moral Politics," and if you're still with me here, check out the Wikipedia article on the theory of cognitive development, and look at the different stages of development described in Piaget's theory. I'm really struck by how today's loudest conservative arguments seem to come from attitudes prevalent in the concrete operational stage, and that these frustrating debates follow from an inability (or knowing avoidance) of the appropriate use of logic and abstract thinking among the conservative ideological base.

My sense is that it'd be productive to criticize conservatives not in terms of ignorance or incompetence (Bush is most frequently tagged with these), but rather in terms of their stunted cognitive growth, and their failure to understand the world as adults. Conservatism does not idealize the fictive "golden era" of the historical past, but actually depends on the emotional comfort and simplicity of infancy, preferring an inability to grow to the acceptance of a complex, multidimensional world.

Value Pluralism and Edwards' Bloggers

In any case, it's important to understand ideologies you disagree with: value pluralism in practice is quite different from moral relativism, and the former is an important part of a fully developed adult worldview that too many of our conservatives and "radical moderates" lack.

I'd go so far as to say that this is why Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen were targets that the right-wing was so eager to challenge: they've covered the topic of how conservative Christianity interacts with their own values for so long that it'd hardly be a stretch to say that they understand and appreciate fundamentalist logic more fully than a great many of its adherents.

That their use of sarcasm and mockery made them politically vulnerable is hardly relevant: pluralism and empathy were assaulted in the 80s in the form of "postmodernism" and "elitist academics," in the 90s as "political correctness" and "sexual deviancy," and post-2000, with conservatism in a position of authority, in the form of war without guilt or sacrifice, whether it be on entire regions and ethnicities abroad, or on the "morally-inferior" lower classes domestically.

Whether bigots like the Catholic League are taking down Blogger Amanda or Professor Amanda matters very little: their aim is to prevent those of us with different worldviews from understanding one another, and to accomplish that goal, they have to pursue the war on empathy wherever they can.

And, while it's helpful that pieces like the CCSU "pro-rape" article drift to the surface every so often to help us to identify the social deficiencies of the American conservative movement, overcoming those deficiencies requires a smart and coherent progressive movement and a generation of work and education. And there's no time like the present to get started.