House of Eratosthenes

2. the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another…
:
He felt great empathy with the poor.

My lately-arriving epiphany here is two-fold:

One, this is testable. Or at least it should be. If you can truly understand and be aware of someone else’s thoughts and feelings, then you should be able to predict what they’ll want and what they’re going to do, just like a real science should be able to predict things. But — a lot of people who have empathy, in fact lots and lots of empathy, can’t even come close. Their concern for “the poor” might be genuine, but if you talk with them about it for a little while, you see some of the things these poor would want to do, the empathic folks can’t see coming. Like, for example, put in a solid day’s honest work for that “minimum” wage, or choose their own health insurance plan. Although their so-called “empathy” might be sincere, and qualify for the dictionary definition in every other way. The word therefore describes two different things: An honest desire to feel the pain of others, in service of some kind of goal to ease that pain and/or to keep more of it from being inflicted — and, access to a conduit of unspoken communication involving true and more useful understanding. The former might not necessarily be able to predict behavior, although the latter can. These things are disconnected, because another outside observer might be able to boast of superior results in predicting behavior of the target, even though he wouldn’t, to coin a phrase, piss on him if he was on fire. Also: Both these qualities are valid things to assess, and to comment-upon, so I’m reticent about labeling one “false” and the other one “true.” It’s just another word being abused by our language, by being deployed to describe two things; the situation is nothing more and nothing less than that.

Like, For Example, Working at Hooters Two: Apart from being disconnected, these two qualities being described by a common word are disjoined. Find me someone who offers bushels and bushels of the one, better-than-even-odds he will be wholly lacking in the other. E1 times E2 equals K. That is my true “didja ever notice” moment; I try to think of someone I’ve known who, as they pondered my various plights or someone else’s, showed ample measures of both kinds. There are very few examples, although the bar is lowered in situations that are especially dire. The guy holding on to the sagebrush to keep from falling over the cliff, probably doesn’t want to die, that’s an easy call to make. It’s after the crisis is averted that we see, those who have the greatest “don’t want anything bad to happen to that guy” empathy, are most sorely lacking in the “predict what he’ll want to do” empathy.

Feminists are a great example of this. All those women feeling empathy for other women, crusading tirelessly for their ability to “choose”…sooner or later they run into a woman who says “Thanks for giving me the choice, now I choose to have the child, stay home, and raise him into a strong, capable man who will make me proud, while my husband works.” They have no idea what to make of it. Truly bewildered. Baffled. Like a spoiled and sheltered pet puppy coming nose-to-nose with a deer for the first time…except…the dog learns about the deer. Militant feminists can’t even reconcile their tiny little world with the occasional spectacle of a woman who cherishes her choice, and uses it to choose things the feminists would never have chosen for her.

A lot of liberalism is like that. But this is a phenomenon much bigger than liberalism.

A lot of liberalism is like that. But this is a phenomenon much bigger than liberalism.

Couldn’t agree more. You said it better than I could. I was trying to get at something like this here. A lot of people who are chock full of E1 “empathy” really aren’t — they “care” so very very deeply about the poor because their caring enables them to append “and that’s why I’m such a great person!” to every “solution” they propose. It’s grace on the cheap.

And this is certainly not confined to liberals. 9/11 pretty much retired the phrase “compassionate conservatism,” but the idea — one of the worst I’ve heard — lingers on. Conservatism by its nature is DISpassionate. It evaluates the world as it is, not how it should be, or could be, or how we really really really Hopenchange wish it to be. The poor, for instance, are poor for a reason. Sometimes those reasons are beyond their control — that’s where charity comes in. But often they’re not, and “compassion” only confuses the issue — we have to pretend that bad decisions weren’t bad, that culture plays no part in economic outcomes, that everyone has equal potential, &c. So nothing gets fixed, nobody’s suffering is alleviated, but hey, at least we can feel good about ourselves while avoiding unpleasant thoughts.
- Severian | 07/06/2013 @ 10:38
[…] ERATOSTHENES– DJEver Notice? LXXX; Daniel’s Post-Independence Day Thoughts; How to Thank a Soldier, by […]
- Steynian 479st | Free Canuckistan! | 07/07/2013 @ 16:34
A lot of what gets called “empathy” is really just sympathy… they feel bad, but it ain’t got a thing to do with what comes next. It’s a lot lower down on the scale, barely this side of complete indifference in some cases. And on the other side of the scale, people will sometimes call empathy the more-comprehensive term “compassion,” though I argue that compassion is a lot more than that.
- nightfly | 07/09/2013 @ 12:35
[…] NOT TRUST SARAH PALIN “One Man” Endowed, Huh? Feminist Make-Up Tutorial Hope and Fear DJEver Notice? LXXX Daniel’s Post-Independence Day Thoughts How to Thank a Soldier, by George W. […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:23
[…] from that, there is a natural desire of Medicators to elevate process over outcome, and a contrary and complementary desire among those on the other side, to elevate outcome over […]
- Memo For File CLXXXII | Rotten Chestnuts | 07/21/2013 @ 14:22

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Saturday, July 6th, 2013