Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of 29. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 5:28 PM for 10h 39m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority is scheduled to meet at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1978, the first computer bulletin board system is created (CBBS in Chicago).
We live in a time where one is urged, where everyone is urged, to be empathetic. Some of us were born in an earlier time, when there was a plain distinction between sympathy and empathy. Of that distinction: while to be sympathetic was to show concern for others, to be empathetic was to feel the feelings of others. Under this distinction, while one might have remorse even for an adversary’s misfortunes (accidents, illnesses, etc.), one would not feel an adversary’s feelings (of domination, bigotry, etc.).
This useful distinction runs through this libertarian blogger’s outlook. One can and should have sympathy even for the reprehensible without sharing the cravings and appetites that make them reprehensible. (Empathy carries a burden; it’s no easy condition. It requires strength of mind.)
As it turns out, this distinction has been commonly abandoned. Some feel that expressing sympathy is condescending, and that a true sharing of others’ feelings is the proper expression of one’s humanity. Those who have abandoned sympathy for empathy on this ground are mistaken. One can care for others, even the malevolent, without sharing their dark thoughts.
Some others, including many populists, have evidently abandoned the distinction between sympathy and empathy because they have neither. They luxuriate in the infliction of emotional or physical injury on others. Adam Serwer is right about these types: for them, Cruelty is the Point.
To rationalize their conduct, or foolishly to trust them, is to place oneself at a disadvantage. Why these populists are the way they are matters less than recognizing their malevolence.
This device corkscrews itself into the ground like a seed:
Noteworthy distinction. Something that has been discussed in our home in occasion. While not peer reviewed – article linked below I would be curious to know your opinion.
Good morning, and thank you for this article.
At it turns out, I don’t doubt there’s truth in the assessment that familiarity with groups can increase empathy. In almost all cases, that’s a welcome outcome.
My own distinction between sympathy and empathy is now an anachronism, a teaching from another time and place that is more cultural than strictly psychological. (I have no training in psychology, leaving me the last person to make a professional assessment.)
I would encourage association and intimacy between diverse groups, as both a natural expression and a social good. In my own (now idiosyncratic) assessment, this would build sympathy, and also, yes, empathy. When one sees children playing, adults happily socializing, or even animals frolicking, there should be both feelings of sympathy (wanting them to have enjoyable experiences) and also in those cases an empathy (an ability to understand their pleasures as feelings). A person lacking sympathy or empathy in those cases would be emotionally troubled, to use a layman’s term.
My concern is narrow, apart from those happy cases: will, or should, one crave the cravings of the malevolent? That cannot be a moral goal, it cannot lead, it seems to me, to a well-individuated personality. There’s a trope that says it takes a madman to stop a madman. One hopes that’s false, as I believe it is. While it’s natural and advantageous to share feelings in cases of friendship and consensual intimacy (to both understand and to feel others’ feelings), we do not — and here I would say should not — approach the wicked by feeling their feelings. In those cases, it seems better to me to substitute cold examination, dispassionate study, for a shared feeling.
One might sympathize with some aspects of a miscreant’s predicament (how he became that way, whether he is treated fairly even when he is malign) without getting closer still, and feeling his feelings. At least I should so hope.
My distinction between sympathy and empathy applies only when encountering the dangerous and devious, to stop at a deserved sympathy and go no farther into empathy.
I respect those few who can go farther without personal compromise. I’m sure there are people so capable. For most of us, I would think, a stop at sympathy (without venturing into empathy as I have defined it) seems practical when confronting wickedness.
In a more tranquil time, we would not face this concern. Providence did not deny us more agreeable circumstances; we are, collectively, responsible for our own broken society (‘what we have done, what we have left undone.’) One looks around, and sees too many who have slipped from the last generation’s principled positions into atavistic and nihilist doctrines. That ilk is to be opposed, with sympathetic justice toward them, but without acquiring their own dark cravings.
We will come through this time, but it will take a studied, disciplined diligence, I think.