
Selective Empathy Can Chip Away at Civil Society - laurex
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53476/how-selective-empathy-can-chip-away-at-civil-society
======
roenxi
What about the hypothesis that focusing on empathy is the problem, rather than
its application the cure?

Gloomy as it is to say, technological superiority has been very comfortable
but doesn't offer any new way of tackling the fact that humans are basically
the same as they have been for the last millennium; large groups of people who
simply are not going to agree with each other.

What is important is maintaining the institutions that have been wildly
successful in mediating conflict between diverse groups, and that all the
different tribes of a society make an effort to accept that institutions are
more fair and reasonable than the alternatives.

Empathy does not resolve genuine disagreements. If it solves a problem, the
problem was one of perception rather than reality.

~~~
nilskidoo
And we should all pretend that the internet resolves conflicts at any level? I
think the widescale lack of communicating without empathizing pheromones is
quite obviously making a shitstorm of the whole wide world. But keep culting
with your bad self.

~~~
wolfgke
> I think the widescale lack of communicating without empathizing pheromones
> is quite obviously making a shitstorm of the whole wide world.

I rather believe that deep empathy for your own groups is the cause of many
shitstorms. To quote from the article:

"For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the
suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as
classic examples of people afflicted with an "excess of empathy. They feel the
suffering of their people.""

~~~
nilskidoo
But the inability to infringe on the rights of others is not itself an
infringement of any actual right. That is an impossible lesson to be learned
by us here in the west.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on
average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40
percent!

I apologise in advance to folks in the humanities for my skepticism, but when
you're quantifying something like "empathy" which is not well defined and
canot be measured directly, then a quantitative difference on its own doesn't
mean much. That 40% shift may be because the questionnaire itself changed over
time, or because it didn't change enough with the times, or any other factor
that is has nothing to do with the actual "empathy" of the subjects.

Edit: I was once given a personality test by a psychologist [for reasons I'm
not at liberty to disclose, like]. One of the questions was along the lines of
"a holy man can heal a patient by laying on hands: true or false?". At the
time, I had no idea what that even meant. "Laying on hands"? What, like a D&D
Paladin? Years later I learned that some evangelical sects in the US practice
this as some kind of prayer or ritual. The personality test I took was most
likely drafted originally in the US and there were many more questions that I
found very confusing, like that one. So, if I had no idea what many of the
questions meant, what exactly was that questionnaire supposed to be measuring?
Yet I believe it was some standardised psychological test given to people
around the globe.

------
b0rsuk
Tribal instincts are super strong, that's been proven over and over again
[citation needed]. I'm afraid long-term empathy for the sake of Other can't
work. It only seems to work when people still remember major disasters and
wars. It's inevitable these fade away, isn't it? (except for very, very long
term, when evolution and/or genetic engineering might change this)

In my country anti-Muslim sentiment is strong, made stronger by the government
and its alliance with the church. When I see people get carried away, I often
recommend them to learn more about Muslims to "know your enemy better". It's a
trick and I think we need further studies to see if it's more likely to
backfire (people hit another group they perceive as enemy much harder because
they now know their weaknesses) or work towards peace and cooperation.

(I'm not a fan of any religion myself, as for Islam my main beef is it doesn't
distinguish between the religion and the secular state. It can therefore be
called a form of totalitarianism)

~~~
speedplane
> Tribal instincts are super strong, that's been proven over and over again

Tribal instincts aren't as strong as you think. Every civil and egalitarian
right that people have gained since the enlightenment are the result of
overcoming tribal instincts. The definition of a "tribe" is more often than
not mostly a social construct. If society can set it up, it can tear it down.

~~~
nostrademons
The _definition_ of tribes is a social construct. The _existence_ of tribes is
not.

Reformers who seek to abolish tribalism usually find that they've simply
redrawn the boundary lines and replaced one set of tribes with another. The
dogmatism of the Church gets replaced by the patriotism of the State. Racism
gets replaced by classism. Discrimination on appearance gets replaced by
discrimination on education.

Sometimes just this redefinition of groups is progress: I'd argue that group
boundaries based upon choices or values are more useful than group boundaries
based on origins or genetics. But the utopian vision of "and the world will be
as one" is naive, and ignores basically all recorded history.

~~~
Mirioron
> _Reformers who seek to abolish tribalism usually find that they 've simply
> redrawn the boundary lines and replaced one set of tribes with another._

I completely agree with this. It seems as though that many(all?) people have
some group that's the Other and it's acceptable to attack them in various
ways. For example, it used to be socially acceptable to attack nerds, but it
isn't anymore, however, people have simply picked new groups that are
acceptable targets that are more specific, such as anti-PC people. What seems
to have improved though, is that we seem to condone extreme measures less and
less. Nerds used to be physically bullied, but that seems to be less
acceptable nowadays.

While I think that the ideas of inclusiveness aren't going to work, because
there's always going to be some Other that's acceptable to be demonized (eg
incels right now) by the in-group, I hope that the demonization becomes less
and less extreme over time.

~~~
b0rsuk
Around here there are tons of image memes about vegans and anti-vaxers. On
websites that are mostly associated with the more liberal side. Apparently
not. I guess it's just a desire to unite by having a common enemy or at least
a target for ridicule.

------
Aloha
I would argue that failure to presume good faith does more to harm civil
society than a lack of empathy. Perhaps presumption of good faith is a form of
empathy - but I don't need to empathize with someones point of view to presume
they have their own very good reasons, and are trying to advance the argument
fairly.

------
debatem1
Seems like a call for what used to be called enlightened self interest-- the
knowledge that "there but for the grace of God go I, or any man" can also be
read as a call for a less punishing, more compassionate way of life.

------
nostrademons
It seems like the type of empathy taught in the 1970s had a very specific
purpose: prevent the world they knew from going up in flames through nuclear
war.

And the type of tribal empathy people show together has the same purpose:
prevent _their_ world (in the form of values, customs, traditions, and other
things they hold sacred) from going up in flames through inaction and the
erosion of others not holding those believes.

It makes me wonder how much empathy is coupled with fear. I've read that the
post-WW2 unionized capitalism, the Marshall plan, all of the egalitarian civil
society built up in the 50s and beyond was supported by the capitalist elite
because just about everything was viewed as superior to the devastation of
WW2. People were willing to sacrifice some of their personal wealth because
the alternative was losing all of it, and oftentimes their lives as well.

Memories of war have faded from most of the developed world. Perhaps it'll
take a refresher before people remember why all of those institutions that
preserve social stability were necessary in the first place.

------
lpu4o74p
Maybe Civil Society's empathy was exploited a bit too much, a bit too
brazenly. If that's the reason, insisting the show must go on won't get you
much empathy.

------
thinkingemote
I'm not sure about the statement that people have less empathy these days. I'm
also skeptical when people say this or that group has low empathy.

Rather I think all humans have a store of active empathy which they can spend
or allocate in different ways. most common is empathy to family and close
friends and then to the neighborhood. Active empathy is where empathising does
something.

That some groups of people seem to show lack of empathy could be a sign that
the observer should empathize more with that group to locate where and how
their active empathy is.

Empathy is neutral too. The worst "monsters" of nazi regimes were often
fuelled by empathy.

------
im3w1l
If I show you a kindness, will you reciprocate, do nothing or try to extract
more?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
If you give a person kindness and they are not able to reciprocate, is it
selfish of you to expect such a thing?

What if a person needs kindness more than once? A broken arm or leg, for
example? Is a single kindness enough?

------
Razengan
Almost 10,000 years of civilization and we’re still trying to figure ourselves
out.

Why is it so hard to codify “Don’t be a dick”?

Because then what do you do about someone who is being a dick?

But what if they just were being a dick to someone who was being a dick?!

Who decides what counts as being a dick? What if they are dicks?

------
neilv
One other possible dotcom connection, to the alleged decline in empathy...

Before the initial IPO gold rush, there seemed to be relatively more
thoughtfulness and altruisim among CS people, about futures of this
technology.

Then the norm became CS students (and sometimes professors) talking like MBA
students (who, previously, were very different, and complementary). Talk of
futures became simplistic, self-focused, and self-promoting, and often seemed
disingenuous.

If we look at the way social media works today, one interpretation is that
some dotcom founders have remade the world in their image.

------
ineedasername
The article very much seems to reverse cause and effect. It cites numerous
examples of selective empathy or lack of empathy coinciding with the erosion
of civil society, but never clearly explains how that empathy element caused
the issue. Instead, it seems much more likely that our hyper partisan
devolution into more segments and tribal in groups and outgroups is itself
that erosion in civil society and lack of empathy or such that is only
reserved for your in group is a symptom, an effect rather than the cause.

------
sitkack
Random acts of kindness was a popular phrase when I was a teen. It always
struck me as a motto for a psychopath, see someone in need, roll a die, and
then act. I know that wasn’t the intent. But it should have been, strive for
more kindness. But it is ieasier for folks to act once and feel better than to
change their median behavior. It seems like one time changes don’t move the
average, that behavior is conserved and we do worse things at other times but
our ego masks any sort of self reflection.

------
devoply
Or just not caring is a step up from hating. Having no opinions is better than
having hate. What seems to have happened in America is that the blue collar
working class has become disenfranchised both economically and before Trump
politically because of business decisions made by the executive class and they
want someone to blame.

Nobody forced America to move all of its blue collar jobs to China and the 3rd
world, that was a political decision. Though you can make up reasons of why
it's economically impossible now to compete with 3rd world manufacturing these
are post-hoc arguments. Before the fact it was perfectly possible to continue
to manufacture goods in the US by moving manufacturing to poorer states and
innovating as much as possible to keep the costs down.

The wealthy in America have no empathy for the poor and the poor hate on the
immigrants while not correctly assigning the blame for their economic woes.

Going forward with this whole basic income idea, it's likely the executive
class will try to turn it into a work for food and housing program. Where you
can get a basic income but you have to work for it at jobs the companies don't
really need to employ for but are simply offering to increase employment in
return for a basic income check. That will offset any amount that the
companies pays for basic income taxes.

------
itronitron
I think teaching empathy in schools is problematic, because students will see
through the bullshit of being graded by any teacher who is encouraging them to
be empathetic and attribute that BS to empathy as a concept.

------
fromthestart
>young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own
generation — 40 percent!

Meaningless without context.

------
muah-dihb
This is actually a key mechanism for what's wrong, socially, with pretty much
everything these days. It fits right in with the concept of The Long Tail.

We get to selectively apply our preferences now, for our unique musical tastes
to hear any artist, and thus only those we like; an infinite choice of movies,
and thus never the fixed schedules of centralized broadcasts; we can binge on
an entire series in a weekend, commercial free, viewing dozens of hours,
watching itall in one sitting; browse unlimited archives of text, applying
search appliances to a corpus of text, to randomly access select passages ona
whim, in ways notpossible with a conventional library of physical volumes.

So too, now, we apply this tendency to the company we keep. We ghost people.
We provide votes to rank performance, and perform to score points in a
virtualized hypertext context ( _it 's not really a community, it's just web
pages still, despite all you may know about interaction, javascript, live
video streams, chat, texts, telecommunications and telepresence, social media
profiles, blogs, photo sharing... even AR and VR, and second life type
avatars... it's all actually still pretty primitive with leaky abstractions
everywhere, to be quite honest_). Dating random people has exploded in ways
not possible with classified ad sections in print media, or even dating
services that played match maker, decades ago.

So it's this impulsive, push-button tendency toward instant gratification,
creeping in atthe edges of every facet society. The combinatorial explosion of
random access awareness to everything we can expose ourselves to, limited only
by the pace we set for ourselves. Far from sheltered in an informational
sense, now armed with a much broader context of understanding, determined by
whichever choices are fortuitous enough to present themselves to us in an
endless chain of relational links or rungs we climb, as we negotiate a
landscape of media consumption to learn and inform ourselves. With this
awareness, we build the context to pass further judgement, stored in a buffer
of medium-term memory, like driving at night, with the high beams on,
following road signs, but only ever being led to fast food pit stops, big box
stores and gas stations, and hotels. Never a home to reside in. No family to
speak of, just strangers on the street, it seems.

So that buffer of medium-term memory dictates which peers receive love, who
gets the ranking votes, why we buy junk food from this gas station, but not
the other.

It's not going away.

It can't be simply destroyed and directly eliminated.

The void left behind will force something to regrow in its place.

This way of life is here to stay. It's going to harden and calcify in this
disposition, unless we find a new way; a replacement to unseat it. To fix the
broken parts. A way forward.

------
soniman
Ammon Bundy is the example they use? Ammon Bundy supports migrants because
he's a rancher and wants cheap labor on his ranch. He wants taxpayers to bear
the cost so he can privately profit. That's why people are suspicious about
"empathy," it's usually a way of manipulating your emotions so that other
people can profit.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Wow, skeptical comments like this strongly reinforce the article's point. To
question whether empathy is helpful and suspect the motives of those who are
promoting it? Ammon Bundy is a fellow human being with struggles of his own -
isn't that enough? It doesn't mean you have to agree with his choices (you can
even call them morally wrong).

Empathy is merely a concern for fellow human beings, not emotional
manipulation, despite the fact that some people attempt to manipulate others.

~~~
chongli
Empathy is a concern for _some_ fellow human beings, not all. I think you'll
find that most people draw the lines of empathy around the identity group to
which they belong and exclude from empathy those their group has identified as
the "other."

Empathy is an evolutionary tool for promoting group cohesiveness. It's not
likely to extend to all human beings, unless we make contact with a hostile
alien civilization.

~~~
TimTheTinker
> Empathy is a concern for some fellow human beings, not all.

> Empathy is an evolutionary tool for promoting group cohesiveness.

Empathy is an emotional attitude we can choose to extend to others. The fact
that some people don't feel empathy towards everyone else doesn't mean that's
morally right.

Evolution has nothing to do with our moral choices, and it's no excuse either.
Extending kindness and dignity to others is far more effective at creating
social good than hoping (or waiting until) aliens show up.

If you insist on a pure-naturalistic philosophy (which I do not, but hear me
out), consider human society as an _emergent_ property with attributes of its
own that are irreducible to natural (or evolutionary, or whatever) causes. As
long as we _can_ choose the right as individuals, we carry a moral obligation
to do so.

~~~
chongli
_Empathy is an emotional attitude we can choose to extend to others. The fact
that some people don 't feel empathy towards everyone else doesn't mean that's
morally right._

You're entering dangerous territory here. It's not a well-accepted fact that
empathy is something you can choose to extend to everyone. On the contrary,
there's ample evidence to suggest that we cannot extend it to everyone [1]. To
then ascribe moral character to a function which is biologically limited is to
run afoul of the ethical principle that _ought implies can_ [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion_fatigue)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ought_implies_can](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ought_implies_can)

~~~
TimTheTinker
Compassion fatigue notwithstanding, it _absolutely_ is possible to believe
that all human beings are worthy of dignity, respect, and empathy.

To have decided ahead of time that everyone is worthy of empathy is most of
the battle. Yes, we all have limited emotional resources. Millions of murdered
people doesn’t move us like it ought to. But love and empathy are like muscles
— practicing them improves our capacity to do so.

It also helps to be emotionally healthy and in healthy, loving relationships.
(And if I may say so, knowing and being loved/forgiven by God provides a
wellspring of emotional life that nothing else can; I’m a Christian.)

------
patrickg_zill
After abusing the great majority of people in the US for the last 50 years
both economically and socially, the elite are now surprised by the fact that
some of the people have noticed.

~~~
doktrin
If you're implying that abuse by elites is some new phenomenon within the last
50 years I completely disagree. In fact social inequality has probably been
more favorable and egalitarian during the last 50 years than basically any
other time in human history, and US history. There's always room for
improvement, but it's worth remembering how far we've actually come.

~~~
jhbadger
I think a lot of the argument over whether "things are getting better" as
Pinker et al. claim and "things are getting worse" as Piketty et al. claim is
the time scale involved. (Nearly) everybody agrees that we are living in a
better world than existed before WWII. The question is are we continuing to
get more egalitarian or have things begun to regress.

