Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3PRmu0tr6k?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=141]
One person whose work on these matters has received considerable attention lately is the British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen. (Yes, cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen aka Borat, but highly regarded as a serious scientist.) He’s the author of The Science of Evil, which seeks to dispose of the problem of evil in part at least by changing its name. “My main goal,” says Baron-Cohen, “is replacing the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term 'empathy.’ ” What he means is that instead of calling someone evil we should say they have no empathy. Baron-Cohen goes to great lengths to posit an “empathy circuit” in the brain whose varying “degrees” of strength constitute a spectrum, ranging from total, 100 percent empathy to “zero degrees of empathy.”
The problem with this idea is that many people wholly lacking in empathy do not take the trouble to exterminate whole populations of people they see as wholly other than themselves. Moreover, if you see only some people as requiring extermination, while you seek to elevate the status of others, then you evidently see the latter as being in some significant way like yourself — which I think suggests a degree of empathy. So it seems pretty clear that the concept of empathy doesn’t do all the explanatory work that Baron-Cohen thinks it does.
“Bruegel suggests a chart of emotions as intricate as the map-making of Ortelius. The sloped back of the kneeling Christ echoes the shape of a cliff or mountain range. The texture of the robes of the Pharisees, all fissures and geological creases, runs straight into this panel’s immediate neighbour: a Bruegel exterior, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. At the feet of the stooped Pharisee is a pebble the size of an egg. And then another, even smaller. The tools of execution are countered by the words Christ traces with his finger in the dust: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” So this act of writing, making the ground into a page, overwhelms the rhetorical snares of speech, the ugly cut and thrust of political interrogation. The enchanted mob, literally petrified, will move again. The stick divided by the Pharisee’s gesturing hands becomes a wand. And the stage, as we remember from John, empties. The stone-throwers walk away, one by one, according to age. Until the kneeling Christ and the standing woman remain, in an awkward reversal of their established sexual status. He tells her to go, to sin no more, to pass from this narrative, and out of our knowledge. A mystery encrypted in one small panel of painted wood now hanging in a London gallery.“ — Iain Sinclair
The act of writing allows me to feel truly alive. Knowing that I have sold 140 million books worldwide (and given an average of three readers per copy, have reached half a billion people), I have always wondered who these readers were who understood so well what I was saying. How could countries with such different cultures, like Israel and Iran, for example, be interested in my books? When I started using social media, without any assistance or planning, two things guided me: the curiosity to find out who reads my work and the challenge of writing on such a different platform.
“Tell me, friends, do you understand how wonderful I am? Because I must tell you, I cannot grasp it. My magnificence has far exceeded my poor abilities to comprehend magnificence. Who am I, really, in comparison to the aura my genius has generated? I can only lower my head, gently, slowly, in a winsome combination of embarrassment and reverence, acknowledging the miracle of my achievement. Now, I regret to say, I thank you generously for your attention, but I must now return to my restrained yet elegant study, lined with lovely books and autographed photos of many famous people expressing their delight in and awe of my writing, and strive for a more accurate count of the people worldwide (and perhaps — who knows? — beyond this world) who love my writing. Ciao.”
Adiaphora: As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great
Adiaphora: As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great
“With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really terrified me…. What does the term ‘greatest theologian’ actually mean? … As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way…. Let me again remind you of the donkey I…
A new study in the journal Science examined the contents of more than 500 million Twitter messages sent in 84 countries over the course of two years, looking for signs of good moods and bad. It found what a lot of us could tell by looking at our own lives.Optimism is reborn with each new day and slowly erodes as we work, study and go about our quotidian affairs. Our mood lifts as we head home to friends, family, entertainment and beer. Our outlook tends to be sunnier on weekends. And speaking of sun, when it starts to pile up in the spring or disappear in the fall, that affects our mood, too.
Most professors are not going to go out of their way to provide career counseling: you have to ask for it, and then you risk seeming more interested in the job than the “Life of the Mind.” There is usually a feeling that you are wasting the professor’s time with issues that can be answered by some combination of career services and peer mentoring. At elite schools, I suspect there remains a belief that graduates can get jobs on the basis of reputation rather than a professional approach to the market. That’s where the graduates of programs outside of the top ten can succeed with good career advising.From the professor’s point of view, effective career advising takes time away from research, and–more important–it requires some honesty about academe that is risky to share with a student. If graduate students we’re forced to acknowledge what’s happening to the academic labor system–and the kind of risks they are taking with their livelihoods–they might leave the program. Most would be right to do so. They will never be competitive for a job that provides healthcare. That’s a conversation no advisor want to have: not while undergraduate courses need teaching assistants and graduate faculty members need people to take their seminars. “So, focus on how much you love your project on Emerson, Milton, and Death. Don’t worry. All of our graduates are employed, if they are talented and hard working.”
To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Bill Pannapacker’s thoughtful response to an interesting and challenging post.
Hilobrow is great.
The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the privacy and data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.And all of this on Google’s dime. They use a back-revved version of Android, not Honeycomb; they don’t use Google’s web browser; they can intermediate user click through on Google search results so Google doesn’t see the actual user behavior. Google’s whole play of promoting Android in order to aggregate user behavior patterns to sell to advertisers is completely subverted by Amazon’s intermediation.
Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.