Dr. Marco Iacaboni, one of the world’s recognized authorities on the neuroscience of empathy, argues that the discovery of mirror neurons, the neurons responsible for empathy, is “so radical that we should be talking about a revolution, the mirror neuron revolution.” Why? Because of the profound implications for how we think about both individuals and the future of our endangered planet. These neuroscience findings can be the foundation for a fortuitous marriage between science and secular morality but, as Prof. Iacoboni argues, this requires dissolving “the massive belief systems that dominant our societies and that threaten to destroy us.”
My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”Dissident Voice
Education, Neoliberal Culture, and the Brain
Gary Olson | Professor of Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science, Moravian College
(h/t Ian Welsh)
4 comments:
What seems the more radical is the presumption that such anthropomorphic views as philosophy, neuroscience and capitalism all finalize "logic."
All this viewed from a more distant, dispassionate paradigm reduces to a more secular view, closer to the non-partisan view of auto-catalysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set
Once scalable autocatalysis is considered, the occurrence in sophisticated nervous systems of neurons encoding any and all forms of inter-dependency feedback (including "empathy") are a trivial finding. It would be surprising if they didn't exist! We're a million years past that point, and should instead be asking what cultural institutions encode our cultural-empathy, not just what neurons encode our personal empathy.
What's most valuable in this discussion is admission that we are willfully and harmfully mis-educating our electorate, to manage policy by presumption, rather than agile, adaptive operations.
@ SFDTIE, maybe Thatcher is related to Erskine Bowles? :(
Hi Roger. Well, nearly all mainstream economists since 70s are related to her!
I think that the take-away here is that nurture can at least partially override nature.
There is interesing research indicating that even completing Econ 101 taught in the conventional way reduces empathy and increases narrow self-interest.
This is actually an important finding because it shows that subsequent programming can override early imprinting also. Virtually all children are socialized by their parents first and then further in the early years of formal education.
So the reversal takes place culturally and institutionally later on. This is a big deal and shows the cognitive-affective impact of propaganda
Post a Comment