Roman Krznaric — The one thing that could save the world: Why we need empathy now more than ever

The passion versus reason dichotomy is bogus. They are inextricably linked in brain function.

As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it, “Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice. Empathy is the reason we have the principles of freedom and fairness, which are necessary components of justice.”

Empathy is the affective component of apprehension of universality, as invariance is the cognitive basis of it. Equal rights are based on the feeling of oneness with others as members of the same species and the knowledge that beyond individual differences there is an invariant aspect of humanity as shared nature. While everyone is unique as an individual, all are the same as persons who are equal before the law and possess equal rights.

Salon
The one thing that could save the world: Why we need empathy now more than ever
Roman Krznaric

Vladimir Putin got this right.

In an unexpected remark Friday, the Russian president spoke of the “meaning of life,” saying that for him “in general” it is love that matters.

Briefly digressing from politics, Putin ventured a philiosophical observation that “multifaceted” love is the basis of all actions and the essence of being.

"The meaning of our whole life and existence is love," Putin told his audience at the 15th Congress of the Russian Geographical Society. "It is love for the family, for the children, for the motherland. This is a multifaceted phenomenon; it lies at heart of any of our behaviors."

RT, Putin: ‘Love is the meaning of life’

Spiritual maturity is determined by the universality of one's love. An expanded heart encompasses all.

Elias Isquith — Right-winger’s “no compassion” crusade: Conservative writer William Voegeli unloads

In order to hear why “no compassion” should be treated as a political mantra (and not just a great Talking Heads song), Salon recently spoke with Voegeli over the phone. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Salon
Right-winger’s “no compassion” crusade: Conservative writer William Voegeli unloads
Elias Isquith

Ira Chernu — If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from

It all began when I was re-reading Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (trying to escape from obsessively tracking the DC rollercoaster.) As Wood observes, the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians divided over basically the same issue that plagues us now: How much of a role should government play in people's lives? (Though the clash back then was so fierce, and split American society so sharply, that it makes today's politics look rather mild by comparison.

But Wood takes us deeper into the substance of the issue. Jeffersonians were willing to limit government only because they assumed that there was "a principle of benevolence ... a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being." They were founding an American nation upon the European Enlightenment's belief that "there was 'a natural principle of attraction in man towards man' [as Hume put it], and that these natural affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together."

This was exactly the point that frightened Alexander Hamilton most. He summed up his opponents' view quite accurately: "As human nature shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan," based on common moral sense and the spread of affection and benevolence, government eventually "will become useless, and Society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles." Then Hamilton, the greatest conservative of his day, dismissed this vision of shrinking government as "a wild and fatal scheme."

The Republicans who now control the House obviously have a very different view of what it means to be a true conservative. But that doesn't mean they have become Jeffersonians. Not by any means. In many ways they would be closer to Hamilton, who scorned Jefferson's trust in human nature.

AlterNet
If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from
Ira Chernu

Melissa Hogenboom — Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research....

Christian Keysers from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and senior author of the study, said it could change the way psychopathic criminals were viewed.

"The predominant notion had been that they are callous individuals, unable to feel emotions themselves and therefore unable to feel emotions in others.

"Our work shows it's not that simple. They don't lack empathy but they have a switch to turn it on and off. By default, it seems to be off."

The fact that they have the capacity to switch empathy on, at least under certain conditions, could have a positive side to it, Prof Keysers said.

"The notion psychopaths have no empathy at all was a bleak prospect. It would make it very hard for them to have normal moral development 

"Now that we've shown they have empathy - even if only in certain conditions - we can give therapists something to work with," Prof Keysers told BBC News.
But he explained that it remained unclear how this wilful capacity for empathy could be transformed into the spontaneous empathy most of us have.

BBC News
Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch
Melissa Hogenboom | Science reporter

Gary Olson — Education, Neoliberal Culture, and the Brain

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)

Sally Kohn — Activists Use Love and Empathy to Create New Alliances and Possibilities with the 'Enemy'

AlterNet
Activists Use Love and Empathy to Create New Alliances and Possibilities with the 'Enemy'
Sally Kohn | YES! Magazine

Actually, we tried "flower power" in the Sixties and were met with brutal repression by the authorities, often the elite security forces of the time that were clearly distinguishable from ordinary policy officers. Since then, the entire domestic security force has been militarized under DHS ("interior minstry").

While my conviction is that love is the way since it is the manifestation of the interconnectedness of all beings, activists should be under no illusion about the likely reaction of authorities to any strategy and tactic that threatens their position. Gandhi's non-violent resistance was non-violent from only one side, as was Martin Luther King's modeled on it.

Paul Bloom — The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy

The case is against empathy as the sole explanation for morality, although it does figure prominently in a comprehensive moral theory.

The New Yorker
The Baby In The Well: The case against empathy
Paul Bloom
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

See also Book Talk: Of apes and atheists - is empathy evolution? by Ed Stoddard at Reuters.

Dirk Ehnts — Sympathy for the deficit – or better empathy?

It seems that prosocial behavior is acquired, not hardwired into the genes. If that is so, the recent failure of empathy in the European Monetary Union has much deeper roots than financial problems. Perhaps antisocial behavior was rewarded too much in the past, with taxes falling for the wealthier part of Europeans, tax flight being more and more common and financial crimes were decriminalized.

econoblog101
Sympathy for the deficit – or better empathy?
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School for Economics and Law

Two relevant recent findings. First, taking university courses in economics makes on less pro-social, and secondly, elevated social status and wealth also make one less pro-social. Maybe there are some lessons here.

Humans are 'naturally nice'

New research shows there is a biological basis for co-operative and empathetic behaviour.

Read it at Al Jazeera

Humans are 'naturally nice'

Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.

"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.

New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as co-operation, said de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

Until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were "nasty" at the core but had developed a veneer of morality - albeit a thin one, de Waal told scientists and journalists from some 50 countries at the conference in Vancouver, Canada.

But human children - and most higher animals - are "moral" in a scientific sense, because they need to co-operate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, he said.Research has disproved the view, dominant since the 19th century, typical of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's argument that morality is absent in nature and something created by humans, said de Waal.

And common assumptions that the harsh view was promoted by Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution, are also wrong, he said.

Mainstream economics is based on game theory, and game theory presupposes that humans are individualistic and driven by self-interest, so that they are naturally competitive rather than naturally cooperative.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism takes this to its logical conclusion, in which the ideal individual is one having no social (altruistic) tendencies. Rand, following Nietzsche, attributes altruism to nurture instead of nature, viewing it as a consequence of deficient culture, largely owing to religious ideology. Interestingly, Rand says she is an Aristotelian, but Aristotle considered the human being (anthropos) to be a social animal (Politics 1.2), and the state (polis) to be the highest from of community.

Rand's view is that of ontological individualism, a curious view of human nature in the history of thought. It is the basis of extreme methodological individualism assumed by a rational representative agent motivated by exclusive pursuit of maximum utility.

In contrast, biologist and MMTer Roger Erickson continually emphasizes the importance of increasing the rate of adaptability through coordination and exploration of options as the scientifically substantiated method of meeting challenges.

Empathy and class

The depiction of the rich and cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol” is backed up with scientific evidence, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.

The researchers found that people in lower socio-economic classes are more physiologically attuned to the suffering of others than their middle- and upper-class counterparts.

“It’s not that the upper-classes are coldhearted,” UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published the journal Emotion, explained. “They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven’t had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives.”

The study was based on three experiments conducted on more than 300 ethnically diverse young adults.

Read the rest at Raw Story
Rich people less empathetic than the poor: study
by Eric W. Dolan

Those pesky mirror neurons

“One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull,” Keltner said. “Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The ‘thousand points of light’—this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society—is improbable, psychologically.”

Rats hardwired for empathy?

As described by Science Daily, “After several daily restraint sessions, the free rat learned how to open the restrainer door and free its cagemate. Though slow to act at first, once the rat discovered the ability to free its companion, it would take action almost immediately upon placement in the test arena.”

“We are not training these rats in any way,” one of the designers of the experiment explained. “These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal. We’re not showing them how to open the door, they don’t get any previous exposure on opening the door, and it’s hard to open the door. But they keep trying and trying, and it eventually works.”

Further variations on the experiment appeared to confirm that the rats were acting out of pure empathy. For example, they would not bother to open the door when a toy rat was placed in the tube. However, they would open it even if it released their companion into a separate area, meaning they were not just looking for company.

And not only that, but when the rats were offered two tubes — one of which contained their companion and the other a pile of chocolate chips — they were as likely to free the other rat first as they were to start by gobbling all the chocolate. There were also cases in which the rat retrieved the chocolate chips first but didn’t eat them until after freeing the other and sharing the chocolate with them.

Read the post and watch video at Raw Story
Study shows lab rats would rather free a friend than eat chocolate

by Muriel Kane

Are rats a step ahead of Ayn Rand and Randites on the evolutionary scale?