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)
