I had a sudden Thought the other night, a thought that wondrously linked all my other grand and lofty Thoughts, and that Thought was: empathy is both the greatest human attribute and the one humanity should
not be striving to smother.
As I see it, empathy is a woefully undervalued skill. For a start, it's seen as 'childish' or 'girly' (these are insults because to be anything less than a man in this society is unacceptable) - people who cry when they see reports of death which is in no way related to them are pretty likely to hear "harden up", "don't be such a girl/baby", etc. This strikes me as ridiculous because most children,
especially very young children, don't even seem to
have a sense of empathy. It's a skill they haven't gained, because they've never been taught. It's a higher state of consciousness, and it takes a certain amount of self-awareness and intelligence, which very small children have not had the time to develop yet.
Condemnation of empathy is quite at odds with what most parents seem to want to teach their children: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule - the basis for the modern concept of human rights. Don't pull your sister's hair! Why not? Well, because
you don't like it when
she pulls
your hair, so don't do it to her. Good. Empathy has been suggested, and with a bit of luck the child isn't just being stubborn. Perhaps the whippersnapper is being raised in a religious environment, in which case:
Buddhism
"One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter."
Christianity
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matthew 7:12)
Confucianism
"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself."
Hinduism
"One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one's own self."
Islam
"The most righteous of men is the one who is glad that men should have what is pleasing to himself, and who dislikes for them what is for him disagreeable."
Judaism
"You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself"
Taoism
"Regard your neighbor's pain as your own pain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss."
Wicca
"An it harm none do what ye will."
Why is it, then, that it is good and acceptable for governments of large countries with an excessive amount of firepower to throw hissy fits at one another over genuinely stupid, ultimately meaningless things and turn half the world into a battlefield? How does one find their way from such a basic and obvious ethical code that it appears in basically all of the world's major religions in one form or another, to shooting a person? It's quite bizarre that the morality our parents worked so hard to instill in us as children is later viewed as a weakness, not a strength. I can only conclude that this has something to do with the fact that if you view the world on a basically empathetic level - in terms of unnecessary hurt, and unasked for kindness - you're going to find
a lot wrong with it. You might complain. You might begin pointing out to other people how avoidable and pointless the majority of human-generated evil is. This isn't good, because for a start it is much more difficult to govern a thinking mass. It is much more difficult to get them to agree to something as senseless as war if they think for two minutes about what they're doing and why. Thankfully, most people seem to lack the capability to think for two minutes about what they're doing and why, and life carries on much the same as it ever has.
And then, of course, there is the raging debate over whether this rule of reciprocation should apply only to fellow humans, or to animals as well - and if so, which animals, and why? Usually the argument that humans should be the only beneficiaries of basic morality takes the form of something along the lines of "it's just natural to look out for your own", meaning humans should only ever care for other humans and the rest of the species we coexist with be damned. There are so many things wrong with this supremely ignorant point of view that the person espousing it is likely too stupid or too uneducated to even begin to grasp
why it is so painfully wrong, so let's save the step-by-step analysis of
that clusterfuck for another day.
Or, a favourite of mine, "animals don't deserve the same rights as humans because humans are more intelligent". This is actually incredibly offensive and reeks of eugenics, because according to this argument, intellectually disabled people do not deserve human rights. You
may want to go back to the drawing board with that one.
And then there's the wonderfully arrogant "it's a nice idea, but people/society will never accept it so it's pointless to try (because of course I can see the future)." Which is both an unrealistically fatalistic view of the world
and a completely unsubstantiated one. If I could have a dollar for every time someone told every inventor of every major technological breakthrough "it's a nice idea, but it'll never take off" and subsequently was proved very very wrong, I would be quite a few dollars richer.
Add to that a dollar for every time the first wave of feminists got told they were crazy, and that women would
never be allowed to work, or vote, or choose not to have children. Interestingly, there were pamphlets distributed around the time of the first wave that equated women with 'beasts' and appealed to the ridiculousness of the notion of
animals having rights. Hmm...
And more dollars! - for every time anyone said this "racial equality" thing would never catch on, for everyone who claimed that it would
never be a crime to murder a black man in the South - well, I would probably be a millionaire. A
smug millionaire. Ultimately "people will never accept it" is one of the most short-sighted things one could ever say; basically, you've severely underestimated both what an enormous span of time the word "never" encompasses, and the power of propaganda. Being correct helps, but it's not always a requirement, hello North Korea.
Of course, it is acceptable and arguably
essential to throw empathy out the window when faced with a decidedly hostile situation. If your life, family or (to a lesser extent) your worldly possessions are threatened, the only logical thing to do is fight back, figuratively or literally. Frankly I find it disappointing how often people use this excuse for things like attempting to eradicate a species that is only a pest in the sense that that person doesn't much like it. "Sharks are dangerous". This
might make sense if cars, stairs, ladders, alcohol, guns, bees, dogs, snakes, fireworks and spiders were not more likely to hurt/kill you than sharks. Start at the top of the statistic probability and work your way down to the things that cause between 4 and 0 human deaths per year; I expect you'll be trying to eradicate cars, which kill 115 people per day in the United States alone.
