Empathy and epistemic closure
It's hard to know what my title should be, but here's my comment:I think you're arguing that if we support each other, and consider what's best for other people as much as what's best for us, we will all make it. All 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 billion people, and every animal and plant, will go on into the cooperative future.
But suppose you believe that everything's going to hell. You believe that there are too many people on the earth. If you believe, deep down, that we're not all going to make it, empathy is a real problem. You start hardening yourself, preparing for riots and chaos, deciding who you will and won't support. Deciding which group gives you the best chance of survival, of making it through. Make that decision, and that group accepts you as one their own, then you're committed to that survival strategy. The closer you think the riots are, the more you can't back out, the more you have to go along if the beliefs of the group you've decided is your survival strategy start to make no sense. The more you're committed to that group as your only chance of survival, the more you want to make it strong and purge it of anything that might make it weak. Groups within the group emerge. Of course the riots and chaos are dealt with by a fundamental concept, "the end-times", which goes close to one-to-one with environmental disaster, but gives it meaning, of a sort.
Is this "stupid"? Much has been made above of "smart people can deal with complex understandings", but the bandying about of "stupid" is just the opposite. If environmental disaster leads to a good approximation of the end-times, with only a few million people left alive in the US, 50 million across the world, say, then on the liberal gold-standard of meaning, evolution, it is arguable that it is who is left who will not be stupid, as a matter of definition. Can we be sure that only empathic people will be left? Or does it seem more of those who will be left will be people who have decided to harden themselves to outsiders, but to cooperate fiercely within their little group?
If there come to be riots and chaos, smart liberals may find themselves defending their own. By writing this comment, I suppose I can't call myself a smart liberal, but since I have residual empathy, Good Luck.
2 comments :
Peter,
I first read your post Sat. morning and I'm still thinking of it. You not only captured an irony, you raised it to a level of conundrum, when you note that the empathic- which we would consider more "evolved" (at least by Christian ideology)- will be out lasted by the "stupid".
I myself would argue that "End Time" scenarios are indeed environmental problems caused by our own hands, and that the God language of the ancient writers comes from their cosmology.
Therefor, I would argue that the most salient message of end time scriptures, is not some prediction of a second coming, but that we as Human Being are warned ahead of time what our self destruction would look like, and we go ahead and self destruct anyway.
I'm choosing to believe that if there's enough of us, we can change the vector of our momentum, back toward an horizon and away from the cliff's edge- which only looks like an horizon from the pov of a lemming.
P.S. Did I use momentum and vector metaphorically correct?
I didn't think I had said "empathic" will be outlived by "stupid", but I can see how it can be read that way. Perhaps I wanted to say that we don't know whether empathic or stupid is best until we find out which is best, down the line. I believe in empathy, though my own faculty is poorly developed, but sometimes one can see the advantages of at least some kinds of stupid.
I think we might learn. I'm not sure what the human race might look like in 20 million years, or indeed in 20 billion years time. That eons make sense is perhaps what it means to say that we can learn. Anything less than making it to the end is "just like the dinosaurs, we didn't learn enough". But we can instead tell an arguably Whiggish story, in which the dinosaurs are of us and still with us in spirit, that we would not be here if the dinosaurs had not been as they were and opened the door for us as they did. And so we will be with and of whatever our actions open the door for, even if there is no direct continuity of our line with the line that, perhaps, speaks with God in the end-times.
Our destruction of the environment, the unmaking of all human life and many other forms of life, may make a crucial opportunity for an analogue of the mammals that the dinosaurs gave way to.
Post a Comment