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.
