Is the Pope Catholic ... or one of the Vaishnavas?

In his NYT oped, which I referred to in this post yesterday, the Pope writes:

If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. ...

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future. 

"we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain."

Yes.

Empathy, as I have often written about here and even in my newspaper columns, is fundamental to understanding what it means to be human. I wrote in this oped in October 2016 that one of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.”

The Pope writing that we have to let ourselves be touched by others' pain echoes the message that I received through the faith in which I was raised.  The fact that I do not practice religion, and challenge the very notion of a supreme being, does not mean that I do not value empathy that non-politicized religious leaders talk about with the faithful.  Why the faithful choose not to let themselves be touched by others' pain is beyond me.  The utter selfishness and disregard for human suffering that the faithful display and practice is one of the most hypocritical behaviors of the religious folk.

Empathy is framed in non-secular philosophy too.  Adam Smith, often hailed as the brains behind capitalism, was a philosopher who wrote in A Theory of Moral Sentiments " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

Many among the faithful and the irreligious alike seem to conveniently shut themselves off from the sufferer.  As the Pope writes, "some of us that we can act as if they don’t exist."

Think, for example, of the wars scattered across different parts of the world; of the production and trade in weapons; of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing poverty, hunger and lack of opportunity; of climate change. These tragedies may seem distant from us, as part of the daily news that, sadly, fails to move us to change our agendas and priorities. But like the Covid-19 crisis, they affect the whole of humanity.

Shutting ourselves off from the sufferer is nothing but a statement of our priorities.  We would rather spend money to buy the latest gadget than donate that money to help alleviate human suffering.

I am glad that the Pope continues to hammer the message that the church needs to go to the margins to see life as it really is. 

“I’ve always thought that the world looks clearer from the periphery,” he said in the book. “When God wanted to regenerate creation, He chose to go to the margins — to places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of illness and solitude.”

If only the faithful would think about that!

I feel your pain!

Remember President tRump saying the following?

There are no national boundaries for climate protection or the global economy. No religious boundaries, either. The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.

Incredible, right?

It is incredible because tRump did not say that.

tRump is incapable of saying anything that conveys even a gazillionth of that meaning!  It is beyond the sociopath's ability to even imagine that "we are the same human beings on this planet" and that "we must coexist."

It was the Dalai Lama who wrote: "We must learn that humanity is one big family."

The sociopath has no sense of empathy.  63 million--including former commenters here--elected him because of that, and not despite that.

And they continue to support him despite because of the evidence over the four years!

One lesson of the last four years is how many people absolutely love having a President who is an extraordinarily horrible human being.

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) May 4, 2020

The office of the presidency requires the President to be a consoler-in-chief during such crises.  But, the orange monster can only talk about himself.  How he has been treated worse than Abe Lincoln was.

Q: Should you change your tone at the WH briefings?

President Trump, sitting at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial: I’m greeted with a “very hostile press.” I believe I am treated worse than President Lincoln. No body has ever seen anything like this.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) May 4, 2020

Yep, the narcissist believes that he is greater than Lincoln--a man who paid a huge price of his own life because he wanted to unite the country!

There are many leaders who have been conducting themselves at the highest levels.

The leaders who exude empathy in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis are experiencing surges in popularity. The New York Times has called Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York “the politician of the moment,” noting, among other things, his briefings, which now regularly reach national audiences and are “articulate, consistent and often tinged with empathy.”

Articulate. Consistent. Tinged with empathy.  None of those will ever apply to a description of this cheeto president!

Empathy has played a pivotal role in American history when presidents feel with, and act in response to, their constituents’ needs. Indeed, leaders who empathize, who relate to and feel with their people can ask them to do difficult things. ...
It is easier to trust an empathetic leader; their empathy is better assurance than the weak sympathy of a leader who grieves the loss of his own power over the loss of life.

But, don't ever forget that there are people, millions of them, who consider this unempathetic sociopath to be their hero!

Source

Death in the time of the coronavirus

Death is a part of life.  Yes.  But, what worries us now is the additional deaths--the ones that have been suddenly caused by the coronavirus.  It is overwhelming, literally and emotionally.

Hospital chaplains are also overwhelmed.  This essay in The New Yorker that is centered on a young chaplain in New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital is poignant.

[Kaytlin] Butler, twenty-six, is one of eight chaplains on Mount Sinai’s Spiritual Care team. The team, which also has four residents, includes two rabbis, a Jewish woman who is not ordained, a Seventh-day Adventist, a woman who is inspired by Buddhism, and an evangelical Christian. (The hospital is also served by two Catholic priests, who are sent by the New York archdiocese.)      

What if a patient is Muslim? Or not religious?  "when families request prayers for loved ones, she honors their traditions. For Muslims, she says the Shahada."

It is a tough job--both in terms of what they have to do, and the context in which they do it.  COVID-19 has made it even tougher for chaplains because invariably the coronavirus patients die alone when they are hooked up to ventilators and more in the ICUs.  It is such a lonely event that even the chaplain cannot be at the patient's bedside calming and reassuring them.  This virus is diabolical.

I have blogged about death as the loneliest event, though that "lonely" was about the end being a solo act.  The following is an edited version of that post from September 2017.
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I am pretty much convinced that it is the acute realization that I might be dead at any second that drives most of my decision-making.

It is good to know that I am not alone in thinking like this.  Today, I came to know that there is something called existential psychotherapy, and that there is an existential psychotherapist writer named Irvin Yalom.

Yalom is practically my father's age.  He "helped introduce to American psychological circles the idea that a person’s conflicts can result from unresolvable dilemmas of human existence, among them the dread of dying."

Hey, that's what I have been saying and writing, based on my intuitive understanding.

Another of Yalom’s signature ideas, expressed in books such as Staring at the Sun and Creatures of a Day, is that we can lessen our fear of dying by living a regret-free life, meditating on our effect on subsequent generations, and confiding in loved ones about our death anxiety. When I asked whether his lifelong preoccupation with death eases the prospect that he might pass away soon, he replied, “I think it probably makes things easier.”

Exactly!  Regret-free life. Effect on future generations. Talking about death and the anxiety.  To me, this is a healthy formula for a wonderful life.

“If we live a life full of regret, full of things we haven’t done, if we’ve lived an unfulfilled life,” he says, “when death comes along, it’s a lot worse. I think it’s true for all of us.”

Yep, the religions and cultural traditions do not matter one bit.  It always comes down to living fulfilled lives.

When two of his close friends died recently, he realized that his cherished memory of their friendship is all that remains. “It dawned on me that that reality doesn’t exist anymore,” he said sadly. “When I die, it will be gone.”

Friends die.  Sometimes suddenly. Relatives die. Every death tears the fabric of our own lives.  We worry that we did not spend time with them when they were alive.

But, memories remain. And memories are all that we can take with us.

“Dying,” he wrote in Staring at the Sun, “is lonely, the loneliest event of life.” Yet empathy and connectedness can go a long way toward reducing our anxieties about mortality.

Empathy is perhaps the emotion that is most important to me, especially in the way it helps me understand my own existence and, thereby, my death.

For all the morbidity of existential psychotherapy, it is deeply life-affirming. Change is always possible. Intimacy can be freeing. Existence is precious. “I hate the idea of leaving this world, this wonderful life,” Yalom said.

Yes, when the day comes, I will hate leaving behind this wonderful life.  But, as my father said, "even the great souls could not stop death.  They too are gone."  Such is life on this pale blue dot.

The un-empathetic sociopath

I will wrap up the empathy series by making it political.

As long as I live, I will never ever understand how tRump was elected President despite all his sociopath behavior that he made explicit.

It continues to shock me that his mocking of a disabled reporter alone did not send him into political wilderness but, instead, got him more support!  What a disgusting turn of events!

More than ever, it is during a crisis that we expect empathetic leadership.  We want leaders to feel our pain, our angst.  We want leaders to tell us that the problem is for real, and that all the machinery of the government is working overtime to get us through this.  However, the leader chosen by 63 million people "tests negative for empathy," as the satirical Andy Borowitz phrased it.

A reporter tosses him a softball question that any other President would have crushed to a towering home run.  Not this sociopath in the Oval Office.  He had a meltdown.  Instead of reassuring Americans, and the rest of the world too, he proved yet again that he "is simply incapable of offering the kind of emotional support the country needs at a time like this."

You may say that this is a less important part of the job of president than actually running the government and making good decisions. But every president is called upon to reflect and tend to the country’s psyche, sometimes over limited traumas and sometimes over larger ones. And when they do it well, we remember it for years, even decades.

We will remember this sociopath for decades, yes, but for all the horrible reasons!

There is no empathy from tRump and his godawful toadies.  Not "a word of sympathy or compassion for the thousands of Americans getting sick and dying on this president’s watch, as a result of this president’s neglect of his duties"

Trump and his party-line media do not do that. They cannot do that. That would take empathy—and empathy might dangerously remind Americans of the tragic cost of Trump’s mismanagement and absent leadership. Rage is all they feel, so rage is all they can express. Hatred fills their hearts, so hatred fills their mouths. The government and the government-line television network are, for the time being, in the charge of broken souls. Those broken souls are breaking a nation.

63 million Americans are guilty forever!

Source

Talking at each other, instead of talking with each other

My father often notes that nobody calls anymore, and that the younger people message each other--or in groups--via WhatsApp and Facebook and more.

Phones are everywhere--sometimes people even have two phones--yet, talking to somebody else using the phone has become rare.  The word "telephone" refers to the distance (tele) and voice (phone.)  The smartphone is not a smarter way for the distance voice.  There is very little vocalization.  There is no need for "phone" in the gadget that we refer to as the smartphone!

The very idea of talking on the phone invokes horror among those who claim to loathe it. There are thousands of memes explaining the many ways that talking, not texting, is rude, basically criminal. Calling is not time-efficient, ill-suited to the attention economy, where all eyes must be on several screens at once.

Efficiency!

The psychologist Sherry Turkle has been studying the impact of computers on human psychology since the early 1980s, and in 2015 she published Reclaiming Conversation, in which she referred to “the edited life” that we live now. She spoke to teachers who observed that their students seemed to develop empathetic skills at a slower rate than they would be expected to. “Face-to-face conversation is the most human – and humanising – thing we do,” she wrote. “Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.”

An interesting essay that will be worth your time.  This is a topic about which I have blogged in plenty.  The following is a copy/paste from one of my previous posts on this; it is from six years ago:

Real world conversations seem to be getting rarer by the day.  For instance, even until a decade ago, the break during class time was when the room was noisiest thanks to students conversing with each other.  Calling the class to order typically ended that noise and it was back to me droning on and on and students trying their best to keep awake.

It is a different world, and a different classroom setting now.  The break time is often quiet--students are almost always hunched over their smartphones, texting and chatting.  Sometimes, I joke that they are probably texting students sitting only two seats away!

Such behavior is not unique in the classroom alone and is played out seemingly everywhere, sometimes even among family members in the same home.

Perhaps an irony that an introverted blogger worries about the death of conversation.  But, keep in mind that introvert does not mean anti-social ;)  While I might not be the nonstop chatterbox like, well, you know who you are (!), I love conversations.

This fascination with the trend in decreasing levels of conversation is the focus of this piece in the Atlantic:

Turkle is at work on a new book, aspirationally titled Reclaiming Conversation, which will be a continuation of her thinking in Alone Together. In it, she will out herself again, this time as “a partisan of conversation.” Her research for the book has involved hours upon hours of talking with people about conversation as well as eavesdropping on conversations: the kind of low-grade spying that in academia is known as “ethnography,” that in journalism is known as “reporting,” and that everywhere else is known as “paying attention.”
“I can’t, in restaurants, not watch families not talking to each other,” Turkle tells me. “In parks, I can’t not watch mothers not talking to their children. In streets, I can’t not watch mothers texting while they’re pushing their children.”
Her methods are contagious; once you start noticing what Turkle notices, you can’t stop. It’s a beautiful day, and we walk past boutiques, restaurants, and packed sidewalk cafés. The data are everywhere: The pair of high-school-age girls walking down Boylston Street, silent, typing. The table of brunchers ignoring their mimosas (and one another) in favor of their screens. The kid in the stroller playing with an iPad. The sea of humans who are, on this sparkling Saturday, living up to Turkle’s lament—they seem to be, indeed, alone together.

We are chatting, messaging, updating the Facebook status, tweeting, yes. But, ...

The conclusion she’s arrived at while researching her new book is not, technically, that we’re not talking to each other. We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in e-mails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

When I teach a class online, it is that conversation with students in the classroom that I miss.  The dialog in the classroom, the tangential comments made, the jokes, and even the wide yawns of students, make up the valuable Socratic conversation.

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”
Occasional dullness, in other words, is to be not only expected, but celebrated. Some of the best parts of conversation are, as Turkle puts it, “the boring bits.” 

Oh well. Maybe some day when there is a severe electromagnetic storm and we lose electronic communication, we might be forced into re-learning the art of conversation.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem likely that we can teach the art of conversation either!

Empathy Through Enchiladas

The NY Times had an interesting report on the predictive power of food:

Voters who had been to Europe, Australia, Canada or Mexico or had eaten at an Indian restaurant were less likely to choose Mr. Trump by 10 to 12 percentage points beyond the differences explained by other factors like the ones mentioned above.
...
Of course, it’s not that eating Indian food leads a person to support one Democratic candidate over another — that’s silly. (And there are voters for whom Indian food is the taste of home.) But a voter’s orientation toward the world is related to candidate choice, and it turns out that eating in restaurants that celebrate less familiar cultures is one way to measure where people think they are more connected: to those around them locally or to people farther afield.

Indeed.  Food is a portal to understanding the world around us.

There's something remarkable about breaking bread together--even if that breaking bread happens at an "alien" restaurant.  That magic is powerful when we share food at home, as I quickly realized when I came to the US.

Siddiqqi, who was from Pakistan, or the Taiwanese girl whose name I have long forgotten, came over to my apartment to eat with me.  And then there were more. Greeks. Nigerians. Or my meals with Palestinians. A Guyanese-American with roots in India.  And, of course, white Americans too.

It was never really about the food.  What is it about then?

According to anthropologists and psychologists who have studied food in recent years, cuisines from international cultures can take us out of ourselves and help us better understand distinct people and cultures. The secret ingredient is empathy. And the process begins with stirring our emotions.

Food and emotions, and that wonderfully important ingredient to being human--empathy.

Empathy, about which I have blogged a lot because of the importance that I attach to it, means that we are placing ourselves in somebody else's shoes and understand their feelings.  When the others are from cultures that are alien to us, food is a phenomenal portal through which that "other" slowly becomes "us."

A culture may seem unfamiliar to a person, but after that person discovers the way people from an unfamiliar culture “prepare their food, the way they eat, somehow they understand it. There’s link between you and them, and that gives you insight.”

But, we need to keep in mind that it is not merely about food.  I have always stayed away from the international food fairs at college campuses because it seems to perpetuate the mistaken notion that it is all about food.  I want people to begin to understand the "other" through food.

Food alone, though, is often not enough to complete the trip to another culture. The journey needs other people.

Which is why white Americans eating Mexican and Indian foods can also be racists and xenophobes!  The "others" serving food is what the supremacists think is the norm--the equivalent of "shut up and dribble."  As if we are here only to keep the masters happy!

"Without the ingredient of human empathy, food from another land can only have a bland effect."  As I noted in this post a few months ago, I wish people would think about this:

“Have you or your family ever invited a person or a family of another race to your home for dinner?” ... When is the last time you or your family had dinner in your home with a person or family of another race?

Breaking bread at my home is about empathy and understanding. I have no place in my life for people who lack empathy.

Learning empathy takes effort

I have blogged in plenty about the need for empathy and, in a number of posts, have also written about a horrible human being seemingly with no sense of empathy being elected by 63 million as the President of the US.

To me, empathy has always been about the others. "Empathy is other-focused, not self-focused."  This is important to understand.  Because, sociopaths like tRump seem to easily zoom into what makes the "others" hurt:

Someone with sociopathic tendencies can ‘read’ other people well and understand their emotions. But a sociopathic person reads others in order to manipulate or take advantage of that person.

Empathy is not about merely understanding the emotions of others.  Empathy "is a tool or skill that provides people with information from which we are then free to take actions, or not. Empathy itself is neutral. What we choose to do with it is up to us."

It is up to us.  And up to us to invest the time and energy to understand the others.

The challenge with empathy is to be open to gaining knowledge about others. We tend to be biased when it comes to empathy. We are better at reading those who are like us than at reading people who are different.

tRump openly expresses his hate for, oh, Muslims and Haitians. But, his heart bleeds if a white person somewhere is attacked by a brown person.  It is not that he is empathetic to the white person in distress--the guy is simply biased. He is bigoted.

The "us-versus-them perception diminishes the ability to empathise. So, what can be done?"  The author distills the full array of empathy into seven behaviors; read them.

I will end this post with the final paragraph from that essay:

If we see ourselves in others, if we walk in their shoes, we have little to fear and can allow empathy to help us decide how to react and behave. It is a challenge to engage in empathy, it is not easy. Some days in some situations, empathy might come easily, other times it won’t. When people are scared, stressed or anxious, it can be difficult for them to step away from their own feelings and tune into those of another person. However, because of mirroring, empathy begets empathy. The more we use it, the more others around us will use it. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. Every group wants to be recognised. It can’t happen without empathy.

Source

Stress Valley

Despite a booming economy, pleasant climate and natural treasures, nearly two-thirds of Bay Area residents say the quality of life here has gotten worse in the last five years, according to a new poll.

No wonder people working there get paid a lot as compensation for the misery.

Apparently people love money and fleeting fame so much that they have made quite a deal with the devil!  And even the people who don't have money don't want to leave, which makes no sense to me.

Meanwhile, The New York Times notes that the Silicon Valley's very-important-people seem to be obsessed with the virtue of suffering.

They sit in painful, silent meditations for weeks on end. They starve for days — on purpose. Cold morning showers are a bragging right. Notoriety is a badge of honor.

Madness, my friends, madness this is!

I have often joked with students that if I wanted to starve and not have hot showers, well, I could have easily stayed back in a poor village in India ;)

So, the Valley's very-important-people are turning to ... Stoicism?  WTF?

Stoicism has been the preferred viral philosophy “for a moment” for years now — or two decades, by one count. The topic of Stoicism usually comes up in the Valley in terms of the maintenance of the personal life. Start-ups big and small believe their mission is to make the transactions of life frictionless and pleasing. But the executives building those things are convinced that a pleasing, on-demand life will make them soft. So they attempt to bring the pain.
“We’re kept in constant comfort,” said Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, in an interview on Daily Stoic, a popular blog for the tech-Stoic community. Mr. Rose said he tries to incorporate practices in his life that “mimic” our ancestors’ environments and their daily challenges: “This can be simple things like walking in the rain without a jacket or wearing my sandals in the December snow when I take the dog out in the mornings.”

Seriously, these are the nutcases that are shaping our collective future through hi-tech?

Why Stoicism?

Ada Palmer is a professor of early modern history at the University of Chicago and a novelist. Her books are popular in Silicon Valley, and she often visits for dinners with tech workers.
“It’s very interesting to see their sort of sad lethargy,” Dr. Palmer said. “When you’re 37, rich, retired and unhappy, it’s very perplexing.”

"Sad lethargy." There is a cure for that--go do something that connects you with real humans.

How much do the rich owe the poor?

First, read the following excerpt:

It is impossible to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth without Bill Gates’s ingenuity and effort. But it is far easier to imagine Bill Gates’s wealth being produced by someone other than Bill Gates within the institutions of modern American economic society than it is to imagine Bill Gates generating Bill Gates’s wealth in a different time and place – in France in the 1700s, or in the Central African Republic today – in which society was or is less tolerant of entrepreneurial capitalism and the accumulation of personal billions, and where the community of engineers that gave rise to and became America’s tech sector is absent. Indeed, at some point in Microsoft’s history it was Microsoft the information-processing organism that was more critical to Bill Gates’s wealth accumulation than Bill Gates himself. People, essentially, do not create their own fortunes. They inherit them, come to them through the occupation of some state-protected niche, or, if they are very brilliant and very lucky, through infusing a particular group of men and women with the germ of an idea, which, in time and with just the right environment, allows that group to evolve into an organism suited to the creation of economic value, a very large chunk of which the founder can then capture for himself.

That paragraph can easily be used as some kind of an ideological  Rorschach test.  Upon reading that, one can get pissed off and defend Gates's gazillions, or one might applaud in agreement that Gates has been unfairly hogging it all.

In the essay, by Ryan Avent, from which I had excerpted that paragraph, he makes an argument that will certainly make one sit up:

The wealth of humans is societal. But the distribution of that wealth doesn’t rest on markets or on social perceptions of who deserves what but on the ability of the powerful to use their power to retain whatever of the value society generates that they can.

His follow-up sentence?  "That is not a radical statement."

I want to get back to the example that Avent uses. Bill Gates has made gazillions.

Could Gates have amassed that wealth if he were in the Central African Republic? The answer is easy--he could not have.

Could Gates have made it that big back 200 years ago in France. He could not have.

Which means, there is something special about the very specific time period over which Gates was able to make his gazillions. The question then is how much Gates owes society for the special circumstances in which all these were possible.

Bill Gates, his wife, and Warren Buffett, have all made it abundantly clear--through their interviews and speeches over the years--that they fully recognize how lucky they were to have been in this special circumstances that made possible their gazillionaire status. Buffett refers to even being born in the USA as having won the "ovarian lottery." In addition to their humanitarian views, this is also a reason for them to turn almost all of their wealth over to the foundation that then spends it on various domestic and international projects.

After quoting Adam Smith and the wonderful advantages of trade and specialization, Avent writes:

Secure in the knowledge that societal growth would not reduce redistribution (and could indeed increase the value available for redistribution by increasing global output) the incentive to draw the borders of society tightly would be curtailed. The challenge, of course, is to create the broad social interest in an encompassing redistribution. How to do that?

Isn't that the challenge that I have been struggling with all my adult life!  How do we create the broad social interest in redistribution that is needed along with the open borders, trade, and specialization?  How do we develop a social contract that will include redistribution, which the ideologues from the right hate, while also allowing for free trade that the ideologues from the left hate?

Avent writes that Adam Smith the philosopher wrote about that too.  "The force of human empathy can be made to serve either openness or societal mercantilism."

Here again the problem is that we are far more empathetic to people like us, but not towards others who are completely unlike us.  We conveniently forget that deep down we are all humans, but only view each other through nationalistic or religious or ethnic, or whatever divisive lens we want to use.

There is a better answer available: that to be ‘like us’ is to be human. That to be human is to earn the right to share in the wealth generated by the productive social institutions that have evolved and the knowledge that has been generated, to which someone born in a slum in Dhaka is every bit the rightful heir as someone born to great wealth in Palo Alto or Belgravia. ...
Rich societies can find ways to justify their great wealth relative to others: their members can tell themselves stories about the great things they did that others could not have done that made them wealthy beyond imagination. Alternatively, they could recognize the wild contingency of their wealth, cultivate human empathy, and do what they can to extend the wealth of humans to everyone.

If only we had more empathy.  If only even a couple of million among the 63 million had even a little bit of a respect for the value of empathy!

If only there were more real Vaishnav people!

It is the anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.  He was shot dead on January 30th in 1948. I am re-posting here a modified version of one my op-ed columns

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Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.

Albert Einstein summed it up best for all of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” 

In the contemporary United States, any talk in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out of a fear of being labeled a wimp.  The worst ones are those who successfully dodged the Vietnam War draft but now want to establish their manliness! This has been especially the case since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the “tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove their toughness.

Of course, violence is more than merely engaging in war. The political rhetoric, especially over the past four years since trump as a candidate and then as the president (gasp!) seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I, as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and rhetoric.

While words, unlike sticks and stones, do not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice--even among those who claim to be followers of Vishnu--is far from that interpretation of humanity.

When it comes to the terrible humanitarian crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the images of dead toddlers. Or, the images of mothers and children running after being tear-gassed at the border for seeking asylum.

The president's adviser on immigration, whose life is possible only because the US offered asylum to Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, boasts that “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”

The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but the radius of the arc seems to be getting longer.  Perhaps we shall overcome all our problems, but only over a much longer time than I would like. 

Resistance requires way too much learning!

As the campaign season heated up back in the spring and summer of 2016, I became more and more panicky.  Not merely about the GOP's candidate winning, as much as it was a reason to lose sleep over.  The panic was this, which I told M and two neighbors/friends: trump's rhetoric was so violent that I worried that some nutcase follower of his might try to assassinate Hillary Clinton.

Fortunately, that never happened.

In May 2016, I ended this post with these lines:

It starts with a swastika and 1488 etched on a bench on a bridge over a river :(  Here is to hoping that we will end it all before it even takes hold.

It has taken a firm hold.  A mob of torch-holding thugs marched through a college town chanting "Jews will not replace us."  It was a depressing and terrifying spectacle.  Plenty of violence, triggered by hate, has happened.  The latest was the massacre at Pittsburgh.

Lesson one: I came to know about "Hillel."  I had no idea about this until the tragedy.

We went to the local chapter, which had organized a vigil.  A 69-year old woman cried that she never thought she would have to relive the fears that have always been a part of the Jewish experience in the West.  A young male student broke down talking about his emotions over the attack on Jews in a synagogue.  And more.

What can one do in such situations other than to be there and tell them we are with them!  Empathy--"fancy with the sufferer"--is all we got as humans in these difficult situations.

As M and I opened the door to leave, even as the event continued on, a young woman who was also leaving looked at us and said, "Thank you for coming."

Her words made me teary.

News reports referred to an organization called HIAS.  I had never heard about it.  That was another lesson.  One of the well-known beneficiaries of HIAS's work: Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google. Without HIAS, Brin's family would not have come to the US, and we might never have had Google?

Turns out that HIAS was founded in 1881 to aid Jews fleeing the pogroms.  One of the many that HIAS helped were jared kushner's grandparents:

During the first week of the Trump Administration, Mark Hetfield, the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), sent the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a copy of a file. It documented Kushner’s grandparents’ immigration to the United States. Like many Jews who fled the pogroms in the Russian Empire, the Kushners were what’s known as “resettled” by HIAS. Resettling meant more or less the same thing then that it does now: processing visas, finding a community that would welcome new immigrants, arranging transportation, insuring that a family has a place to live and access to basic services, and insuring the continuity of those services until new arrivals are, well, resettled.

Of course, HIAS never heard back from kushner.  And not since the shooting either.

Because of this shooting, many people, including me, now know HIAS as the wonderful organization that does phenomenal work, and we now know what it stands for: "for welcoming refugees, and welcoming refugees as Jews."

But, we ought to live a life that does not involve knowing HIAS, or Hillel, or who my DA is.  These are the kinds of people and institutions that work mostly in the background, and we find out who they are only if we need them.  Otherwise, we go about our lives, worrying only about what we might have for dinner.

However, the past three years has been hectic, with the candidate and then the President creating chaos out of everything that he can think about, exhausting us.

Tired we get; resist we will!  And, we shall overcome!

There is no room in our society for gun violence and especially not in a place of worship. Elected officials must stop fanning the flames of hatred, bitterness, and division. We must condemn these terrible acts in the strongest possible terms and work to heal these deep wounds.

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) October 27, 2018

Trading places

Over the years, I have come to appreciate John Rawls's "veil of ignorance" a lot.  I mean, a lot.  (Click here if you need a ninety-second briefing.)

Unlike Rawls's theoretical structure of an original position, we have the real world to deal with.  It is this world, not a hypothetical scenario, that we have to work with.  Which means, we need to figure out how to understand what it might mean to be a person of the type that we are not.  The "other" could be a different gender from us.  A different religion.  Different skin color.  Different upbringing.  Different whatever.

If we begin to understand the circumstances in which the others might find themselves, then, well, we are beginning to have that wonderful aspect of what it means to be human: Empathy.

It is not the emotional empathy that I am referring to, like when we see the stereotypical photo of a fly buzzing around a poor kid with a runny nose.  Nope. As Roman Krznaric explains in the video that I have embedded in this post (or you can watch here) it is cognitive empathy.

We imagine what the people in Aleppo are going through.  We imagine what the homeless in the nation's capital experience when they are only a few blocks away from the President's palace.  We imagine what the hijab-wearing Muslim is worried about as a result of the elections.

Krznaric referred to Adam Smith, which, of course, intrigued me.  Smith, is often hailed by the free market and the pro-business people.  (Pro-business is not the same as being pro-market.)  However, that is cherry-picking from what Smith had to say.

Smith not only wrote about the invisible hand and the power of self-interest, but was a moral philosopher.  Krznaric quotes Smith about empathy.  The think-tanks and the business lobbies conveniently forget that Smith was quite a philosopher.  Either they forget, or they are not even informed about it--perhaps the latter!

Krznaric quotes from Smith's other book, A theory of moral sentiments: " ... by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."

By changing places with the sufferer ... in our imagination, not literally.  We then imagine what it might mean to be that other person.

When the President says all the horrible things that he says on a daily hourly basis, it reflects an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy.

It is not any surprise when he makes even tragic situations only about himself. Or, talks about the most nonsensical things like how a boat ended up in some guy's yard.  A lack of empathy means that the asshole-in-chief can never behave like the comforter-in-chief that Presidents are expected to be in the face of tragedies. 

When he lacks empathy ... progress will stall.  Huge steps backward as we hopefully wait for the long arc of the moral universe to bend, again, towards justice.

Sex sells?

We live in strange times.  People have plenty of "friends" but perhaps feel way more alone than ever.  It is, but one measure, of how rapidly our lives are being transformed.  In the process--and more importantly--we are completely redefining what it means to be human, with human emotions.

Sex is one of those human emotions, which is also being rapidly redefined.  "Making sense of modern pornography" is what this New Yorker essay is about.  The following sentence there makes me think about how much even our "regular" vocabulary and approach to life has changed:

It has permeated everyday life, to the point where we talk easily of food porn, disaster porn, war porn, real-estate porn—not because culture has been sexualized, or sex pornified, but because porn’s patterns of excess, fantasy, desire, and shame are so familiar.

I know what the author is referring to; even in this blog, I have used phrases like 'poverty porn' when, for instance, critiquing Slumdog Millionaire.  The word "porn" has pretty much become a part of our daily vocabulary.

Porn is everywhere.  And at zero cost.  One small typo when entering a URL can easily send one to a porn site.

Years ago, back when the web was young, I wrote an op-ed about this, during my California years, in which I noted that life as a teenager has become immensely more complicated and how amazed I was that the kids were managing this quite successfully.  In the years since, the life of a young person has become even more challenging with porn so easy to access right from the smartphone, and with sexting becoming a part of the daily vocabulary.  I am so glad that I am not a stressed out teenager with hormones rushing through every possible vein.  Phew!

With the growth in technology, we knew it was only a matter of time before we reached that strange twilight zone issue--robot sex.  And, therefore, robot porn. And, heck, robot brothels.

Apparently it already arrived and I never knew about it!

A Canadian company wants to open a so-called “robot brothel” in Houston, but is getting pushback from officials and community groups, with the mayor saying the city is reviewing its ordinances to determine if they address public safety and health concerns potentially associated with the business.
...
Kinky S Dolls says it’s opening a “love dolls brothel” in Houston. It opened a similar venue in Toronto in 2017.

What is the business about?

KinkySDolls is one of many manufacturers of sex dolls that range in price from $4,000 to $20,000 depending on the features. The company operates a try-before-you-buy store in Toronto, where time alone in a private room with one of the products ranges from $80 to $120.
Or put another way, the company offers a hotel room with a sex doll in it on an hourly basis.

Why Houston?  I am sure the company did the background market research.  While people who don't care for profits make location decisions for crazy reasons, businesses guided by the profit motive don't casually choose locations.  I wonder what it is about Houston!

The profit-loving people will perhaps love this, despite their rhetoric!

As one who cares about humans and empathy and emotions, I am not thrilled with this.  But, I am not surprised that it has come to this :(

The machines have won :(

Ever since I started thinking on my own, following something that somebody lays down as a rule has been difficult.  I don't want to merely follow orders.

Now, increasingly, it is not humans ordering us what to do and what not to do.  Machines do that. Algorithms are the enforcers.  It scares the bejesus out of me.

It is not that I don't care for the comforts that these machines provide.  It is awesome that. for instance, the heater kicks in automatically at five in the morning and warms up the home before I get out of the bed.  But, I worry that most of us are mindlessly yielding to computers.

As we transfer agency to computers and software, we also begin to cede control over our desires and decisions.

That loss of agency worries me. It has always worried me.  Agency is what I have always urged in my students too.  I have even semi-seriously joked that my view of college education is to make sure we don't create automatons out of students, and that I want to make sure they can think.

But, automatons we are rapidly becoming.

Already, many people have learned to defer to algorithms in choosing which film to watch, which meal to cook, which news to follow, even which person to date. (Why think when you can click?) By ceding such choices to outsiders, we inevitably open ourselves to manipulation. Given that the design and workings of algorithms are almost always hidden from us, it can be difficult if not impossible to know whether the choices being made on our behalf reflect our own interests or those of corporations, governments, and other outside parties.

I feel like it is a lost cause.  The battle, the war, has been lost.  A few of us jumping up and down shouting about these won't matter--most are not even listening to us.  Heck, they don't even know we exist!

I often argue, as I did even yesterday, it is all about making conscious decisions about "the trade-offs inherent in offloading tasks and decisions to computers."  Agency.  " If we don’t accept that responsibility, we risk becoming means to others’ ends."

We humans are becoming more and more like machines. We are becoming robotic, even as robots are getting better and better.  And that means:

it will be increasingly impossible to distinguish between humans and robots because of our machine-like behavior as much as robots’ human-like features. And could this eventually become the norm, with humans spending their entire lives acting like machines?

I am sure that even now many amongst us will fail the “Voight-Kampff test," which in Blade Runner was used to "assesses capacity for empathy, a human facility that even the most intelligent androids lack."  How else can one explain the election of a man completely devoid of empathy as the President of the US!

Does the Dalai Lama tweet?

I have no idea which god is out there applauding trump in the Oval Office, nor do I have any idea about the god that his 63 million voters pray to.  These religious people I can never understand!

Other religious people have tried to talk sense to trump.  Like the Pope himself.  Remember this one?

When the President met the Pope at the Vatican, last week, it was as if they were members of different species, so far apart in values and style that the actual content of what separated them proved elusive. Francis slyly presented Trump with a gift, though, that—as of yesterday—defines their opposition as absolute. The gift was a copy of his encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si’.” Trump politely promised to read it. Sure.

If you believe that trump read even one page of that book, hey you are one of the 63 million voters!

[The] dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another.

How awesome that the Pope reasons that our moral pollution is the cause of atmospheric pollution.

Another religious/spiritual leader has stepped in with his anti-trumpism.  The Dalai Lama writes "America First" is deeply flawed:

There are no national boundaries for climate protection or the global economy. No religious boundaries, either. The time has come to understand that we are the same human beings on this planet. Whether we want to or not, we must coexist.

I am sure trump immediately understands this.  His 63 million voters, many of whom include deeply religious Catholics--now denounce him.  Of course I am being cynical!

The Dalai Lama continues:

We must learn that humanity is one big family. We are all brothers and sisters: physically, mentally and emotionally. But we are still focusing far too much on our differences instead of our commonalities. After all, every one of us is born the same way and dies the same way.

I wonder if the pussy-grabber really knows that he too is going to die some day, like every one of us.  Maybe not.  Maybe he thinks that he will merely step into a golden plane and be off to much greener golf courses!

So, what does Tenzin Gyatso--aka, the Dalai Lama--suggest that we do?

The young generations have a great responsibility to ensure that the world becomes a more peaceful place for all. But this can become reality only if we educate, not just the brain, but also the heart. The educational systems of the future should place greater emphasis on strengthening human abilities, such as warm-heartedness, a sense of oneness, humanity and love.

Humanity.
Empathy.
Love.
Heart.
Peace.
Words that trump does not even seem to know.  And 63 million voters elected him!  Shame on them!

More on the Banana Republic of America

For a few days now, I did great not tweeting anything about the current president of the United States.  I had decided that I did not want trump and his minions sucking away all the oxygen from my life.

Everything was going so well for me ...
... until he did this:

If that looks different from the usual tweets from the @realdonaldtrump, it is because on Twitter I follow this "Real Press Sec." bot, which two people had created to make sure we all realize that trump's tweets are presidential statements.  It is not some random 71-year senile man across the street.

I couldn't take it anymore.

In this piece in the NY Times, the author makes a point:

Yet criticism, even from Republicans, has not deterred Mr. Trump and some of his supporters in the past — witness how many denounced him over the Access Hollywood tapes. The president has paid no discernible political price for his actions. So that leaves the question very much open whether behavior once ruled unthinkable is again permissible in America today.

It is pathetic how Republicans do not care for this president's behavior.  That they don't care is not really a surprise.  After all, it is not as if the guy flipped after having been a perfect gentleman throughout his campaign.  These people voted for him fully knowing what a disgusting human being he is!

I had to do something, at least for my own sanity.

I sent the following message to the two senators and the congressman who represent me in DC:

I am truly, truly, feeling helpless watching this President tweet and rant with complete disregard to basic human decency, leave alone the dignity of the office to which he was (s)elected. This president's recent tweets attacking Mika Brzezinski are merely the latest example.
He is an absolute embarrassment to the nation, is destroying America's credibility around the world. I cannot for a moment even imagine how this is contributing to Making America Great Again.
Even worse, this president is giving permission to haters, bullies, xenophobes, racists, and misogynists--not only in America but around the world as well. America is, indeed, a shining city on a hill; this visibility lets the thugs and goons anywhere on this planet know that their low values are consistent with this president's values.
I worry even more about this president as a role model for impressionable children in America and elsewhere.
I understand that I am not contacting you about a policy position on which you can vote. So, what do I want you to do?
I want you to talk with the GOP members in Congress--in the House and Senate--and make them understand that their support for this president only continues to enable his indecent and disgusting behavior. Please make your GOP colleagues understand that it is not good principles for them to care only about their political victories on their preferred policy positions while being indifferent to their party's standard-bearer.
trump is an embarrassment and a shame, not only to the GOP but to all of us Americans whom he represents as the President of the United States of America.
Thank you.

Who feels another’s pain ... Who shares another’s sorrow

As I pulled into the parking spot, I noticed her.

About thirty years old.  She was in the driver seat, with nobody else in her car.  The left hand held the smartphone to her ear, and the right hand was gesticulating, a lot.

And then I saw her face.

She was crying.

She then wiped away the tears that were flowing down.

What can this man do?  What can anyone do?

The world is a messy place.

While we can philosophize that our consciousness about ourselves and this world is nothing but a “user-illusion,” everyday life is not easy.  Our bodies ache.  Our minds ache.  She cries in the public, with her vehicle giving her a private space.  Most cry at home. Or even on Facebook.

I imagined walking up to her car and knocking on the window.  "Are you alright?"  She would probably say that she was fine.  "I'm ok, thank you."

Instead, I slowly got out of my car, and stole a glance at her.  She was gesticulating and crying.

"If she is there even when I return, I will check on her," I told myself.

I considered picking up a chocolate bar for the distraught one.  I decided against.

Her vehicle was gone when I returned.

I started driving back home.  The light turned red, and I stopped.

The homeless man held up his cardboard sign.  I acknowledged his presence with a nod.

It does not seem right that I empathize with the woman who was crying in her car, while I drive past the homeless man.

Do unto others ...

Over the years, I have read plenty of trashy, potboiler, fiction.  I have also read a number of serious works of literature. The past few summers even included syllabi that I carefully constructed (FYI: The 2016, and 2015 lists)

Over the years, the potboiler fiction and cheap movies have pretty much disappeared from my radar.  As I have often remarked in this blog, reading great works of literature, and watching movies that are about the human condition, help me with trying to understand the "other," which is pretty much everybody other than me.  In the process, I begin to understand myself too.

I have also blogged often that my intuitive, personal-observation-based, view is that despite the fact that we are more educated than ever before, we are reading less of literature. I routinely poll  students in my classes about a few classics that I expect to appeal to young readers in particular (like Fahrenheit 451) and the response is always discouraging.  For that matter, even my faculty colleagues seem to be unfamiliar and uninterested in some of the great works.  Yet,  these very faculty can be all high and mighty defending the value of the humanities.  WTF, right?

Many humanists have difficulty in presenting their case because they are used to speaking one way among themselves and another way to outsiders. To the public at large, they still make statements about the value of great books, of the noblest things said by the most brilliant minds and of the need to know the Western heritage. Among themselves, such talk is, at best, hopelessly dated. Perhaps one reason literary scholars make an unconvincing case to outsiders is that they do not believe it themselves.
Students often come to college without having any grasp of what reading great works entails. Their AP and other exams test knowledge of facts about literature, not actually understanding it. Classes teach them to hunt for symbols, to judge writers according to current values, or to treat masterpieces as mere documents of their times. The first method makes reading into a form of puzzle solving, the second allows us to compliment ourselves on our advanced views, and the third misses the point that great literature speaks outside the context of its origin. Tolstoy is not great because he tells us about czarist Russia or the Napoleonic wars.

How unfortunate!

Here’s an alternative approach: Why not approach great literature as a source of wisdom that cannot be obtained, or obtained so well, elsewhere?

Exactly!  This is exactly what I have been talking about, and practicing, for years now.

And great writers present ethical questions with a richness and depth that make other treatments look schematic and simplistic.Moreover, great literature, experienced and taught the right way, involves practice in empathy. When we read a great novel, we identify with the heroine. We put ourselves in her place, feel her difficulties from within, regret her bad choices. Momentarily, they become our bad choices. Even when we do not like her, we may wince, suffer, put the book down for a while. The process of identification, feeling and examination of feeling may happen not just once but, in the course of a long novel, thousands of times. No set of doctrines is as important for ethical behavior as this constant practice in ethical thought or that direct sensation, felt over and over again, of being in the other person’s place.
The most important lesson novels teach is not a fact or a message but the skill of empathy and of seeing the world from other points of view. Practiced often enough, that skill can become a habit.

Seriously, isn't it tragic that these are not self-evident, and that the president of Northwestern University and his faculty colleague there have to write a commentary to remind higher education professionals about these?

Empathy does not come easily to us.  We need to learn about it, and experience it over and over.  We learn and experience empathy through the profound works of literature.  I still remember feeling devastated after reading A farewell to arms.  As I noted in a post:

Felt so empty inside when it ended that I had to wait out a couple of days before blogging this.
Hemingway simply sucked everything out of me with the anti-war story where the American protagonist signs up to serve in the medical corps of the Italian army in order to fight the good war, ends up deserting that only to have the military come after him because of his AWOL status as an officer, flees to neutral Switzerland with his British "wife" who is pregnant ... and then Hemingway lets the wife die after a difficult birth of a stillborn child. That is simply too cruel!

Empathy, dear reader, for this fictional character leads to empathy for the real ones in the real world.

What could be more important, for ethical and social understanding, than the ability to grasp what it is like to be someone from a different culture, period, social class, gender, religion or personality type? And one learns why even those broad categories won’t do, because one senses what it is like to be a particular other person. And that, too, is an important lesson: no one experiences the world in quite the same way as anyone else.
If we could more easily put ourselves in the position of others and put on a set of glasses to see the world in their way, we might very well, when those glasses are off, still not share their beliefs. But we will at least understand people better, negotiate with them more effectively, or guess what measures are likely to work. Just as important, we will have enlarged our sense of what it is to be human. No longer imprisoned in our own culture and moment, or mistaking our local and current values for only possible ones, we will recognize our beliefs as one of many possibilities -- not as something inevitable, but as a choice.

Indeed.

That's life

In the movie 20th Century Women, the young teenage boy, who is raised by his divorced mother, asks his mother a simple question.  He asks her whether she was ever in love with his father (her ex-husband.)

There were many such moments in the movie, written and directed by Mike Mills.  Reading the reviews of the movie, I was reminded of his previous movie that I enjoyed: Beginners.  I remembered that one of the things that appealed to me the most about Beginners was that it seemed so real and genuinely plausible.  This movie, too, felt the same way--a mix of characters that is not out of the domain of real world happenings.

I re-read the New Yorker essay about Mills, and this stood out in a way that I can relate to both those movies:

“Mike is obsessed by exploring the connection between the dramatic and the real,” the director Lance Hammer, a neighbor of Mills’s, said. “I think it comes from the need to believe he’s actually here, that he’s not having a dream, not floating away.”

I have always felt that fiction that makes me think and feel for the characters does so because of how real it feels.  Which is also why I have difficulty connecting with fiction that deals with a future that is far, far away, or that is mythological like with the Hobbits.  That connection between the dramatic and the real helps me understand the world, the humanity around me, which is what I am looking for--it is not mere entertainment.

Anyway, back to the son's question.  The mother's reply to her son was, well, real.

She looks at the son with a matter-of-fact face and tells him that she didn't think so.  She got married to his father because she was getting old, and was concerned that she would end up alone and unloved.  And, sure enough, they were divorced real soon after, instead of the ever after.

Real life is way too complicated.

A short story in the New Yorker was also about life that is anything but simple.

Literature and the arts help me understand my fellow humans and, therefore, my own place among us.  The empathy that I did not understand till I got older.

Before he won the presidential contest, when he was a US Senator, Barack Obama spoke about the empathy deficit, in his commencement address at Northwestern. In that, Obama said:

The world doesn’t just revolve around you.
There’s a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit – the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us – the child who’s hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room.
As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier.

If only this current president would read a few such short stories, or watch a few movies, or even listen to any one of Obama's commencement addresses, in order to truly understand the complicated lives that all of us lead and, therefore, to empathize.

J'accuse!

Even prior to this post, I have blogged 37 posts that I have tagged with a label that matters to me a lot: Empathy.  In her speech last night, Meryl Streep reminded us about that noble human quality.  By pointing out how empathy-deficient the pussy-grabbing president-elect is:

It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter—someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.

I still cannot believe he won despite such talk and action.  A horrible human being as the President!

Source

It is even more depressing to think that he won because of such talk and action.

To quote the philosopher Adam Smith--yes, that same Smith who is canonized as the saint of capitalism--"by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels."  We imagine how it would be to be disabled. Or to be terminally ill. Or to live in Aleppo.  Normal human beings, therefore, do not mock the disabled, or the dying, or those being bombed in Aleppo.  Yet, if 63 million voted for that horrible human being to be the president, then I worry more about my fellow citizens than about the pussy-grabber himself!

Which is why right from election night I have been operating with a clear bottom-line: There is no such thing as a good trump voter:

Trump campaigned on state repression of disfavored minorities. He gives every sign that he plans to deliver that repression. This will mean disadvantage, immiseration, and violence for real people, people whose “inner pain and fear” were not reckoned worthy of many-thousand-word magazine feature stories. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe about the groups in question. That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.

To empathize requires a fundamental starting point of recognizing and respecting the other--who does not look like me. Not with this demagogue and his voters!

Empathy is also what serious art conveys to us.  As Streep said, "An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like."  Like even when a eleven-year old boy silently sheds tears because an animated character dies.

Unlike that eleven-year old boy, the demagogue has an utter lack of an ability to "fancy with the sufferer"--a complete and total lack of empathy.  There will be situations during his presidency when he will have to be the comforter-in-chief.  There will be situations when he will have to weigh whether or not to bomb a place or a country.  There will be situations when his policies might have drastic effects on people.  But, when he lacks empathy ... progress will stall.  We might even regress.  The trump voters will stand accused!