President Barack Obama continued his push for immigration reform Thursday, calling the need for change an economic, security and moral imperative both for "millions of people who live in the shadows" and for the country as a whole.
This is a subject that can "expose our raw feelings," Obama told an audience at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. But we need to "show empathy to our brothers and sisters and try to recognize ourselves in one another."
Like most conventional scientists, Hawking believes that human beings are not conscious beings. Thus, we are incapable of empathy; incapable of love,pain, suffering or making our own decisions based on free will.
This utter lack of recognition of the value of consciousness in living beings is the core principle of evil upon which most of modern science is built. It is the lack of empathy itself that gives rise to great evil.
Interestingly, this is precisely the conclusion of a member of the scientific community– Cambridge University psychology professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who has written a new book in which he concludes that evil originates with a failure of empathy. He explains that psychopaths have “zero degrees of empathy,” meaning they do not recognize nor value the thoughts and feelings of others.
Botox patients don't just have trouble expressing emotions with their faces: They have trouble recognizing how others are feeling.
Physical mirroring heightens empathy and understanding: Without always realizing it, we widen our eyes when our conversational partners express surprise and crease our brows when they’re worried.
How do we recognize the emotions other people are feeling? One source of information may be facial feedback signals generated when we automatically mimic the expressions displayed on others’ faces.
Supporting this “embodied emotion perception,” dampening and amplifying facial feedback signals, respectively, impaired and improved people’s ability to read others’ facial emotions...
Accordingly, when the skin was made resistant to underlying muscle contractions via a restricting gel, emotion perception improved, and did so only for emotion judgments that theoretically could benefit from facial feedback.
So those who are going to be attracted to the idea that evil is just lack of empathy, are probably those that will be the most insensitive to God. An inability to even call evil what it is, something that we do freely because we want to, not because we don't know how the other person feels, is a huge lie that many will want to believe.
Just as they want to believe that God doesn't exist, or that they get reincarnated or absorbed into the oneness when they die, or even that they cease to be when they draw their last breath. It's all a lie that leads to torment for eternity if people don't turn towards God. Which is really the end that we were made for.
God made us for Himself, to spend eternity in Heaven with Him. He just wants us to want to be there. Redefining evil is just another way of thwarting that, and thwarting God.
My take: while a lack of empathy combined with some other traits can cause humans to harm and kill others it would be a mistake to believe that we should make everyone equally empathetic and much more empathetic.
Too often empathy causes people to enable others to be lazy, destructive, and irresponsible. The tendency to experience very strong emotional desires, of any form, clouds the mind and blocks development of needed understanding.
Empathy has no religious, philosophical or ideological roots. Empathy is an emergent quality of the Natural Human being. As such it is a biological imperative; it is not a question, therefore of belief, but of a direct perception of the natural world, and guided by that intrinsic empathy material experiential knowledge appropriate to the nurturance of life is acquired: that is the basis for an truly healthy natural human being.
And that process starts from within the womb. The greatest Sacred Site is the mind of a Child. Corneilius Crowley
The conference will be focusing on empathy and compassion through the lens of the emerging science of empathy, which is demonstrating that we are actually wired for empathy and compassion. Rather than seeing human beings as an outcome of the selfish gene, knowing that empathy potential exists at a neurophysiological level gives us a completely different understanding of human nature.
To explore this reality we have brought together a distinguished panel of presenters. The well-known writer Karen Armstrong has been a leading proponent of the Charter for Compassion, which she will introduce. Iain McGilchrist will explore the neurophysiology underpinning empathy –the social brain - and its association with the right hemisphere.
The view that the urge to destroy, to compete, profit and come out on top, no matter what the price is simply human nature is a very commonly held belief. We might not find extreme selfish behaviour or ‘evil’ justifiable, but it is to be expected, because we assume it is what we are. In this climate, the idea of developing an attitude of love and compassion towards the world and its inhabitants can seem hopelessly idealistic.
Does it actually matter what society feels about whether the human potential for evil is inherently part of our nature, or whether we are more naturally disposed love and compassion?
In Wired to Care, we discuss how special cells in our brains called mirror neurons allow us to experience what other people are feeling — not just in an imagined way, either. Repeated tests have shown that both people performing an activity and people observing an activity experience identical brain activity. And new research shows that this goes far beyond our minds. Researchers in Europe recently went to the Spanish village of San Pedro Manrique to look at how mirror neurons respond to a particularly extreme physical test — ritualized fire-walking.
The empathic implications of this are quite remarkable. When we view someone else as being like us, whether through family ties, friendship, or simple identification, we are capable of literally syncing our physiology to them — feeling what they are feeling. ...
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil, I think I've come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It's the one characteristics that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil I think, is the absence of empathy." From Nuremberg (2000) Nazi Leaders on trial.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist at Cambridge, argues that we can do better than the concept of evil as an explanation for cruel behavior.
But it is a profoundly naïve work of moral philosophy, one whose conclusions suggest the natural limitations of Mr. Baron-Cohen's approach. The trouble with taking great issue with "evil," not the thing but the word, is that it misunderstands why such terms exist in the first place. Most people who use the word would agree that malicious actions usually have causes. Evil is something rather separate, having to do with the effects those actions produce, not their causes. The reason that the concept of evil recurs in religious belief is not that it exceeds the bounds of rational consideration. It is that wickedness throws a troubling wrench in any attempt, religious or otherwise, to consider the world systematically. Raymond Zhong
Simon Baron-Cohen has been battling with evil all his life. As a scientist seeking to understand random acts of violence, from street brawls to psychopathic killings to genocide, he has puzzled for decades over what prompts such acts of human cruelty. And he's decided that evil is not good enough.
"I try to keep an open mind. I would never want to say a person is beyond help," he explains. "Empathy is a skill like any other human skill -- and if you get a chance to practice, you can get better at it."
So, yes, immigration reform is a moral imperative, and so it’s worth seeking greater understanding from our faith. As it is written in the Book of Deuteronomy, “Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” To me, that verse is a call to show empathy to our brothers and our sisters; to try and recognize ourselves in one another...
That sense of connection, that sense of empathy, that moral compass, that conviction of what is right is what led the National Association of Evangelicals to shoot short films to help people grasp the challenges facing immigrants. It’s what led the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to launch a Justice for Immigrants campaign, and the Interfaith Immigration Coalition to advocate across religious lines. It’s what led all the Latino pastors at the Hispanic Prayer Breakfast to come together around reform...
I’m asking you to help us recognize ourselves in one another.
For me, one of those people was my fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Mabel Hefty. When I walked into Ms. Hefty’s classroom for the first time, I was a new kid who had been living overseas for a few years, had a funny name nobody could pronounce. But she didn’t let me withdraw into myself. She helped me believe that I had something special to say. She made me feel special.
She reinforced the sense of empathy and thoughtfulness that my mother and my grandparents had tried hard to instill in me -- and that’s a lesson that I still carry with me as President.
Ms. Hefty is no longer with us, but I often think about her and how much of a difference she made in my life. And everybody has got a story like that, about that teacher who made the extra effort to shape our lives in important ways.
Presidents must show empathy during difficult economic times. It's in the office handbook. There's only so much any one president can do though about the immediate condition of the economy, and he must be careful not to exaggerate his impact.
So he emphasizes that he understands the plight of regular Americans. The problem with empathy, however, is not just that there's never enough of it to go around. It's that by offering it, presidents raise unrealistic expectations of a different sort.
However violently Osama bin Laden may have acted, celebrating his death requires the silencing of our own empathy. Empathy is a noble gas. We can’t attach political complexities to it—when we designate one person worthy of empathy, another unworthy—what we’re really doing is switching empathy on or off, heeding it or silencing it.
And what all acts of violence have in common—all acts of violence—is the silencing of empathy. When Obama killed Osama, he first felt no empathy. When Osama attacked the towers, he first felt no empathy. ..
That’s why it makes no sense to me to silence our own empathy to celebrate. Empathy is what we need, more than anything, to cultivate, and we know—too well—what happens when we silence it.
No amount of “rebranding” can diminish the horrors of child sacrifice, infant genital mutilation, random acts of disfigurement and amputation or the systematic abduction of children in order to force them into sex slavery and involuntary military service.
Whether we say the perpetrators are “empathy deficient” or “evil,” they have to be stopped and we can’t get sentimental about why they do what they do. Until we get these people under control, culpability is immaterial. A raging fire in the neighborhood isn’t making choices. It’s not responsible. But that doesn’t matter. Savagely destructive forces can’t be allowed to destroy and disfigure the innocent. Period.
Simon Baron-Cohen, the eminent researcher into autism, has set himself a mission. He wishes to convince us to jettison talk of "evil", and focus instead on the concept of empathy deficiency. For him, this represents a shift from a position that is woolly and permeated by theological assumptions towards something much more objective and scientific...
Baron-Cohen concludes by saying that "unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone". The trick lies in that phrase "by definition". From whose standpoint is oppression to be judged? Who decides what is the correct response to another person's thoughts and feelings? He is grappling with one of the most important questions for our times, and although his answers are partial, they are sophisticated. The debate will certainly continue. Joanna Bourke
Nearly everyone agrees that women, on the whole, are more compassionate than men. In a 2008 Pew research poll, 80 percent of Americans expressed that view.
Is this a sexist stereotype? Apparently not. Newly published brain-imaging research suggests that in this case, conventional wisdom is correct.
Interesting. In his very own book, Frans DeWaal writes: "None of this denies male empathy. Indeed, gender differences usually follow a pattern of overlapping bell curves: Men and women differ on average, but quite a few men are more empathy than the average woman, and quite a few women are less empathic than the average man. With age, the empathy levels of men and women seem to converge. Some investigators even doubt that in adulthood there's much difference left." (The Age of Empathy,67-8). Of course one big question: IF there is a difference, so what? Imo, and i suspect yours, too, it's more important to figure out how we can all grow empathy - whether some have more "naturally" than others is not that relevant then... <br/>
Rachel AB's comment May 11, 2011 6:39 PM
His take on the topic in the video starts at about 11:48 - talking about deeper levels of empathy. Since empathy originates in female care for the young, women have learned a deeper form of empathy - maybe this means men need to get involved in childcare ;-)
Thanks for pointing me to this interview! I really enjoyed it! Great questions, too.
I was a bit surprised when Frans was talking about how it's easy for men to turn off empathy for revenge or whatever.. he was so adamant about it.. I've seen that in women as well. ;-)
Simon Baron-Cohen says tales of Nazi horror motivated him to deconstruct human cruelty, sees empathy as worlds most valuable but ignored resource.
Psychopaths, narcissists, and people with borderline personality disorder sit at the bottom end of the scale -- these people have "zero degrees of empathy".
But rather than labeling them as evil, Baron-Cohen says they should be seen as sick, or "disabled", and we should seek to understand why they have such an empathy deficiency and help them replace it.
Baron-Cohen shies away from saying that psychopaths can be "cured" of extreme behavior, but he argues strongly against locking them up and saying there is nothing society can do.
Does Baron-Cohen’s theory illuminate mass outbreaks of evil, such as in Lenin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany. Pol-Pot’s Cambodia, or post-Habyarimana’s Rwanda, for example? I think the answer is no.
In Rwanda, for example, if accounts are to be believed, thousands of perfectly ordinary people, of no apparently psychopathic tendencies, took up machetes and other instruments and killed their neighbours, then enjoying their goods and feasting on their food, celebrating what they had done.
What would Baron-Cohen say about this (he does not use this example in his book)? Well, he would say, in certain circumstances – fear, mass hysteria, or whatever – some circuits in the brain overwhelm other circuits in the brain, those for example that are necessary for the expression of empathy. Remember that people are on a continuum of empathy: as circumstances grow more and more dire, so a bigger and bigger percentage of the population loses its capacity for empathy. > Theodore Dalrymple
Happiness Within Reach Conference at Stanford University 2011. Link to Slides http://bit.ly/euLB6m Real and deep happiness comes from connection, compassion and empathy with others. Emma Seppala
Does Simon Baron-Cohen's new book, The Science of Evil, offer a perspective on evil that leads to more questions... This begs the questions: Is evil treatable? And is lack of empathy the defining factor of evil? The philosophical questions are perhaps, in this day and age, more pressing than the psychological ones.
One interesting point the author seems to make is that empathy can and should be taught to evil people. But how? And by whom? We don’t know for sure*, but there is evidence that psychopaths and other “evil” people are created by both nature and nurture combined. In order to study the process of their development we must first identify those most likely to become evil–is there an evil gene? Is it a mutation? Or, is evil a flaw or defect?
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