Glen,
I don't think of empathy as something
that you gin up; it either happens to you, or it doesn't. And
then you decide what you want to do with your empathy. As a
child, perhaps,, did you ever read any of Ernest Thompson
Seton's (no relative) Lives of the Hunted? The
wolf, terror of the Corrumpaw (?), wily killer of sheep,
evader of traps, lies before you in a cage, wounded and
helpless. You feel empathy. And so you kill it. Anybody who
tells you that you should feel empathy lacks empathy
for your lack of empathy. I WILL feel empathy for Trump when
he's tried. I dread those trials. In fact, even watching
him twist and lie and twist and lie, watching him contort,
makes me queasy inside, like watching a man tortured. But
empathy, like rage, is just another emotion, and needs, like
all emotions, to be tempered with reason.
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and
Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of
u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 6:54 AM
To: FriAM [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim
A collection of people, who shall remain
nameless, recently tried to shame me for objecting to their
waste of empathy for poor lil ol Trump, in light of his
infection. One argument went something like "His father was
horrible." One primary argument went something like "empathy
begets empathy". Empathy is not zero-sum. Etc.
I started my objection to all this
Trump-as-a-victim talk by listing several aspects of his
CHARMED LIFE, like the fact that he's lucky enough to have
lived to a ripe old age (when so many of us die young), he was
born wealthy (when so many of us live our entire lives dirt
poor), his stupid TV show was wildly successful (when so many
of us are serial failures), his weaponized litigousness has
benefited him throughout his life (when so many of us can't
even afford a lawyer). Etc.
All that *privilege* has been bestowed
upon him. And it seems, to me, he's squandered it all. He
reminds me of those pitiful pictures of Saddam Hussein in
court and then prison and then dead. Oh boo-hoo, poor little
dictator being mistreated. Such sentiments are not merely
weird to me. If game theory and the success of simplistic
tit-for-tat has taught us anything, it is that the algorithmic
*depth* required to beat straightforward (poetic) "justice" is
academically interesting, but pragmatically degenerate.
So, no. I will not waste any of my
finite lifetime feeling sorry for poor lil ol Trump, our
Privilege Squanderer in Chief. If that magically limits my
ability to empathize in some other context, so be it. If it
implies that when I die pathetically, under some bridge,
eating partial hamburgers from the Wendy's dumpster, my
colleagues *rightly* avoid wasting their finite lifetimes
feeling sorry for me, then I'm ready for that day. Like it or
not, tu quoque is a fallacy.
--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
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