A Wise Bear
A White Bear said a really smart thing yesterday that I want to remember:
I realized today that I assume all these things about the people I know—that they at least are against things like genocide and rape—and that I’m not wrong, exactly, but they’re so busy thinking that genocide and rape are beside the point, somehow, that they don’t mind sitting around laughing at man-hating feminists and stupid hippies who talk about rape and genocide as if they’re problems. Ann Coulter’s groupies seem like that to me. They’re so busy laughing at humanity in that stupid, scornful way that they can’t hear someone saying “Please don’t make fun of the death of my son. Really. Please.”
I’m sure this isn’t universally true of everyone on the other side, but it’s at least one possible answer to the rhetorical question I often find myself directing to the ceiling: “What the hell is wrong with these people?” I wonder what it is that can make one so fixed on being superior that they can lose all touch with empathy?
Real open-minded empathy can be scary. No one wants to look at their beliefs or actions and conclude, “Oh crap, I’m an asshole.” And of course the right and just course is to recognize that, yes, sometimes I am an asshole, and when I realize it I ought to change. But it’s much easier to throw up defenses.
And, more disturbingly, I wonder if the same impulse is behind my disdain for, say, vegans and Dennis Kucinich? Am I too busy scorning the dirty hippies to recognize that they have some valuable things to say?
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Guess I’m kind of suprised the issue presents itself to you in this form. We always have mixed feelings about what we know to be sensible policies being the stock-in-trade of “fringe” candidates. I always take the bit about “dirty hippies” to be ironic dig at conventional thinking, that we all accept that the excesses of the counterculture were minor considering the big issues it got right, ant that the smear campaign against it was just that. It doesn’t occur to me that there are younger people in my circle who harbor genuine aversion to hippies, as opposed to knowing how impossible certain associations are for strictly political and conventional reasons.
About AWB’s point, I always think of it as a failure of imagination. Sympathy, empathy require a certain projection beyond what we can actually see and feel, and not everybody has it. I can’t handle the violence in many movies, which almost everybody cool regards as harmless release, obviously unreal, warranted by artistic purpose. While we shouldn’t shrink from looking things, real things, in the face, I think that simple coarsening, or failure to cultivate imagination, if you like, is part of why this inhumanity exists. And maybe always has and will.
A failure of imagination seems like a likely diagnosis a lot of the time.
I meant “scorning the dirty hippies” ironically, of course. That said, I think I recognize (in myself at least) the potential to discount a message because I have something invested in keeping myself at a distance from the messenger. That’s the parallel I was getting at.