Empathy

I'm reading this book, For Your Own Good, and it's really pretty good. Not fantastic, but really helpful and I'm sure especially so for folks who haven't been exposed to this.

Anyway, empathy is a big theme and the fact that its commonly blocked off in parents when it comes to the suffering, degradation, humiliation and general trauma they often unconsciously inflict on their kids.

I thought about my roommate, who mocks the sort of spiritual ideas I'm sympathetic to, the idea of gods and spirits and whatever. (My feelings aren't really fixed, which is part of why he's so critical of them). I think about an expression I'm sure I've used, and one I've heard often, "I just can't understand how someone could believe in gods and ghosts and spirits (and all that other mumbo-jumbo)." And I realized that part of why I'm sympathetic to these ideas is because I'm trying to understand the world from the point of view of some of the nature-based people who I look up to in some ways. Jason at Anthropik talks about cultural materialism, and how ideas are grounded in lived reality, and how it just makes sense for a forager to be an animist, in the same way that its pretty nonsensical to an urban person these days to be an animist.

I don't think it's good to be proud not to understand something in this way, to cast it off and demonize it as incomprehensible, and foreign and other in various ways. Ran makes this point- it's not good enough for Indians to say they just didn't understand the ways of the civilized. We have to do better for the future, and make sure that we understand full well why the culture of empire is absurd, based on experience. It also doesn't work for (not) understanding people who committed evil acts. In the book, Alice Miller tries to uncover some of the context for Hitler. Hitler's no easy guy to have empathy for, and certainly his actions aren't something we should feel compelled to sympathize with. But what she aims to do is provide context, to understand cause and effect, and see the background for acts like these not to re-assign blame, but to pro-actively work to change this in the future so these circumstances don't repeat themselves.


The books falls a bit flat for me in that it, like I guess many theoretical treatises, tries to make its theory the final word, when I think lots of other elements were at play, namely the generalized debasement of life, not limited to the debasement of childhood, and the increasing distance between our context and the ones we evolved in. Miller seems to suggest that if we raise kids in a way that is empathic and not cruel, all misdeeds will be avoided. And that makes sense as far as it goes, but I think the understanding of what constitutes cruelty has to be expanded beyond where she may place it.