How to Empathize

The plenary session today was one that I had heard before: Reinhold Wagnleitner, one of the more eccentric and beloved friends of the Seminar, performed his staple lecture "America and The World: Visions at a Distance". This was the third time that I had heard an iteration of this presentation, and each time I internalize a larger portion of the slides that he shows, a number which easily exceeds 130. The paramount tenet of Reinhold's lecture is that perception, not fact, is a preeminent factor in creating an environment in which global citizenship is possible. This position makes immediate sense. Ironically, the problem of perception seems to be just as present intra-nationally in the United States as it is internationally about the United States.

Here is where we enter the problem of empathy that I want to address. In the discussion after the presentation, a predictable amount of self-gratifying noble liberalism hung thick in the room, while any shrewd or cutting analysis of the way in which we go about changing this negative perception was simply eschewed from the dialogue. Luckily, I have this blog, so the pressure to speak about my ideas (which seem to be decidedly radical, and stand in juxtaposition even more prominently in a mildly conservative demographic such as this one) never becomes so much that my head collapses in on itself like a dying star. The pervasive attitude of many of the speakers seemed to be that in order to fix many problems related to persecution and suffering and human rights violations and greed, these themes must be underscored in the school system. Okay, maybe: but I think that faculty forget sometimes that school matters far less than visual media, in terms of mass education. But I'll concede the point, because my objection about that premise leads nowhere interesting to discuss. From this premise, the room forwarded their next assertion that the best--and perhaps only--way to ensure that these themes are enduring is to demonstrate them in person; for instance, to do service trips and language studies and study abroad would be the best--and again, perhaps only--way to ingrain a lasting impression in students that caring for one another is of vital importance.

Well.

I immediately and fervently objected, and I like the idea! My position is this, and it is simple: I am saddened by the notion, if it is true, that we have become a nation or a people who cannot learn except by doing. There are some things, I think, which a desirable version of a human being is able to intuit, facts about the world which must be true in order to the world to function properly, ethically: to believe otherwise is to deny our soft power of intellect. One of these principles, for example, is that, in any complex society, there must be some meta-ethics that are necessarily true, full stop. I cannot imagine to be satisfied with the notion that in order to understand that slavery or misogyny or racism are wrong, we must directly experience them, or meet with people who might "tell us their stories" of how terrible those things are. Can we not discern that these and other certain acts and attitudes are wrong, a priori, and that the experience is indeed the way that we might change the situations which we have identified as unsatisfactory, rather than the way that we learn about it in the first place? Action as activism, I say; not action as education. And by extension, the message is extremely upsetting: we cannot acquire genuine knowledge of a thing by thinking about it, we must have it happen to us. This assertion implies that certain terrible acts must occur first, before we can determine that they are unwanted. Is that the sort of world that we wish to create, or worse, to encourage?

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Kyle Brown, gentleman and scholar that he is, has written a lovely rumination on the subject of involvement and belonging (but also on the informal subject of San Francisco antics). I have thought a great deal about that subject, as we all are compelled to do. To contradict the point I have just made above, I do believe that it is a necessary pre-condition of self-actualization that a person has felt that, in fact, he does not belong.