Solri's lamentable tendency toward physical violence

[robinturner]

Whenever I read Internet posts by wannabe Nietzscheans, neo-Nazis, Ayn Rand fetishists, the two people who voted for George Bush and so on about how the weak are a drain on the strong, free competition is the only way forward, aid to developing countries is immoral, and in general "I'm good and deserve to survive because I have good genes and a high credit rating", I just want to say -

"OK, if you're so fit to survive, let's test it. I bet your kneecaps break as easily as any of those welfare bums'."

Comments

[blorky.livejournal.com]

I actually started to think about it when I read Piaget on child psychology. The fundamental attribute of empathy seems to be an requisite step in developing a formed adult sense of self. The extension from the awareness of another's emotional state to the desire to relieve their suffering seems pretty hard coded. I know that empathy and compassion shouldn't be conflated, but it's difficult for me to conceive of one without the other. Ken Wilber has put together the most compelling version of the "compassion as evolution" argument that I've seen, but he draws from a large number of disciplines.

[katminnaar.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing a lot about empathy when I listened to the audio book "Emotional Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman. Fascinating stuff that is.

Ken Wilber has put together the most compelling version of the "compassion as evolution" argument that I've seen, but he draws from a large number of disciplines.
I've heard of Ken Wilber; haven't read anything by him yet. One thing that stuck in my mind is from when I watched the miniseries documentary Rome, Power & Glory. Apparently, compassion was in terribly short order and it was thought to be anti-Roman to show sympathy; however, there didn't seem to be much humor either. Whether it's hard-wired into us makes you ask what happened to it way back then, or was it just strongly supressed?

Can you imagine a world without any compassion or empathy?? *shudder*

[solri.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of one of the last conversations I had with my father - he was explaining how Romans distinguished between clemency or mercy, which was informed by reason and therefore good, and compassion or pity, which was based on passion and therefore bad. It seems to be a case of the Romans' perversion of Stoicism into a cult of civic duty. OTOH, Marcus Aurelius was a bit of a bleeding-heart liberal.

They did have a sense of humour, though - look at Juvenal or Ovid.

[katminnaar.livejournal.com]

Passion a bad thing, huh? Or maybe misdirected passion?

I have a translated book on Marcus Aurelius titled "Meditations." He did seem to be much 'softer' than other emperors. He also said he thought there was a strong distinction between religion and philosophy... thought religion was mostly ceremonial and for the masses (to be handled by the clergy) and philosophy limited to those dedicated to higher intellectual thoughts and 'asking questions,' and that passage interests me greatly!

I'm sure SOME must have had a sense of humor, but that one documentary noted that humor in general was rather frowned upon. Maybe they didn't anyone laughing when someone got torn to pieces in the Colosseum!

[blorky.livejournal.com]

Well, by "hard-wired", I really meant was that the impetus for that behavior is inherent in human beings. It's not critical for the ongoing survivial of any one individual (like, say, breathing), and so an individual or large groups of individuals can repress or rechannel that impetus. The drive to reproduce is inate, but surpressable, and, IMO like compassion, if surpressed in large numbers of people, doesn't make for good long term species survival.

I'll have to dig through my neurophsych bookmarks, but if memory serves me, high environmental lead levels have been correlated with learning impairments at a very early age. It makes sense to me that one of the developmental processes that could be damaged is self/other differentation, and therefore a neurochemical surpresson of empathy/compassion. I could well be swinging at the bats there, though.

Thank you both for the ongoing discussion.