Since Obama’s election, one hot topic has been divining how conservatives will respond the their loss of power. Cognitive scientist, George Lakoff, at Alternet, argues that the attack on empathy, in the wake of Obama’s remarks about the qualifications of a supreme court justice, is central to their strategy.
The Sotomayor nomination has given radical conservatives new life. They have launched an attack that is nominally aimed at Judge Sotomayor. But it is really a coordinated stealth attack — on President Obama’s central vision, on progressive thought itself, and on Republicans who might stray from the conservative hard line…
Empathy is at the heart of progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others — not just individuals, but whole categories of people: one’s countrymen, those in other countries, other living beings, especially those who are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed. Empathy is the capacity to care, to feel what others feel, to understand what others are facing and what their lives are like. Empathy extends well beyond feeling to understanding, and it extends beyond individuals to groups, communities, peoples, even species. Empathy is at the heart of real rationality, because it goes to the heart of our values, which are the basis of our sense of justice.
I argue in Reviving the Left that an ethic of care, which involves empathy as one central moral capacity, is the foundation of contemporary liberalism. And Lakoff agrees.
This leads to a view of a government that cares about its citizens and has a moral obligation to protect and empower them….
President Obama has argued that empathy is the basis of our democracy. Why do we promote freedom and fairness for everyone, not just ourselves or the rich and powerful? The answer is empathy. We care about our countrymen and have an obligation to act on that care and to set up a government for the protection and empowerment of all. That is at the heart of everything he does.
This motive of care is fundamentally at odds with modern conservatism.
Empathy in this sense is a threat to conservatism, which features individual, not social, responsibility and a strict, punitive form of “justice.” It is no surprise that empathy would be a major conservative target in the Sotomayor evaluation.
As Lakoff points out, with countless homeowners under water with their mortgages and millions out of work, now is not the time to be perceived as insensitive. On the surface this attack on empathy doesn’t sound like a winning strategy. But Lakoff is alive to the deception involved in the conservative strategy.
But the target is not empathy as it really exists. Instead, the conservatives are reframing empathy to make it attackable. Their “empathy” is idiosyncratic, personal feeling for an individual, presumably the defendant in a legal case…
The argument goes like this: Empathy is a matter personal feelings. Personal feelings should not be the basis of a judicial decision of the Supreme Court. Therefore, “justice is not about empathy.” Reframe the word “empathy” and it not only disqualifies Sotomayor; it delegitimizes Obama’s central moral principle, his approach to government, his understanding of the nature of our democracy, and progressive politics in general.
Empathy here has been reframed as emotion that is “idiosyncratic” — personal — a danger to reason. “Sentiments,” that is, emotions, must be “disciplined” to fit “manners and morals, tradition and practice”– in short, the existing social and political order…
What about Newt Gingrich calling Sotomayor a racist? It is linked directly to the personal feeling argument: because of her personal feelings for her own kind — Latinos and women — she will discriminate against white men.
So while Democrats are busy trying to refute absurd, conservative charges that Sotomayor is a racist, and apologizing for her remarks, as Obama did recently, they should be focused on showing conservatives to be what they are–mean-spirited defenders of thieves and villains.
How should Democrats respond?
Democrats should go on offense. They need to rally behind empathy — real empathy, not empathy reframed as emotion and personal feeling. They need to speak regularly about empathy as being the basis of our democracy.
Liberals have always made the mistake of running away from their principles by accepting conservative ways of framing debates. And Lakoff’s frustration that we haven’t learned this lesson is apparent.
The whole article is worth a read.
Tags: conservative revival, empathy, George Lakoff, Sotomayor
To reduce empathy to “subjective feelings” is indeed a gross distortion and simplification. Empathy is a special type of cognitive state, namely one that allows the individual to experience at least in part and thereby better understand the situation of others, especially as it applies to pain, sorrow and unfair treatment. A capacity for empathy characterizes all social mammals to some degree. Humans are exceptionally social creatures, and so empathy plays a central role in shaping our interactions and judgments. Those who belittle it cater to another feature of our species, namely self-centeredness, which is rooted in the cognitive egocentricism of infancy. At the adult level, it is the center piece of the me-first worldview of social conservatives - a worldview that 1) denies the social influences on consciousness, including the individual’s character and decision-making, and 2) denies the inequality of opportunity that is intrinsic in market economies and their class structures. As both Dwight and Lakoff point out, this conservative worldview is fundamentally elitist and anti-democratic. Also, like creationism’s denial of evolution, it is fundamentally anti-science in that it ignores all the advances being made in the cognitive and social sciences about reasoning, emotions, empathy and the nature of social species.