Empathy or Death

I will speak slowly at this UN conference because this is still a stage where people listen. My time is mandated and uninterrupted and my audience is global. I have about three minutes until I finish but you will have a lifetime to listen.

We need to find empathy with each other right now not because it is the right and moral thing to do. We need the coolness of empathy so we don’t die on a boiling planet. It is likely too late but we must try.

We should first pan for empathy in the dirt of our selfish interests. I teach my children to say please not just because it is the right and moral thing to do, but rather because saying please gets them their way more often. As my UN colleagues will agree, Western society is secular with the separation of church and state. We panned for knowledge in that separation and our insights were gold. Still, that was not a moral or intellectual choice inasmuch as private institutions then enjoyed more power and money.

We need empathy because we still need to believe in something with the same fervency as we once did religious faith. That is where our ideologies arise, or our -isms, those total beliefs in grand ideas by which we think everyone should live. Such -isms are often degrading, such as sexism and racism debasing both the thinker and the target.

If we actually challenged our -isms towards gender and race, then life would look and feel like it does in 2020. We would suffer its dichotomous ructions. Such change would be deemed laughable, unworthy of serious attention, yet strangely dangerous, something you should ignore while someone else attempts to smash. As long as your principles remain as still as stone, you can be sure your morals are strong and right.

Excrement.

That which we see as essential to us, that which might be our guiding principles, can always change. The Ancients saw the wearing of trousers as emasculating, that to open your genitals to the balmy air is a liberty as essential as logic and love. That is, until they visited the British Isles, at which point warm genitals beat principles like a small schoolboy flicking his neighbour’ scrotum.

But I do not call for us to dismiss our principles, but rather to drink from a refreshed thought about empathy. Rather than attempt to look at figures of the world through a coldly neutral view, why not consider how that figure might see you? How might Hegel perceive your actions? Or Lincoln? Plato? Your initial response might focus on your gender or race or class. But then move past that - imagine you share a beer together. What values do they have? How do those values match yours, or otherwise? How would they feel about your future, as a friend might see your time ahead in the sober hours of dawn? Imagine you are part of that thinker’s tribe, not just your own. Could you wear their empathy?

Tribalism will always exist because your eyes are in your skull. We will always seek the company with whom we are most comfortable because our eyes painfully want to pop back into their sockets. Yet until another species greets us, until we find another out-group, our division is necessary and human. Until we unite in empathy for our human context, we will define our in-group on the basest of characteristics, of genitals and skin colour.

Our narcissistic assumption that we can see anything value-free is as dangerous to us as anything.

By looking at yourself through the eyes of another, you are not just attempting to empathise with your context, but rather gaining a more human and tacit understanding of theirs. Context is such a cold word to describe the expanse of emotion and spirit in that realm of experience, that facet of life, that ‘context’.

In doing this exercise you will become an ambassador for your heritage far better than my UN colleagues because you will wear your values rather than a medal of honour. You might see how an endorser of a feckless president might see the support of their parents as the value behind their decision. Or that a voter for Brexit might see the celebration for their brother’s business as the value behind their decision. Whether you believe their behaviour celebrates your values should be second to how you see their ‘context’.

In doing so you might leave the prison of your skull and see the ghost of thousands residing in support behind someone else, of all their ambitions and agendas conflicting for a voice. In doing so you might finally see those who stand with you manifest into being. You are no island, for you are the head of a family of thought stretching back thousands of years, brothers and sisters all.

My time is up but I will speak for thirty more seconds.

But do not think this will be an easy or happy experience. The natural world should be competitive because we are human and as I said, our eyes exist in our heads. Nature is the old testament, a competitive arena of consequences that are never soft or easy. There will always be those children in the playground who will punch you in the nose, who will cut in line, who will take advantage of your moral values because theirs are so much more flexible. Understand them as well, of the powers and advantages they enjoy, and the costs to us all. Their transgressions erode their world in desperate relativity, heavy machines that threaten to roll over any path of improvement we might take. Only empathy might curb the exuberance of their freedom, feeding them a better and more human diet.

From the papers I have written and the values you see in the pattern of articles I wrote online, what do you perceive as my context? Against the canvas of my context, might you better outline the ghosts of your own, waiting impatiently for your empathy? Drink the coolness of your own empathy before our planet boils.