Monday, September 19, 2011

Freedom and Empathy

So I have already discussed the Tea Party and their lack of empathy. I just happened to see the clip of the crowd cheering on Ron Paul as he says a sick 30 year old who doesn't have health insurance should die: You Tube and there was also the loud cheering for Perry's record number of execution. Are we a country that has lost its compassion and empathy? The Tea Party spokepeople claim that they are not interested in social issues, but economics alone: Crooks & Liars. This claim is so absurd as to not warrant a response, but there is the deeper issue of whether we can actually separate social issues like healthcare and poverty from economics. This is the assumption of conservatives, but it is again an absurd claim.

The role of the state in contemporary societies has been to mitigate the power of corporations and the power elite to exploit the public at large. They have done this in a number of ways since the beginning of the Great Depression by supporting unions, regulating banks and investment firms, offering healthcare to some or all citizens, breaking up monopolies and oligopolies, helping the poor, elderly and handicapped, protecting workers rights, regulating irresponsible and dangerous corporate behavior and redistributing income. They have also worked to soften the ebbs of the business cycle by providing stimulus to the economy. Since the conservative revolution, all of these roles have been attacked and seriously circumscribed. This is well-trodden territory. What is less acknowledged in the mainstream is the simultaneous effort to mark poverty and lack of economic success as moral failures.

There is a long tradition of this in the U.S. and other countries, but the New Deal and Great Society had seriously challenged those ideas. Starting in the 80s, the "blame the victim" discourse gained ascendancy and has been gaining popularity ever since. Together with a "culture of cruelty" on television and in many movies, and the ways that technology and consumer culture alienate people from each other, it can be argued that we are becoming a society that lacks empathy. There are certainly plenty that continue to fight for the poor and downtrodden, but it is possible that there are many more that either don't care or actively believe that those who fail deserve it. Certain strands of evangelical Christianity have further solidified these ideas by arguing that those who succeed do so because of God's will; which lends itself to the obvious concomitant conclusion that those who fail also do so at God's will.

A society without compassion or empathy is a society that will amost inevitably slide toward Fascism. Without a belief that we have some responsibility to each other, society collapses into the neoliberal dreamscape, where each person simply looks out for themselves (and maybe their immediate family). Over time, factions will grow that will seek to punish those who don't follow the dictates of that society. Polanyi makes this very point in a different context in arguing that the rise of Fascism and Communism were preordained by the pre-WWII global economic reality. Assuming we are again approaching a similar economic crisis of corporate and state interest conflicting dramatically with those of the public at large, we may again face this choice, without many supporting the precepts of communism or even socialism any longer. It is a troubling time, but one hopes that empathy can be restored as people looked around them and see the real costs of the choices we have made. I do every night, as the number of homeless on the Venice boardwalk continues to rise ...

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