What Is Evil?

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Here’s a blog exchange that gives me a chance to revisit a favorite theme — what is evil? Ernest Partridge argues that evil is the absence of empathy. And it’s a good argument.

Someone who is utterly without empathy is, by definition, a sociopath. I think there are degrees of empathy deficiency short of sociopathy, however. You’ve probably known people who could be empathetic to others in their same demographic group but utterly callous to “outsiders,” for example.

Partridge goes on to describe today’s American Right as “regressives” who lack empathy, versus “progressives” whose moral worldview is based on empathy. And I think that’s a valid argument, but perhaps not the whole enchilada.

I would argue that the difference between today’s “conservatives” and those I like to call “normal people” is also a difference in cognitive ability. And I don’t mean just “smarts.”

Righties have rigidly linear thought processes; they don’t see the interconnectedness of things. The Iraq War is a good example of linear thinking — Saddam is bad, taking him out is good. They were incapable of even considering how “taking him out” might change Iraq’s relationship with Iran, for example, or how the ancient Sunni-Shia feud might impact postwar Iraq. Even now they don’t seem to grasp how much the war has and is and will cost the nation, nor how the rigidly linear focus on Iraq actually hurts our overall anti-terrorism efforts.

Domestically, they don’t appreciate how allowing New Orleans to rot might impact the rest of the U.S., or how allowing big chunks of the population to fall into poverty because of health care costs or the mortgage crisis might impact the economy as a whole. They can’t see outside the linear “people dumb enough to take junk mortgages/not have health insurance don’t deserve to be rescued.”

I’ve met some far left-wing ideologues who seemed no more empathetic than their right-wing counterparts. The difference is in where their loyalties lie. As for the rest of us, I don’t know if “seeing the interconnectedness of things” is the result of empathy, or vice versa, or unrelated. I think probably it is possible for someone to have a keen intellectual grasp of interconnectedness but rank only average on the empathy scale.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has a different view of Partridge’s post.

At the RightOnline summit at Austin, we actually discussed the nature of “evil” for a while. While most people think of “evil” as a greasy character, twirling his mustache while planning to hurt the innocent for the sheer joy of it, that’s not an accurate description of most evil people.

Saying that evil people lack empathy gets closer to the truth, but isn’t quite right. Even a person who isn’t very empathetic could be pure of heart, live by Golden Rule, and be a great person.

I don’t think so. Hawkins is leaving out the self-bullshit factor, or the lies we tell ourselves to give ourselves permission to do whatever we want to do, consequences be damned. Empathy is a wonderful moderator of self-bullshit. Without it, people inevitably rationalize why the injury they do to others to get what they want is somehow justified, even “moral.”

Hawkins continues,

So, what is at the core of evil? I’d say selfishness.

Selfish people aren’t empathetic and they don’t care very much about how their actions impact others because it’s all about them.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a distinction between Hawkins’s definition of “selfishness” and “absence of empathy.”

Oh, they may say they care about people and pretend to emphasize with them, but in reality, they do what they do only because it benefits them.

That’s classic sociopathic behavior.

…And regrettably, the “moral cornerstone of progressive politics” isn’t empathy, it is selfishness. Take that for what it’s worth.

What it’s worth? Since Hawkins doesn’t bother to explain why he thinks the “moral cornerstone of progressive politics” is selfishness, I’d say you’d get more value from a bucket of piss.

If you are talking about the moral cornerstone of progressive politics, I agree with Partridge — empathy, definitely. I argue that empathy — or, at least, good socialization — is the cornerstone of morality, period.

If you’re interested, I have an article about the Buddhist understanding of evil on the other site.

The Speech

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Any reaction? I understand there’s some blowback on the Right regarding Obama’s “citizen of the world” line. Yet Ronald Reagan used the same line once upon a time.

Ann Althouse once again proves her inability to critically think her way out of a wet paper bag. She picked up on Obama’s comments about the Berlin Airlift:

I guess we’re not supposed to think about how Obama wanted and still wants to give up on the Iraq war. Surely, if he’d been there in 1948, he would have said the Berlin airlift is hopeless. He thought the surge was hopeless.

Yes, the “surge” is so much like the Berlin Airlift it’s hard to tell them apart. (/snark)

Huh?

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More self-evident stupidity — Steven G. Calabresi, McCain supporter and co-founder of the Federalist Society, argues that Barack Obama is too young to be president.

The Constitution says a person must be at least 35 years old to be POTUS, and Obama is in his late 40s. However, Calabresi argues that since life expectancy is longer now, “35” should be adjusted up.

In 1789, the average life expectancy of a newborn was about 40 years, compared with about 78 today. A lot of this was because of infant mortality, but in 1789, even the average life expectancy of every man who reached age 18 was only about 47. This suggests that at best a 35-year-old age limit in 1789 might have functioned then about the way a 55- or 60-year-old age qualification would function today. On this account Obama may be old enough to drive and buy a glass of white wine, but he has a way to go before he can run for president.

But the possible human life span hasn’t changed much. Our second POTUS, John Adams, was about 91 when he died. That made him only a teenager in dog years, btw. Next?

Others on the legal left, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, argue that in choosing between different interpretations of the Constitution, we should select the one that will produce the best consequences. This method too suggests that Obama should be understood to be constitutionally barred from serving as president by reason of his age.

Here comes my favorite part.

We have had three presidents out of 43 who were younger when they took office than Obama would be on Jan. 20, 2009: Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt.

This is bad? Are we making sense yet?

All of them committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young.

As opposed to older guys who screwed up their entire administrations.

I don’t know how old Calabresi is, but I say he’s too stupid to be writing op eds. Or to be left alone for more than ten minutes at a time, for that matter.

Missionary Position

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Sometimes you run into people who are so clueless you wonder how they dress themselves. Today I ran into a blog being kept by a Christian missionary in Thailand. I’ll just link to one post without comment. It parodies itself.

Here’s a post on another blog that talks about Christian missionary work in Thailand. Techniques for converting the Thais include scare-mongering and emotional blackmail.

Update: Here’s one more — “Buddhist migrants pressured to convert to Christianity.” I bet they’re not as aggressive with the Muslims.

I wish some of these deadheads would stop and think how they would feel if some group representing another religion tried the same tricks on them, or on other Christians. Do unto others, etc.

More Media Mayhem

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Michael Grunwald writes for Time that, by any previous predictive measure, the McCain candidacy ought to be toast. However,

It’s also unwise to underestimate the hunger of the media for an exciting race. … The media will try to preserve the illusion of a toss-up; you’ll keep seeing “Obama Leads, But Voters Have Concerns” headlines.

Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei write for the Politico that “McCain gaffes pile up; critics pile on,” but the fact is that McCain’s “gaffes” — which are about big honking geopolitical matters like where Pakistan is — aren’t drawing nearly as much attention as inconsequential stuff Al Gore didn’t even say back in 2000.

The wingnuts are still hyperventilating about John McCain’s “rejected” op ed about Iraq, in which McCain tried to get by with bashing Obama instead of explaining his own position.

Today I learned that a “humor” piece someone wrote about Netroots Nation was “spiked,” and Michelle Malkin says, “So, not only are we not allowed to make fun of Barack Obama, but it appears that liberals in the media have also made ridiculing the left-wing blogosphere off-limits.”

I didn’t go to Netroots Nation this year, I regret, but had I been there I’m sure I could have written something humorous and fun-poking about it. The problem with the “humorous” piece that was ripped down from the website of the Austin American Statesman is that it wasn’t a bit funny. It was just mean. Right-wing humor, in other words. (IMO actual, unvarnished ridicule is rarely funny.)

Malkin has a big chunk of it on her website. But if you want to get the Cliff’s Notes version, see Greg Mitchell at Daily Kos. My impression is that the “writer” of the piece built it entirely from ancient stereotypes of “leftists” without bothering to pull his head out of his ass long enough to notice if the stereotypes still apply.

Genuine wit reveals something real. As Mark Twain said, “Humor is the good natured side of a truth.”

The part of the spiked piece that most offended me is “Pelosi is so far left her title should include (D-Beijing).” Pelosi has shown more cojones, as it were, in speaking out against Beijing and its Tibet policies than any Republican I can think of.

That’s why it wasn’t funny.

Fairness and Flatulence

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The McCain campaign claims that the New York Times rejected an op ed McCain wrote about Iraq. McCain’s campaign fed this to Drudge, who reprinted the op ed. I don’t link to Drudge, but you can find it if you really want it. The Times asked the McCain campaign to write a piece that “mirrored” the one they published by Obama a few days ago.

Remarkably, Daniel Finkelstein of the Times Online (UK) agrees with the New York Times‘s decision.

It wasn’t about Iraq. It was about Obama. If I received it I would have done exactly what the NYT did – send it back and ask them to redraft it so that it was about Iraq and was more, well, interesting.

Why was I only able to say I “think” they “may” be right? Because I don’t know exactly what they asked the Senator’s staff to do to the piece. But if they simply asked for a piece that matched Obama’s because, like Obama’s it was actually about his views on Iraq, well then I am right behind them.

Finkelstein is right that McCain’s op ed is just a big whine about Obama. I think he’s right about what the NY Times meant by “mirror,” also. That makes sense. The wingnuts, of course, think it means they want McCain to write a piece that agrees with Obama’s which does not make sense.

Rasmussen reports that there’s a growing belief reporters are trying to help Obama win. This is an opinion poll, mind you, not a report on the actual activity of journalism. 78 percent of Republicans think the press is trying to help Obama win.

What do you think? I don’t watch the entire media that closely any more. I check in with MSNBC in the evenings, scan through newspapers during the day, and that’s about it. I would say from what I’ve seen on MSNBC that their coverage is kinder to Obama than it was to Al Gore in 2000 or to John Kerry in 2004. Olbermann is unabashedly pro-Obama, of course.

At the same time, I haven’t seen MSNBC (except for Olbermann) be as harsh to McCain as it was to Gore in 2000 or Kerry in 2004.

Does this mean MSNBC on the whole is stumbling around somewhere in the general territory of “unbiased”?

Learned Helplessness

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In his column today, Bob Herbert writes,

When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.

When was it?

Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

Welcome to the 28th year since the Reagan Revolution.

I don’t blame Reagan entirely for our state of learned helplessness, mind you. And Bob Herbert wasn’t writing exclusively about government. But by persuading people that “government is the problem” I think the Reaganites caused a shift in how Americans understood government. And this put the nation on the road to learned helplessness.

Even as late as the 1960s, most working- and middle-class white Americans (I realize African Americans had a different experience of things) felt that the government was theirs. Certainly people complained that Washington did plenty of boneheaded things, but still there was a belief that We, the People could accomplish great things by means of government. This may in part have been a legacy of FDR, who had a gift for evoking a “we’re all in this together” sentiment among America’s ordinary citizens.

But today, people treat and speak of “the government” as if Washington DC were occupied by space aliens taking orders from Mars, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Government can’t, or won’t, respond to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans, and ordinary Americans no longer expect anything from government.

Thanks loads, Ronnie.

I’ve given this speech before, but I still think it’s critical that ordinary citizens be reconnected to the idea that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s ours. It’s us. There’s nothing wrong with using government to solve problems that are not being solved by other means.

There’s a lot government cannot do. But, dammit, there’s a lot it can do, if people have the will and the leadership to see it done.

On a sorta kinda related note … yesterday David Brooks wrote one of his most bone-headed columns ever. I wanted to respond to it yesterday but was busy fighting off Shugden culties.

In “The Coming Activist Age,” Brooks said “periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule.” Really? Change? Conservative rule? Um, Coolidge? Hoover? Nope, can’t be. But lo, Brooks’s main example was Theodore Roosevelt.

You might disagree with TR’s ideas about foreign policy, but in the context of his times TR’s domestic policies made him one of the purest progressives who ever sat in the Oval Office. And after he left the White House he went further Left. His “New Nationalism” speech is the foundation of modern American liberalism.

Apparently John McCain is going around saying he wants to be the new Theodore Roosevelt. A Times letter writer responded,

Is John McCain aware that Theodore Roosevelt was not a conservative? On virtually every domestic issue — race relations, the environment, the role of government in the economy — T.R. was what today would be labeled a robust liberal, and the leading conservatives of his day, like Mark Hanna, hated and feared him.

There’s nothing of TR in McCain, I say.

One more interesting read — Sasha Abramsky, “Putting ignorance on a pedestal.”

Interesting Times

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Sorry I’ve been scarce. I need two of me to keep up with things sometimes.

Yesterday hundreds of Shugden Dorje devotees and Dalai Lama supporters clashed outside Radio City Music Hall and had to be separated by NYPD. I’m sorry I missed it.

If you’ve seen the Shugden groupies — they go around protesting His Holiness the Dalai Lama everywhere he speaks — you may have wondered what their issues are. I just wrote a long backgrounder on the other blog. Essentially, the Shugdenistas are a fundamentalist cult, and what’s going on is a power struggle within Tibetan Buddhism.

The leaders of the Shugden sect recruit lots of soft-headed westerners, feed them highly revisionist versions of Tibetan history and Buddhism, and get them all worked up into believing His Holiness is an enemy of religious freedom. But the protesters really are just pawns in a bigger game. And you can bet China is involved. This is all explained on the other blog.

So if you see the Shugden culties in the future, just ignore them. And pity them, if you like.

Notice to Shugden culties: If you want to argue with me, go to the Buddhism forums. Any nonsense you leave here will be deleted.

It’s the Stupid (Republican) Economy

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I think somebody ought to have an ad featuring these McCain quotes from a January 2008 debate running 24/7 —

Q: Are Americans better off than they were eight years ago?

A: You could argue that Americans overall are better off, because we have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment and low inflation and a lot of good things have happened. A lot of jobs have been created. … We need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which I voted for twice to do so. … I think we are better off overall if you look at the entire eight-year period, when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etc.

This should be juxtaposed with a clip from Dubya’s Tuesday press conference.

He’s not worried.

On a day that saw one economic bombshell after another, President Bush squinted, smirked and grimaced into the future Tuesday, declaring – contrary to a growing mountain of evidence – that the country’s financial system is “basically sound.”

“I’m an optimist,” a sometimes testy Bush said in his first White House news conference since April. “I believe there’s a lot of positive things for our economy.”

Dan Froomkin cites an AP poll that says “by a 2-1 margin, Americans believe McCain would generally continue Bush’s economic policies.”

Harold Meyerson has a must-read column on McCain’s economic policies in today’s WaPo.

… as McCain tries to balance the tattered libertarianism of Reaganomics with the financial exigencies of the moment, he and his campaign have moved beyond inconsistency into utter incoherence. He vows to balance the budget while also cutting corporate taxes and making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich — even though the rich and corporations made out like bandits during the Bush “prosperity,” while everyone else’s incomes stagnated. McCain squares this circle by vowing to cut entitlements, a move that would reduce, rather than enhance, consumer purchasing power at a time of economic downturn (or any other time, for that matter).

Whether Americans are even experiencing a downturn has been a matter of some dispute in the McCain camp, since former senator Phil Gramm, until last week one of McCain’s chief surrogates on economic issues, deemed America a nation of “whiners” mistaking subjective insecurity over the economy for an objective economic fact. For McCain, who had the misfortune to be campaigning in Michigan the day that Gramm’s remarks dominated campaign news, Gramm’s insensitivity was appalling. But McCain has never expressed any concern that Gramm wrote the legislation that enabled the $62 trillion credit default swaps market to remain unregulated, which, as David Corn documented in Mother Jones, meant that banks and hedge funds could accumulate liabilities that they could not cover if the markets — most particularly, the subprime mortgage market — went south. To the contrary, McCain has viewed Gramm as one of his economic gurus. “There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm,” McCain declared in February. …

…One problem is that McCain himself has no real ideas about how to fix the economy, which leaves his tetherless surrogates free to roam the policy landscape. An even deeper problem is that standard-issue Republican economic policy has run out of plausible mantras. The ritual extolling of markets and denigration of government make no sense at a moment when a conservative Republican administration is rushing to save the markets through governmental intervention.

Or, to use Reagan’s construction: Republican economics is not the solution to our problem; Republican economics is the problem — for our nation, surely, and also for candidate McCain.