Thanks for the comments on the Father Land post.
Also wanted to point people to a germane TED talk by Jonathan Haidt about the moral mind, politics and personality.
He compares how different political persuasions define "morality" differently, giving varying weight to five basic values: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity.
Ingroup, Authority and Purity show the greatest disparity between left and right. For example, on a question about choosing a dog, Conservatives prefered a dog who was loyal but not warm to strangers, whereas Liberals went for a dog who was independent-minded and related to its owner as an equal.
Oh, and here's a quiz you can take to participate in Haidt's morality research.
While we're on the TED track, here's a truly jarring presentation by (the rather devilish-looking) psychologist Philip Zimbardo (author of the famed Stanford prison study and The Lucifer Effect) about how good soldiers turned bad at Abu Graib.
It includes VERY graphic pictures taken by the American reservists themselves of the torture they commited on prisoners. Horrifying!
He tries to explain how even previously normal people can commit dispicably evil acts.
It boils down to a kind of circumstantial group think and the power of authority. People will do things within anonymous organizational frameworks they would never do on their own. (Even so, some outliers do stand up and refuse.)
He advocates promoting everyday heroism among children.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
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3 comments:
In light of one's own faults and propensities to be misled and misleadiing, one hopes to be like Emily Dickinson, transcending impulses, gaining perspective. But, in doing so--not that one might have a choice--we might also fear losing too much of a social/personal life through the empathetic habit. Yet, boiled down by life's events, drop by drop, we grow empathetic to the losers, to those bearing difficulties.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requirest sorest need.
Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can the definition,
So clear, of victory,
As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
Should one be fearful of the logic, to become so Buddhist, so transcendent as to not want anything but peace and connection with all? Does one risk, through empathy, becoming so sensitive as to be like poor Lincoln, troubled by a fallen bird?
Didn't know about the TED talks. (The Stanford guy has gotten better with age, from some early PBS shows he's on.) Thanks, and sorry to go on.
A lesson we only thought we had learned from the Nuremburg trials. I would like to see Zimbardo speak but I do not want to see more disturbing images.
On the issue of a dog, I want one who is both loyal and warm to strangers. Are those mutually exclusive?
Two interesting studies that show that it's within human nature not to acknowledge the real pain we cause other people in whatever zealous form of guarding or imprisoning or ostracizing. The imprisoned is, quite to the opposite of his or hers humanity, regarded has having no sensitivity, no emotion, no personal value to anyone.
When we ourselves are the force of arbitrary justice upon other people, bent on punishment, we tend not to see it for the persecution it is.
It takes a change of consciousness to identify the prisoner as someone much like ourselves, as a moment of poetic understanding might offer us.
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