In comments to last night’s post about empathy, The Invisible Spinster raised some perfectly sensible concerns.

So … are you now creating a no-humanity class too, in addition to the no-sex class?

I really have to take issue with your second-to-last paragraph there. On one hand, you’re absolutely right that a lack of capacity for empathy is the way of the sociopath. On the other hand, someone’s unwillingness to engage that capacity at any particular moment does not in any way make them less human.

Perhaps I am reading your post out of context … I don’t follow Twisty Faster because she reminds me a little too much of the aggressive reductionism of my own Andrea Dworkin phase. However, this idea that empathy is a necessary requirement for humanism seems exactly backwards to me. It is precisely when we’re not in a swoon of empathy and do the right thing anyway that makes us human.

When applied to sexuality, I think your position gets scary even faster. For example, it pleases me to oogle cute guys. I am appreciating them for their sexuality, not their worth as a human being. Does my oogling in and of itself make me inhuman? Or is the unhumanity line crossed when I look at their muscles when talking to them instead of their eyes? Or does the line reside where I discount their ideas because they’re merely beefcake?

Now, I would fully agree that line 3 is definitely unempathic. I would argue, though, that line 1 is fully within the bounds of other-human-respectfulness because it’s in my head.

Whether it’s sex or CNN or daily interaction, it’s scary-judgemental to me that you deem me inhuman because I’m not thinking the right thoughts.

She said it here.

“So … are you now creating a no-humanity class too” No. Actually “No!” The no-sex class is bad enough! (I don’t talk so much about it because I like it.)

It’s totally fine to ogle each other, top and bottom each other, marry each other, be hot for, have hookups with, call each other “honey pie” and love and hate each other. That’s not only not wrong it’s normal.

It’s not necessary to be empathetic every moment of the day to be human. (Even I’m not that much of a tree-huggin’ carrot-crunchin’ granola head.) What’s necessary is to be able to reflect on people in terms other than their utility (sexual or otherwise) to us.

What I was going all off on in the first post, specifically, was a particular but prevalent attitude towards other people that’s (erroneously I think) short-handed as “porn culture” but that also encompasses – speaking of human athletes in terms of their entertainment value, as in “a product of…“ (scroll down to the left sidebar) this or that school – viewing political opponents as “magic negros,” – dismissing someone’s aspirations to a medical or technology career with the point that she “with her looks she could earn a lot more money if she ‘went pro,’” – (as happened to me) saying “Your fiance just left you for another woman? That’s perfect! I’m looking for a husband.” We should go out.” – or, for that matter, of unreflectively dismissing all men (as partisans over at Twisty’s sometimes do) as “doods” and/or urging women to refuse to nurse or nurture, as a class, infant boys. (It would obviously be equally erroneous to call that last bit of othering “anti-porn culture.”)

In “The Human Condition” Hannah Arendt made the strong case that people alone might be beasts, or they might be gods, but that we can only be human in the company of others. Of course she was referencing the world view of the ancient Greeks who, with their bare faces hanging out, dismissed the women in their lives …their partners, mothers, and daughters let alone servants and slaves… as not really human. What Arendt was referring to the difficulty people have in isolation to distinguish reality from fantasy and, thus, the importance of having others around to help confirm or refute our perceptions.

The qualification I’d add to Arendt’s point, one that relates to my prioritizing empathy over sympathy, is that the dead white male citizens of Greece were sympathetic to each other in the second sense of “an inclination to support or be loyal to or to agree with an opinion.” Their failure of empathy for, oh, say, women within their communities or the “barbarians” without (the word “barbarian” allegedly comes from their opinion that the language of non-Greeks sounded like “bar bar bar”) tended to, um, confine their opinions.

One notices similarly limiting effects in discussion on, say, extreme right-wing newsgroups, libertarian think tank publications, “escort review” websites, sports chat rooms, “seduction community” sites, pro- and anti-porn sites, MRA and “radfem” discussion, and (a personal bugaboo) seminars designed to teach women “Menglish” or inquiries into “what women want” or propositions that men and women are from different fucking planets. Because nothing creates empathy like approaching people who, say, sleep in your own bedroom as if they were extraterrestrials.

So anyway, in the Arendtian sense, to surround one’s self only with those sympathetic to your views brings upon one the same problems of confirmation the Greeks worried about: we can be angels in isolation… even in collective isolation, or we can be animals, but not human beings.

It seems like empathy, or at least striving for it, is a clear way to break out of that kind of echo chamber of (second meaning) sympathies in a way where (first meaning) sympathy falls short.

Which may (or may not) be a clearer way of saying what I was trying to say last night. Or if not clearer then, I sincerely hope, less alarming!