Empathy, Obama and connecting across differences
by: Miki Kashtan on April 10th, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Cross-posted from the Fearless Heart.
Gary Bauer, c/o Wikimedia Commons
“Empathy [is] the act of understanding and being sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others. … Empathy is essential for any president… To be authentically empathetic, however, presidents must consider how policies affect all Americans.” – Gary Bauer, Obama and the Politics of Empathy
Understanding Bauer’s Experience
After reading Bauer’s article, I want to extend another invitation for dialogue across the divide. I was struck by the depth of alienation from the current administration and President I see in his article. I want an opportunity to understand and to reach mutual trust about our care for each other’s well being. Is his main concern, in essence, a plea to have all voices matter, including those with whom the President disagrees? What else is important to him?
Understanding, Care, and Agreement
Empathy calls on us to open our hearts and imagination to others’ humanity. It’s easy to understand and show care for those similar to us. The challenge of empathy is precisely in the face of differences. How can we show care for others needs even when we say “no” to what they want? How can we understand and remain open and respectful even when we believe others’ positions are potentially harmful? How can we appreciate others’ suffering when we believe it’s caused by their own actions or misunderstanding? It seems that both Conservatives and Liberals have failed to step out of being themselves and to enter and understand another perspective.
Beyond understanding, conveying empathy to others in the face of disagreement makes the challenge of connecting across differences even more intense. For example, short of agreement with Bauer’s policy prescriptions, is there any way that Obama could convey to Bauer and others that their voices matter, and could affect the decisions he makes?
Coming Back to Essential Human Needs
In a country saddled with persistent core disagreements about most fundamental policy issues, connecting across differences seems essential for our continued functioning as a nation. What can we then do as common citizens, public figures, or the President, to cultivate and convey empathy?
My own hope rests on my experience that even in the most intense disagreements we share core needs, values, qualities, and aspirations that inform our opposing views. Here are two examples.
Bauer says: “Conservatives can be just as empathetic. But they believe that, in most cases, it’s not government’s role to be the primary dispenser of empathy.” What I read in this statement is care for people’s well-being mixed with a deep respect for individual freedom of choice. Although I disagree with Bauer’s view, I have no difficulty relating to these values, because I share them.
Bauer also says: “our children and grandchildren … will be saddled with paying for today’s unprecedented borrowing.” I am touched by our shared desire for the coming generations to be cared about, even though my worry about the next generations comes up in different contexts, not this one.
Can We Work Together?
Shifting attention to what matters most to each party to a debate can bridge seemingly insurmountable gaps. I dream of town hall meetings facilitated by skilled people. I want all participants express the core of what matters to them, and to hear each other across the divide. This is not a pipedream. Skilled individuals are available. Models of productive citizen deliberation exist and have been successful at finding policies that diverse groups with opposing views can embrace (see the Tao of Democracy, especially chapters 12 and 13). What would it take for the people of the United States of America to transform their town hall meetings from battleground to an opportunity to shape a shared future?
Here are some of Gary Bauer’s political positions (below). I especially “like” his “Christian” call for the DEATH penalty. How compassionnate!! Is this someone you can respect? Not me! He is an insensitive fool. Marco
Political positions of Gary Bauer.
Bauer describes himself as pro-life. He is in support of repealing laws that allow abortion. He advocates for the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade as the first step in the pro-life cause.[7] He wants to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and do away with any U.S. aid for abortions. Bauer also says that he would counsel raped family members against abortion.[8] He points to the Constitution and the Christian view of human life as reasons for not supporting euthanasia, stating that, “all people have immeasurable value because they have been created in the image and likeness of God.” He is a supporter of the death penalty for death row inmates.[9] Bauer opposes cloning and embryonic stem cell research, but supports adult stem cell research. He supports a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and prefers abstinence programs to comprehensive sex education programs. Bauer wants to remove from the tax code all economic disincentives to marry.[9]
On foreign policy issues, Bauer supports strong ties with Israel, would not trade with China until the country improves its human rights record, and supports full funding for the Iraq War. Bauer believes that America should advance and protect freedom worldwide and “bring the message of freedom to the Arab world”.[8]
Bauer supports enforcing all laws against illegal immigration and that all immigrants should learn English and U.S. traditions.[8]
On economic issues, Bauer supports income tax cuts and decreased regulation of small businesses. He has stated that corporations should serve the U.S. as well as their shareholders, and has occasionally been critical of the World Trade Organization
I’m not sure how the Left’s empathy would translate to the Right’s feeling like they’re being heard. I can tell you from growing up amongst such people, being heard is irrelevant. Conquering Other is everything.
Miki’s fine essay and incisive analysis here goes well beyond issues and revved up polarization by numbers. To me it is about our shared umanity at the core of even those with whom we disagree.
This is first piece tha i have read in a very long time here that really lifts my heart.
Folks who believe that they have a monopoly on God, Country, Government, politically correct thinking and right action scare the hell out of me.
Below is an example of the kind of treatment right-wing jerks deserve. A funny , savage, and accurate piece written by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, who also, by the way, is making quite a name for himself writting hard-hitting articles eviscerating Wall Street because of the Financial crisis. Marco
Matt Taibbi:
I feel compelled to respond to an article written in part about me by emigree contributor Erica Jong. According to the eight hundred year-old sex novelist, my offhand description of Hillary Clinton’s arms as “flabby” means that I’m a misogynist and a sexist who is guilty of “Momism,” which she describes as an “Oedipal obsession with the bad mother — to counter a boy’s attraction to his good mother.” The whole of her argument is based upon my use of that one word, “flabby” — which she argues is evidence of my typically male tendency to fixate on the appearance of female politicians. Like other sexist men, I apparently trained my monomaniacal focus on Hillary’s appearance while while ignoring the paunches, liver spots and comb-overs of male politicians.
Jong has apparently never read anything else I’ve written. Here is a short catalogue of some of the physical descriptions I’ve used in recent articles about male politicians:
RUDY GIULIANI, former presidential candidate: “Virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns.” Also: “The electoral incarnation of Tommy Lee Jones’ acid-bath-surviving Two-Face character.” A “bottomless pit of vengeful little-guy ambition.”
MARK PENN, former chief strategist for the Clinton campaign: “Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he’s fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm’s length missing from the picture.”
MIKE HUCKABEE, former presidential candidate: “Huckabee, who in recent years has lost 100 pounds, has the roundish, half-deflated physique of an ex-fatty. With his button nose and never-waning smile, he looks slightly unreal, like an oversize Muppet.”
TOM DELAY, former House majority leader: “DeLay moves through the aisles like some kind of balding incubus, and as he passes, Republican members instinctively turn their backs on him, not wanting to be caught in the Gorgon’s gaze (or, more to the point, be threatened with the loss of a chairmanship or reelection funding).”
JAMES SENSENBRENNER, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman: “An ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death.” Also: “Your basic Fat Evil Prick, perfectly cast as a dictatorial committee chairman: He has the requisite moist-with-sweat pink neck, the dour expression, the penchant for pointless bile and vengefulness.”
MITT ROMNEY, former presidential candidate: An “utter tool…a poll-chasing stuffed suit with a Max Headroom hairdo who will say (or won’t say, for that matter) whatever the fuck it takes to get elected.” Also: “When it comes to the satanic art of presidential campaigning, this lean, heavily moussed political athlete is a stone prodigy, a natural who glides through campaign events with the aid of some dark supernatural power – a tie-clad, sweat-resistant cross of Roy Hobbs and Rosemary’s Baby.”
BORIS YELTSIN, former Russian president: “A pig… A human appendage of a rotting, corrupt state, a crook who would emerge even from the hottest bath still stinking of booze, concrete and sausage.”
TOM TANCREDO, former presidential candidate: “Vengeful midget.”
JOHN McCAIN, Republican nominee: “On the trail, McCain looks equally pathetic — slow-moving, soft-spoken and physically frail. With his lecturing tone and corny jokes (‘Governor Schwarzenegger and I have many similar attributes’), he recalls the moralizing granddad who’s not a bad egg overall but who embarrasses the fuck out of you by waiting till your late thirties to give you the birds-and-the-bees speech.”
That’s just from the last few years. And yet according to Jong, the reason I decided to use the term “flabby” when describing Hillary Clinton is because, deep down inside, I want to fuck my mother. “And love is the problem, of course,” Jong-Freud writes. “You cannot fuck your mother so you must revile her.”
I mean, wow. And I thought I was a hack.
Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi
Related:
Erica Jong Responds: Eight-Hundred-Year-Old Jong Responds to Callow Youth Taibbi
Matt Taibbi: Erica Jong Rolls Out Every Liberal Cliche in Existence
Previously:
Erica Jong: Misogyny, Momism
Marco, I think Miki Kashtan was entirely aware of Bauer’s conservative opinions in writing her post. You write that rightwingers “deserve” to be ridiculed in the kind of harsh language you quote. But you don’t say why you think that is the most productive way to go. A lot of us on the left as well the right may “deserve” ridicule or other kinds of dismissal, for various different reasons, but what are the effects? Often the experience of being ridiculed pushes people further into their own angry dismissal of the ridiculer. And the people already on “our” side may cheer when we ridicule the other side, but all the vast numbers in the middle are highly unpersuaded and tend to say “a plague on both your houses.”