Empathy and Foreign Affairs
Glenn Greenwald spoke on the absence of empathy in America, from an extensive and valuable interview with Bill Moyers late last month:
[A 2004 Pentagon study] concluded what ought to have been obvious, which is that the more we invade and occupy other countries in the Muslim world, the more we kill Muslim civilians, the more imagery that we create of prisons being created, where we put Muslims without any charges of any kind, the more hatred there is towards the United States, and therefore the greater the terrorist threat is. [...] I think the central problem is a lack of empathy. And my biggest wish is… that every American in sort of a national collective exercise would spend just ten minutes thinking about the following question:
Suppose there was a Muslim country that invaded the United States with 150,000 troops, and proceeded to occupy our country for the next eight years: dropped bombs on wedding parties, slaughtered men, women, and children who were innocent. Created prisons in our country, where they arrested American citizens and put us for years without charges. Created an overseas island prison where they shipped some of us to without any recourse whatsoever. And at the same time, were threatening to do that to several other Western countries. How much rage and anger and a desire for vengeance and violence would we feel towards that country that was doing that to us?
I mean, just look at what the singular one-day attack of 9/11, the kind of anger and rage it unleashed. And I think if Americans were to think about how we would react towards other countries, and what we would want to do to them, if they were doing to us what we are now doing to them, I think a lot of light would be shined on what it is that we’re really achieving in terms of our national security.
Is there room for empathy in foreign affairs today?
Climate change conversations from Canadian political elites are diminished to questions of economics, with hardly a comment about humans, in Canada or anywhere. World food talks are conducted more like theatre and barely register in media. Questions of war and violence are framed by a narrow interpretation of National Security, or in Canada, a partnership and duty to America or Israel.
It is tragic to examine how distant a consideration of other people is in what we do. Empathy must be reintegrated into the core of public action.
I think one of the major problems with empathy is how most people have been taught to view it. When it's explained, it usually goes like this: “Treat others the way you'd like to be treated.” While this makes plenty of sense (or seems to), there's a bit of a flaw in it. It relies on us looking into ourselves before we genuinely look to others. “What if it was you” can mean nothing for most people in the first world because we've never felt the kind of suffering necessary that would allow us to genuinely feel for the oppressed and politically crushed. Individualism has made this especially difficult, and this way of seeing things just seems to feed into it.How can we look at it in a way to genuinely feel empathy? I don't really know. Perhaps we should teach our children that it is necessary not to “imagine” how the other person feels as an individual, but to identify with them and try to feel along with them. Empathy means “in feeling” after all.