Empathy and Neuro-political priming

Interesting line about the nexus of neuro-cognitive science and the current zeitgeist of social context: "My sense is that the most insidious, influential and largely unacknowledged of these belief systems is neoliberal capitalist ideology. That is, the critical missing piece in this lively and rapidly proliferating conversation about empathy is the failure to identify the dynamic convergence of of culture, politics and the brain, what the eminent political theorist William Connolly once describes as neuropolitics or the “politics through which cultural life mixes into the composition of the body/brain process. And vice versa.”"

Here is what sense I make on this. From roughly Reagan '80 onward, a shift in consciousness has taken place.  People are encouraged to think of themselves above all else (as in Thatcher's comment that society does not exist, only people do). Economic self-interest becomes the primary mode of self-recognition and effort (this essay from the LARoB partially explains the economics of the transition towards greedy self-aggrandizement as the height of achievement). Schools feed into this context by teaching forms of consumption (knowing more, being able to do more) and competition (knowing more than others; doing more than others) and meritocracy (the system is fair and neutral, therefore the winners deserve their gains).

Lee Siegel makes what I take to be a similar point in his essay from the WSJ on how humanities ruined the humanities (well, literature's own self-immolation): "So you see, I am not making a brief against reading the classics of Western literature. Far from it. I am against taking these startling epiphanies of the irrational, unspoken, unthought-of side of human life into the college classroom and turning them into the bland exercises in competition, hierarchy and information-accumulation that are these works' mortal enemies."

The background to engaged efforts to understand (of what Paulo Freire might have called conscientization) in our time engender instrumental applications for this learning.  Put another way, the more successfully critical thought is learned by students, the more adept they become at using the system to enrich their own life.

Can empathy be the antidote to the irrupting this contextual reality?  Can teaching students, and demanding of leaders in all institutions, a form of mindful consideration of the interconnection of all things, of the relatedness that our actions have on others and the suffering that others experience are part and parcel of our own lives matter?

Siegel again: "The literary classics are a haven for that part of us that broods over mortal bewilderments, over suffering and death and fleeting happiness. They are a refuge for our secret self that wishes to contemplate the precious singularity of our physical world, that seeks out the expression of feelings too prismatic for rational articulation. They are places of quiet, useless stillness in a world that despises any activity that is not profitable or productive ... Literary art's sudden, startling truth and beauty make us feel, in the most solitary part of us, that we are not alone, and that there are meanings that cannot be bought, sold or traded, that do not decay and die. This socially and economically worthless experience is called transcendence, and you cannot assign a paper, or a grade, or an academic rank, on that. Literature is too sacred to be taught. It needs only to be read."

Empathy as the process of accept mystery, sitting with silence, withdrawing from the aggressive act of making sense and thus affixing function on life?  One can hope and act in pursuit of that hope.

NYTimes, David Desteno, on meditation

A short piece on the value of meditation, too shrift of good research discussion, earns a letter.

To the Editor;

In his fascinating study on the value of meditation ("The morality of meditation" July 6, 2013), David Desteno misses, for this educator, a more encouraging reason why his participants exhibited compassion: simply participating in the study made them more attuned to those around them.

Their compassion might not "... stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us," Rather, being part of a specific group - as members of in a study on meditation - may have induced the participants to engage with the world around, regardless of any consequence from their mindfulness work.

I try to encourage my students to embrace more fully in their social world as part of their training to become teachers.  It is hopeful to learn that simply by doing so, they may become more empathetic, and thus better serve their students.