Deep Thoughts

Terrorism and the Weaponization of Empathy

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An interesting article by neuroscientist Orli Peter:

Across the Middle East, militant groups from Hamas to the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations. Seen from a clinical point of view, they demonstrate exceptional skills in cognitive empathy, which they use to manipulate our emotions.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the thoughts, feelings and values of others. It’s like hacking into someone else’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. On the other hand, emotional empathy – what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the other person is experiencing.

Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas emotional empathy is involuntary. Anti-Israel militants have been able to turbo-charge their propaganda by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy.

Using cognitive empathy, militants have learnt to present their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating their image as champions of freedom and justice. This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships, where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties, using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that influence those in power. These terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.

I think there is a lot of truth in this. However, many of those who project sympathy for the jihadis are not doing so because they have emotional empathy, but because they want to be believed to have emotional empathy.  This is particularly the case, I think, in the case of media people and academics.

Also, empathy toward one group of people can serve as a self-justification for the unwholesome pleasures of cruelty–direct or vicarious–toward another group of people. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the anti-Semitic behavior which is being justified by claims of empathy toward people in Gaza.

I remember something Chesterton said:  ”

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

There is today way too much latching onto pity toward a socially-acceptable set of designated victims and closing of minds toward the facts of the case (Chesterton’s “untruthfulness”)….and closing of hearts toward other groups of people who are being harmed by the policies purportedly intended to protect those designated victims.

The distinction among cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and pretended emotional empathy is an important one. 

Economic Development: From the Roof, or From the Foundations?

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An interesting thread by Kamil Galeev:

Why the USSR failed? There are two ways for a poor, underdeveloped country to industrialise: Soviet vs Chinese way. Soviet way is to build the edifice of industrial economy from the foundations. Chinese way is to build it from the roof. 1st way sounds good, 2nd actually works.

To proceed further, I need to introduce a new concept. Let’s divide the manufacturing industry into two unequal sectors, Front End vs Back End: Front End – they make whatever you see on the supermarket shelf Back End – they make whatever that stands behind, that you don’t see
Front End industries are making consumer goods. That is, whatever you buy, as an individual. Toys, clothes, furniture, appliances all falls under this category. The list of top selling amazon products gives a not bad idea what the front end sector is, and how it looks like.
Still, the production of ready consumer goods comprises only the final, ultimate element of manufacturing chain. The rear part of the chain remains hidden from our sight. We call it the Back End Back end products are not recognisable. You never bought an SMX 700 radial forge.

Read the whole thing.

I’m reminded of something Peter Drucker wrote in 1969:

In any aid program, the economist, especially the development economist employed by government, tends to impose his own values on the choice of priorities and projects. Understandably he likes things that look big, impressive, and “advanced”: a petrochemical plant, for instance. He likes the things he knows the poor “ought” to have. He has nothing but contempt for the “frivolous,” e.g., small luxuries. In this respect there is amazingly little difference between the Russian planners and the economists in the governments of the most “capitalist” nation.

The factory girl or the salesgirl in Lima or Bombay (or the Harlem ghetto) wants a lipstick. She lives in a horrible slum and knows perfectly well that she cannot, in her lifetime, afford the kind of house she would like to live in—the kind of house her counterpart in the rich countries (or the white suburbs) can afford. She knows perfectly well that neither she nor her brothers can get the kind of education they would like to have. She probably knows perfectly well that—if lucky—she will marry some boy as poor as herself and as little educated who, within a few years, \vill start beating her out of sheer despair. But at least she can, for a few short years, try to look like the kind of human being she wants to be, respects, and knows she ought to be. There is no purchase that gives her as much true value for a few cents as cheap cosmetics.

A cosmetics plant gives more employment per dollar of investment than a petrochemical plant. It trains more people capable of developing and running a modem economy. It generates managers, technicians, and salesmen. Yet the economist despises it. And the reliance on aid makes it possible for his moralism to prevail over economics and for his desire for control to prevent development.

(The Age of Discontinuity)

Of course Drucker understood the importance of the petrochemical plant; his argument is that things work better when the petrochemical plants are called forth by the cosmetics factories and other consumer-facing businesses, rather than planned from the top.

I don’t think the above points just apply to poor & undeveloped nations.  In the US, the development of the computer and semiconductor industries benefited greatly from the sales volumes and technical challenges created by the computer game field…which is not the kind of thing that a central planner would be likely to earmark as a critical industry for the future.

In a market economy, ‘industrial policy’ intended to spur vital industries via subsidies and tax incentives will often seem to make sense–the US certainly does need it own ability to produce high-end chips, for example–but carries the danger of starving other industries of investment dollars and talent. And some of those industries may turn out to have been just as critical, or more critical, than the ones focused on by the industrial policymakers.

Springs, Cables, and the Rebirth of America

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Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened.  The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.

In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom.   One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:

For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.

The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco.  Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.

Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant.  I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around.  There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions.  Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope.  We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.

Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.

(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)

My Name is Academe, and I’m a Failure.

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I have been calling attention for years, and don’t mind at all when people with bigger platforms than mine recognize that the first step in correcting failure is to admit failure.  The refreshingly solid Republican victories in national election might be the sort of evidence that would encourage academicians to revise their priors.  Let’s start with Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western, with “We Asked for It” in the house organ for business as usual.

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.

Democracy is about emergence in government. The academic enterprise is about emergence in understanding.  It sounds like I got out just before the real nonsense took over.  Or perhaps higher education reverted to its roots in the seminary.  (Is it any accident, dear reader, that Joe Stalin was a seminarian at one time?)

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Formalism and Credentialism: Reversing the Trend?

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The Trump victory represents in significant part a popular reaction against the excesses of credentialism.  I’m remembering a 2018 post at the Federalist:  Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials….Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s  the real conflict going on.

The post reminded me of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940.  Matisse was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims.  “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing?”

Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.

It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… “I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.

The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.

In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented.  From the linked article:

In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the  charge d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”

As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror.  Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.

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