Reason divorced from empathy was a speciality of the Nazis, who used reason to argue that Jews were subhuman and then codified it in the Nuremberg Laws. What made the Holocaust possible was the Nazis’ racial ideology that achieved one of the most successful erosions of societal empathy in political history. There are positive lessons from history too. A growing wave of scholars, from the cultural historian Lynn Hunt to the arch-rational psychologist Steven Pinker, argue that democratic rights have been won when societies have extended their empathy to previously neglected social groups. Look no further than the 18th century humanitarian revolution, which generated the first campaigns to tackle child poverty, the anti-slavery movement and associations to improve working conditions. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Pinker points out it was rooted in ‘the rise of empathy and the regard for human life’, underpinned by the ‘reading revolution’ as literature opened up imaginations to previously hidden lives. When the public became sensitized to the suffering of marginalized groups, it spurred legislative reform.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 23:28:44 +0000
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