Empathy – a lotta words!
I understand why we push beggars and the homeless aside. They can be annoying to the rest of us as we quaff our lattes on the sidewalk of a newly gentrified cityscape. Many are alcoholics or drug addicts – or were till a recent recovery. Some are clearly insane, * if we can still use that imprecise term. Although younger homeless runaways are able to reconstruct their lives, long term homeless become like damaged goods with no place in society.
In the long past, we warehoused the mentally ill in “insane asylums.” Although asylums were awful places where we removed people who may have done nothing more that express their nonconformity, they were at also a home of last resort for schizophrenics and others suffering from various thought disorders. In the 60s the treatment of mental illness changed, inspiring a drive to replace in-patient confinement with treatment in the community. Many folks did ok, and were able to find a safe harbor with their families – some even found employment, but a stubborn sliver remained who were not helped enough to do well on their own. These became America’s new homeless.
Although not conceptually related, America tired of public housing. Starting in the 80s with Reagan, we commenced on a bit-by-bit disassembly of a large national public housing edifice – as time passed, we also began to remove selected felons from the public housing that still existed. The reduction of public housing increased the likelihood that a family under economic stress might find itself homeless. The focus on felons added an additional subset of the poor to the homeless pile.
Then we have gentrification. As cities gentrified, rooming houses, single room occupancy hotels, and flophouses disappeared. These humble institutions provided a reliable source of housing for a class (mostly men) who existed on the margins. Many were day laborers, some existed on disability pensions. A few were outright bums. But they were safely dispersed among working poor and lower middle class neighborhoods.
After his wife died, my uncle live in a rooming house for several years before his entire neighborhood was cleared in a slum clearance program. If my memory serves me, his neighborhood was a place of used tire and junk dealers, used clothing stores and cheap rental units. Although hardly a garden spot, it was safe enough that my father would take us, his young children, to visit our uncle. After the neighborhood was cleared, it was replaced by a modern high-rise complex. But with the businesses gone, and middle class removed, the concentration of poor became a dangerous ghetto.** My uncle lived there for a short time before he died.
All Barbara Ehrenreich wants is for us to understand and empathize. She would like more, but given the current situation, our not tormenting the poor would be a enough for now.
A civil society needs empathy. Empathy is the engine that moves (a select subset) of the governing class to seek solutions to social problems that without empathy, they would not understand. Thus, empathy is an engine of social progress. Despite what you might think given the rabble rousing conservative press, the US is a reasonably empathetic society, as is much of the West. By empathetic, I am referring to the infrastructure of social justice, from public pensions to welfare that Western nations have created. It is no wonder that the two major communist revolutions did not occur in the West, but in Russia and China – two nations that operated without the ameliorating institutions of Western social democracies. (And please don’t add Nazi Germany to this list. The path to Nazism was not especially violent, even if the ultimate state was demonstrably so.)
Empathy is a core human trait. When humans are compared to other mammals, we find some that can count, some that can understand dozens of words, but we don’t find empathy – the trait that tempers our self-absorption by an awareness of the other.
Now that the Sotomayor has been sworn in, we can state affirmatively that, yes, we want judges with empathy. Those who disagree argue that an empathetic judge places a finger on the scales of justice. But Justice’s scales are already out of balance. For an individual in court, whether facing off against the government, for example, when challenging a traffic ticket, or when challenging a corporation, the individual has far less power. So a finger or two on behalf of the little guy is no more than fair. Without empathy judges become merely tools used by the powerful to maintain the status quo. If that sounds like Marxist hyperbole, consider this classic defense of the status queue, Plessy v Ferguson, an 1896 Supreme Court Case that established the right of states to segregate blacks from whites. Here is a brief quote from the majority opinion, “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s (Plessy’s) argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”
The majority made no effort to understand the plight of African Americans in the newly segregated South.
The lone dissent came from Justice John Marshall Harlan. His comments are summed up by this quote (from the Wikipedia article): “But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
Plessy occurred while Jim Crow was still being perfected. Over the next 60 years America demonstrated just how unequal a forced separation could be.
Do you think that a court full of “wise Latinas” would have made a better decision than the white male court did? I do.
In the Sotomayor hearings, much was made of the Ricci case (this is the Supreme Court case involving the Hartford firemen).
As a white man who knows how to pass a test, I am sympathetic to the plaintiffs. I’ve taken insurance courses and have a number of industry certifications as well as two licenses. A smart test taker knows what materials will be required for test prep even before he or she signs up. So, why didn’t the minority firefighter do this? (Or did they? And fail anyway?) Judge Ginsburg has her answer in her dissent: in discussing testimony given before the New Haven Civil Service Board “Other firefighters had a different view. A number of the exam questions, they pointed out, were not germane to New Haven’s practices and procedures. … At least two candidates … noted unequal access to study materials. Some individuals, they asserted, had the necessary books even before the syllabus was issued. Others had to invest substantial sums to purchase the materials and “wait a month and a half for some of the books because they were on back-order.” … These disparities, it was suggested, fell at least in part along racial lines. While many Caucasian applicants could obtain materials and assistance from relatives in the fire service, the over-whelming majority of minority applicants were “first-generation firefighters” without such support networks.” In her effort to understand the problems facing minority firefighters, she was showing empathy. Why wasn’t at least one other judge from the majority persuaded to change his mind after reading her words?
Empathy is not the final answer. Honest souls can see the same situation and react differently.
The issue of passing tests is a difficult one. Culture plays a part (culture may not be the best word for it, but hear me out anyway). A few groups stand out as being especially motivated toward success on tests – the Chinese have their history of exceptionally grueling Confucian civil service exams, Jews have a history Talmudic scholarship – members of both groups seem to appear in large numbers in the top colleges and later on, in the professions. On the other hand, my own ethnic group is not known for academic achievement. Don’t worry about us, we do fine, but we are more likely to labor in the successful middle than at the top. And yes, the “gift of the gab” may explain the seemingly large number of Irish in politics. African Americans also do not have a legacy of scholarship. Combined with the legacy of Slavery and the horrors of Jim Crow, it would be understandable that African Americans would not have a culture that emphasized the value of test taking. In any case, in SAT scores and other standardized tests, neither African Americans nor Hispanics do as well as whites.
After the court decision in Ricci, perhaps it would be useful if African American advocacy groups focused less on civil rights and more on the helping poor and working folks acquire the skills necessary to survival in a job market that has little regard for the unskilled.
I have no final closing note, but will close with a question, wasn’t the empathy discussion just more nonsense?
*And yes, I recognize that insanity is a label that society places on those who don’t fit in. But fitting in is a survival skill, and one a valuable as the ability to tolerate cold or heat. Those who can fit in, but choose not to, make their lives that much more difficult. When I use the word insane, I am referring to those who cannot fit in because of problems with perception (hearing voices, seeing visions) or with distorted judgment.
**As a person who is old enough to have watched brand new apartments turned into slums, I understand the reaction from working class whites (and taxpayers) who feel that we gave them something useful and “they” turned it into trash. Still, it turns out that warehousing the poor is as risky as warehousing the mentally ill.
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