Impact of Empathy on Policy

I was watching Bill Maher’s show the other day where they were talking about Rob Portman’s recent change in position on gay marriage. It seems that his son came out of “the closet” announcing his homosexuality two years ago. Rachel Maddow, one of his guests, made a comment which struck a chord. She said something to the effect that since Republicans change positions when things strike close to home, maybe they should have poor sons and thus have more empathy with the poor. One of the things I have often pondered and have written about is the difference between conservative and progressive views and the notion of empathy may help me understand this difference. The human race has organized itself into various groups ranging from family to tribe, village, region, nation and species. There are other intersecting groupings such as religion, ethnicity, race, gender, occupation and I am sure there are still others I have not thought to mention. If the more closely we align ourselves with a group, the more we want policies favoring that group. The question then is how the value we place on membership in these groups is distributed. At the extremes are the individualists giving primacy to themselves and the globalists the human race. The Buddhists, and to some extent native Americans and some animists take it a step further and feel that we are connected to all things, even inanimate objects. Conservatives espouse individualism and place a higher value on groupings closer to the self and thus individual freedoms, family cohesion, local and regional institutions and their protection become paramount. The value of a nation becomes less important because of its separation from the individual and its diversity. All the overt enthusiastic patriotism and flag waving may just be to cover the guilt from the low value given the national citizenship, (as Shakespeare once said “the lady doeth protest too much”) and the patriotism is more focused on the military and security aspects and tends to be ethnic and not inclusive. To that point, Sarah Palin, while running for VP, talked about being glad to visit a “real America” when she was in some rural community. In her mind, the bowls of Newark NJ belong to some foreign nation, certainly not to her America. People living in rural areas tend to be conservative and in general are isolated from diversity. They tend to have a fear, distrust and misunderstanding of the “others”, be they the other by virtue of race, religion, intellect or culture. They are in favor of States Rights and local control which they can easily see and touch and distrustful of the strangers in a distant place. (You can’t get too much more distant than the UN) Progressives, on the other hand, placing greater value on society and identifying more with the human race as a whole, see the downtrodden, other races and ethnicities as part of their group and are less sympathetic to individual wants. They tend to speak more of American exceptionalism in terms of its ability to assimilate immigrants and care for the needy rather than its military and economic might, considering the latter to be the consequence of the former. Their patriotism though it may be deeply felt, tends to be less demonstrative. Protection of the environment and therefore our species, a global quest, is strongly advocated by progressives. City dwellers by nature of their diversity tend to look more to the federal government rather than the state which often has more of a rural lean. So I think that the degree of empathy may be determined by the relative priority given to the various groupings and to a great extent the resulting empathy drives policy. Though conservatives tend to place more value on groupings closer to the individual and progressives closer to the species, looking at Democrats and Republicans through this lens, one can see significant outliers. On the Republican side, true free marketers really are globalists with a large acceptance criterion, whereas members of unions support Democrats giving high priority to a very narrowly defined grouping. In fact the largest group that placed value only on a single factor was the now defunct Soviet Communists. In trying to “unite the workers of the World”, they gave minimal value to family and nation, none to the individual and made religious organizations illegal. So, is there hope? I heard of a phenomenon called the “Aunt Susy Syndrome”(?) which says that as we become more mobile, we bring into our circle of friend and relatives individuals (Aunt Susys) from unfamiliar groups. Through this interaction we note the similarity and humanity which contradicts the lore of bigotry and gradually come to like Aunt Susy and in so doing, others of her ilk become much less scary and we start expanding our circle or forming a new one to include her kind. If policies are indeed influenced by empathy, which I think they are, they should benefit an ever expanding range of our population as time goes by.