I am writing to you to wish you all the best for the festive season and, in fact, for the rest of the year, the decade and your life. The reason for this letter is partly as an exercise in being nice, partly as I have nothing better to do but mostly out of empathy.
You see, empathy interests me at this time of year. Part of the Christmas spirit has always been about empathy. Phillip K Dick defined an android in his book "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep" as a sentient being which lacks empathy. His argument was that there are members of the human race who are indistinguishable from robots as they have no capacity for empathy. His "Turing Test" for being a higher being was emapthy. Not IQ, not sympathy: empathy.
I write to you to tell you that I understand why you are the way you are. You are an android and you have no empathy. You meddle in others' lives as you feel that your life is one to emulate, but you cannot empathise with their lifestyle or their suffering and so you don't understand. You claim that morals are declining, values are missing and the cause of all ills is a lack of faith in some deity. Your lack of empathy creates a situation in your psyche whereby you cannot understand why others think and behave in the way they do. In ways that your lack of understanding finds offensive.
But I understand, and it is OK. I understand because I can empathise. I can create a mental state in my own mind that echoes yours. It gives me insight into why you think and behave in the way you do and I refuse to any longer find it offensive.
You see, I am tired of seeing otherwise intelligent people wasting their energy trying to make you understand concepts like compassion, kindness and empathy. You simply do not have the wiring in your brain. Without the wiring, which is formed early in development, there is simply no argument that can convince you. There is no slot in your mind to place the information. Just as I and my kind lack the wiring to understand your arguments and concepts.
We are all guilty of treating our own thought processes as correct. We all have the mental feedback loop that affirms our own ideas as irrefutable simply because we thought of them. It makes sense, as a brain which doubts its own knowledge is inoperative.
However, all is not lost. It is possible to condition the mind against such rigid thinking. I am not suggesting you try this. To embark on a journey of enlightenment such as this is a decision to be made by each individual free from external pressure. I only mention it simply to inform you that I am embarking on this journey. If you wish to walk the same path, I will welcome the company. If not, I'll see you when you get there.
Merry Christmas and all the best for the second half of the Naughties,
Chas
1 comment:
Do you ever read Theodore Dalrymple? He's one of the best conservative writers around, and he was having a bit of a chat about 'empathy' in the Christmas issue of the Spectator: "Empathy these days is the greatest of the virtues, and he is best who empathises most. That is why pop singers and British politicians are the best people in the world: they can’t see the slightest suffering without empathising with it. Whether they behave better than anyone else is beside the point; it is what they feel, especially in public, that counts.
In my own small way, I also sometimes empathise. Last week, for example, a patient came to see me who seemed very nervous. He looked around him as though he expected at any moment to be taken by a giant raptor.
‘Are you like this all the time?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Since when?’
‘Since I was young.’
‘Why?’
‘You know how you feel when you’re stealing a car?’ he said.
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ Then I thought this sounded rather priggish and unempathic. ‘But I can imagine,’ I added."
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