Empathy is the key trait which provides the most reliable basis for human morality. But empathy isn't a rule you can make, it's not a law you can pass or a social ethic you can institute. It's a capacity we need to learn from childhood. We have to establish it at the root of our motivational formation and firmly fix it at the top of our values. If we don't learn it and teach it, it won't happen.
But, as we noted, teaching and learning is something we do, in every way we can conceive of, as an indelible aspect of our humanity. When empathy is deliberately and consciously engaged, practiced and enhanced, it works seamlessly with the other three human characteristics we talked about. Each of these qualities contributes its own components to a very profound and meaningful sense of morality that is based not on external requirements but on the naturally occurring evolved tendencies we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.
The components we have discussed so far, form a constellation of characteristics which, when consciously recognized and deliberately fostered and applied in tandem, generate a moral basis for our shared human life.
First, we are a species which not only communicates but has expanded rudimentary practical communication into multiple complex languages. We use our languages to articulate and explore not only the vast information available from the external environment, but continually expanding inner universes of ideas, concepts, abstractions, thoughts. The more we think and talk about something, the more important it becomes for us, the more interesting and valuable.
Simply by thinking and talking about the role of empathy in governing our shared life experience, moves it up the scale of value. By focusing our tools of inner and outer language skills, we elaborate our understanding and our conceptions of the role of empathy to increasing degrees.
The same is true for the fluidity and malleability of our categories of the group associations which form our social environments. As humans we have engaged in repeated re-conceptions of the groups with which we personally identify. We’ve expanded from identifying only with the troupe, pack or family group, to identifying with a collection of families in clans and villages. Then we expanded our self-perceptions to identity with language and cultural groups, which could include many hundreds of villages, towns and clan associations. We also constructed cities and trade and business associations that incoporated diverse languages, cultures, and societies.
But why stop there! We put lots more units together and made countries and nations. Then businesses found that being international was a really good idea. Scientific enterprises found that cross-cultural collaboration was good for their work, as did universities. Sharing ideas, skills, and expertise really moved everyone ahead at a much more rapid rate.
In the seventeenth century a lot of people began to see that, in fact, we are all connected by our common humanity. We're all, in reality, just one big group to which we all belong. We have always been accustomed to experiencing empathy for "my people." Now we're finally beginning to see that all people are "my people." When we make this conceptual transition, then empathy begins to naturally flow to anyone we meet, anyone we know or interact with.
And the final piece which works most closely with empathy to create a universal morality, are the mirror neurons we share with other pre-human species. It is the mirror neurons that enable us to recognize both intellectually and emotionally, the experiences of others. Empathy makes that recognition matter to us.
So what about creating a larger social ethic based on a natural morality based on empathy, enhanced by mirror neurons, articulated by all our language skills and applied to the whole human community.....
see the next post
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