You know how modern agriculture can grow enough food to feed everyone on the planet thanks to the “Green Revolution” and high yield seeds, but people are still starving, because of the use of food by politicians and politics in the pejorative sense to perpetrate hostility, aggression, and bad actions? Likewise with empathy
Whereas some leaders try to balance power with compassion, the current leadership often portrays empathy as a flaw. Strength, in his view, is about domination—whether over political rivals, foreign adversaries, or marginalized groups.
Review: Mutilated empathy in spite of itself in Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy by Glenda Carpio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023, 285pp.) [This review updated to correct typos and grammatical infelicities on Dec 10, 2023.]… Read More ›
Novelistic truth teaches the reader to give up absolute truth—certainty—and learn to dance in the dynamics of life’s sometimes chaotic but committed conversations in which dogmatic agreement yields to the give and take of empathic relatedness.
Empathy Lessons 