This is your second warning, that you are heading towards a sad and obnoxious story. If you are a humanist, in the sense that you take the happiness of individuals to be guiding principle for civilisation, then you may want to save yourself some trouble... and stop reading now. (But if you are such a humanist, and if you like stirring your own pot, then by all means proceed.)
Earlier this evening, I was eating food in a public location, accompanied by my cohabitant. As we were almost finished, our process was interrupted by a hawker, holding some puffed flour crackers which we locally call 'keropok'. I spoke to my partner, continuing our conversation which had been interrupted, while ignoring the hawker, apart from some cursory eye-contact and a shake of my head. At this time, the hawker said something to the effect of, 'look at me, if I could find a job, I wouldn't have to do this', at which point I turned pointedly to my partner and said, 'I think that's a sign for us to leave,' and we did. The hawker wished us, 'good day'.
As we returned to our residence, we corroborated our independent views of the situation. (The paragraph that precedes this one was written based on our discussion.) We discussed the unusual assertiveness of the hawker, the hawker's disability (I noticed a crutch), and the hawker's capability to find other work (the hawker's English was well-spoken).
Now come the point of this document, where I list out some (perhaps silly) reasons for my behaviour.
Firstly, I don't think an explanation is due to anyone, but as the organisation of information is my general activity, I find it useful to catalog thought processes for my personal amusement. (Sometimes these catalogs are found to be useful by others, go figure.)
- My partner and I are both fully cognizant of our privilege, in economic terms. Separately we have amassed different types of assets, some intellectual, some material - we don't work as hawkers, at the moment, though I've always thought that I might want to (or have to) at some point in my life.
- We both handle actual faeces in our respective jobs, often on a daily basis. We are also both cognizant of the existence of individuals who lack our privilege - we are aware that some are employed, and some are self-employed i.e. business owners.
- We are aware of the difference between begging, and trading. Furthermore we are aware of the moral norm that many of our peers practice, which is to express overt pity for less privileged people, and to speak in consensual terms that helping less privileged people is a normative value.
Secondly, I have a heuristic policy of avoiding public donations to the needy. In practice, this is a method which discourages grifters. Whether I otherwise help anyone is more of a personal concern, and I think people should generally do this if they don't want to be known as someone who helps people. I don't want to be known as someone who helps people.
- This is correlated somewhat with my approach to unsolicited salespeople in general. The more interest the seller expresses without reciprocation, the lower I downgrade their superficial trust score. (I do this because I find that it works, but of course, we are free to consider it some artifact of my upbringing or other past experience.)
- Specifically, the negative feedback provided here was with various audiences in mind - besides the hawker themselves, the other customers and sellers around us would be expected to have seen the hawker approach our table, and to then have seen our party leave in response. This was intentional bullying, and patently classist, on my part. (My partner may not have viewed it that way.)
Thirdly, I think it's always amusing to consider the question of whether the needy should be helped, or left to suffer. I leave this to each individual to decide.
- I elaborated to my partner, that in this particular event, if I had the energy to assist the hawker in a career change, I would have begun by advising the hawker to stop selling junk food as that is, in-and-of-itself, a social ill. (Sorry, 'keropok' lovers.)
- Furthermore, assuming that junk food was not an issue, trying to sell junk food to non-junk-food-lovers is an issue.
- Finally, appeals to empathy are a horrible marketing practice, and should be eviscerated. (I give the hawker full points for trying.)
- Given that I wasn't willing to hand-hold the individual case through to completion of a career overhaul, I did not bother to engage even superficially, with the slightest grain of positive feedback.
Fourthly, for the individuals who do think that needy members of society should be helped, I furthermore think it's always amusing to consider the question of whether privileged individuals should help the needy, or whether the provision of help should be left entire to the state. (Read: 'If the government doesn't help poor people, and they suffer (or die), this is the correct phenomenon,' - do you agree or disagree?)
- Personally, I'm a federalist. For poetry's sake, I don't believe that the parts are worth saving if we can't save the whole. So I stringently avoid putting my resources into local sinks, and typically put all my efforts into further one (clumsy) long-term objective.
It's probably time to come back to the title of this essay. As far as I'm concerned, empathy is a skill, not a virtue. Empathy can be spontaneous, or it can be acquired, and in either event it may or may not be intentionally turned off - so some people can turn it on and off at will, and some people can't.
I most certainly don't agree that the people who are spontaneously empathic should get to decide what is good for everyone else. In fact I prefer to classify them as a risk to civilisation in general, despite the fact that we're here as a result of their contributions as much as the contributions of the people who were able to turn their empathy off and on. (This abstracts away the notion that the spontaneous empaths may not prefer spontaneous empathy as a civilisational ideal, and vice versa the controlled empaths - also note that such a dichotomy between spontaneous and controlled empaths is an abstraction over each individual in the population's ability to control their empathy.)
From an information systems perspective, we can analyse empathy as a system's functional ability to recognise the point of view of another system. (This ability is itself dependent on some more rudimentary abilities, such as the ability to distinguish between oneself and others, but that's better left for elaboration in a seminar on the broader architecture of cognition.)
An interesting question is, 'Is this functional ability an important component of civilisation in general?'. Of course, it's important at the moment, because the individuals in our civilisation are of a specific species with specific sorts of genotypes which benefit from the phenotype of empathy. But where should we be headed in the future? Towards a population that has less or none of these genotypes, or waht
sic?
I think a lot of people will find it silly to run their entire lives around the notion of what civilisation would be regardless of human genotypes. Personally, I think of people as a type of information system, and so my own interests revolve around what civilisations can be achieved by information systems in general.
Thanks for reading if you made it so far.
In brief conclusion, despite all the ills that spontaneous and unregulated empathy has brought upon us throughout history, a world without humans will probably still require empathy if 'empathy' is defined technically in this way.
