I agree with almost all of this analysis, but have a slight disagreement with the penultimate paragraph. I come from a large Italian family of Trump voters (there are a few exceptions), and they'd disagree with the idea that they "delight" in breaking liberal norms about racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.
A fairer characterization is that they delight in breaking the current progressive norm of an excess of compassion that has no common sense boundaries. The author clearly calls that kind of excess out earlier in the article, rightly, and I think deserved some placement in the conclusion.
My sense is that Trump has exploited exactly that fairly obvious lack of common sense, and I think the evidence is the voters in those politically motivated groupings who also agreed with him. Latinos are less worried about Trump being racist, and he has their support on reforming immigration and sending the message that crossing the border unlawfully is . . . unlawful. More and more blacks don't worry about his racism, nor do more and more women worry about his male braggadocio, often pretty funny. He's not my kind of man, but I have some understanding of why good people would and do support him.
There are clearly Trump supporters (including many of his recent nominees) who do seem to lack much in the way of compassion, but if they and Trump can actually accomplish movement in the areas that Democrats have failed in, I think that would be a win for the country. Trump will certainly put forward some more wretched nominees, and will say more wretched things, but maybe that can provide a corrective to Democratic excesses that badly need some fixing.
In discussing "the centrality of compassion" here, I wish Fukuyama had given more consideration to what Yascha Mounk calls "The Identity Trap" -- or to Musa al-Gharbi's observations on the role of "symbolic capital."
In conflating compassion or empathy with pity, he overlooks a strong element of condecension -- and with that condescension, a LACK of empathy for anyone who doesn't "get with the program." ("Latinx," anyone? "Gender identity" [a social fiction] as an attribute that purportedly supersedes biological sex?)
As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank (and now, playing both ends against the middle, stoking the backlash, too).
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
None of that looks like compassion to me.
PS: In "The Disposessed," Ursula LeGuin can only solve the problem with a deus ex machina -- while in "Triton," Samuel Delany sees only solipsism, and despairs of finding any exit. The solution is beyond my own pay grade -- but I'd be sincerely interested in wheher Francis has any suggestions. :-)
I have puzzled about this for years. What is it in some people that leads them to embrace a sort of intentionally naive stupidity, particularly within the classes who have no experience with physical labor or physically weaker people who depend on police and government to protect them from the predators. The best I can come up with is that it is a reaction formation in old Freudian language. It is a pathological attempt to go overboard to pretend you feel something quite opposite than what you really feel in order to protect yourself. If I am weak, and I want not to worry about that then I can pretend extraterrestrials will always love me, that governments will always do better when we all just love each other, that flowers are more powerful than bullets etc. It is simply a lie I must continue to tell myself to feel safe even when I am not safe. The lie of weak people, which of course at my age includes me. Here I am you loving Maritians! I am just another Lovefool. Here I am now "Love me love me say that you love me..."
An important perspective on this, the three body problem and other reflections on the fermi paradox have basically been discarded by hard core scifilosophers -- for the simple reason that they're more mirrors of our society than they are actually thought experiments with regards to what the motivations of an interstellar species might be. The technology required to achieve such things is so outlandish, that simple things that are inalienable to us, like scarcity or mortality, probably do not exist for them. Our childish conceptualizations of "self-interest" or "interplanetary resource harvesting" or "fear" are probably similarly inane in the presence of one of these higher tier civilizations.
Yeah, but who's to say that, under the aegis of their benign wisdom, we wouldn't be bred and "farmed" as slaves, and conditioned ("Brave New World"-style) to relish that fate?
The more likely scenario is they do not care about our existence. It is equally, possibly more, likely that one of their teenagers while playing some sort of incomprehensible game accidentally destroys our solar system and doesn’t notice. We project our hopes and fears on to them with all of our scenarios, even in mine with the concept of a “game” or a “teenager” — the fact of the matter is they would probably be utterly incomprehensible to us. We have about 500 years of scientific learning under our belt. On the scale of the universe, and in terms of understanding, we are probably closer to single cell organisms than we are to them.
Could it also be equally likely that extraterrestrial life is far simpler than us? I suppose that's much less relevant or interesting to our interstellar curiosity than equal or more advanced/intelligent beings, so we tend to contemplate the latter, rather than the former.
If extraterrestrial life is far simpler than us, we had better take that into consideration -- or we might stumble into something far worse than Covid!
And then again, who's to say that such an apparently simple (albeit potentially lethal) life-form might not be a manifestation of a larger, more comprehensive "living" phenomenon operating on a scale we're not advanced enough to comprehend?
I loved the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man". Who doesn't? But what struck me years later is that the time and expense and resources it would have cost the Kanamits just to get a culinary treat would hardly have been worth it.
That's why the history of humans conquering other humans is not a good parallel. Distances in space are so much vaster than distances on Earth that it's hard to even comprehend. So what are the odds that a civilization from a distant star could gain more from conquering and exploiting Earth than it would cost them to get here?
Is that vast distance really so much more of a stretch than it would have been for a 17th-century Englishman, gazing out at the Atlantic (or for Natives warily casting their eyes in the opposite direction), to contemplate a vision of a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, full of patrons ordering foie gras (or Shanghai dumplings)?
I agree with almost all of this analysis, but have a slight disagreement with the penultimate paragraph. I come from a large Italian family of Trump voters (there are a few exceptions), and they'd disagree with the idea that they "delight" in breaking liberal norms about racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc.
A fairer characterization is that they delight in breaking the current progressive norm of an excess of compassion that has no common sense boundaries. The author clearly calls that kind of excess out earlier in the article, rightly, and I think deserved some placement in the conclusion.
My sense is that Trump has exploited exactly that fairly obvious lack of common sense, and I think the evidence is the voters in those politically motivated groupings who also agreed with him. Latinos are less worried about Trump being racist, and he has their support on reforming immigration and sending the message that crossing the border unlawfully is . . . unlawful. More and more blacks don't worry about his racism, nor do more and more women worry about his male braggadocio, often pretty funny. He's not my kind of man, but I have some understanding of why good people would and do support him.
There are clearly Trump supporters (including many of his recent nominees) who do seem to lack much in the way of compassion, but if they and Trump can actually accomplish movement in the areas that Democrats have failed in, I think that would be a win for the country. Trump will certainly put forward some more wretched nominees, and will say more wretched things, but maybe that can provide a corrective to Democratic excesses that badly need some fixing.
In discussing "the centrality of compassion" here, I wish Fukuyama had given more consideration to what Yascha Mounk calls "The Identity Trap" -- or to Musa al-Gharbi's observations on the role of "symbolic capital."
In conflating compassion or empathy with pity, he overlooks a strong element of condecension -- and with that condescension, a LACK of empathy for anyone who doesn't "get with the program." ("Latinx," anyone? "Gender identity" [a social fiction] as an attribute that purportedly supersedes biological sex?)
As we pick each other to pieces over "pronouns" and "privilege," the oligarchs keep laughing all the way to the bank (and now, playing both ends against the middle, stoking the backlash, too).
As I lament to my cat, "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
None of that looks like compassion to me.
PS: In "The Disposessed," Ursula LeGuin can only solve the problem with a deus ex machina -- while in "Triton," Samuel Delany sees only solipsism, and despairs of finding any exit. The solution is beyond my own pay grade -- but I'd be sincerely interested in wheher Francis has any suggestions. :-)
I have puzzled about this for years. What is it in some people that leads them to embrace a sort of intentionally naive stupidity, particularly within the classes who have no experience with physical labor or physically weaker people who depend on police and government to protect them from the predators. The best I can come up with is that it is a reaction formation in old Freudian language. It is a pathological attempt to go overboard to pretend you feel something quite opposite than what you really feel in order to protect yourself. If I am weak, and I want not to worry about that then I can pretend extraterrestrials will always love me, that governments will always do better when we all just love each other, that flowers are more powerful than bullets etc. It is simply a lie I must continue to tell myself to feel safe even when I am not safe. The lie of weak people, which of course at my age includes me. Here I am you loving Maritians! I am just another Lovefool. Here I am now "Love me love me say that you love me..."
An important perspective on this, the three body problem and other reflections on the fermi paradox have basically been discarded by hard core scifilosophers -- for the simple reason that they're more mirrors of our society than they are actually thought experiments with regards to what the motivations of an interstellar species might be. The technology required to achieve such things is so outlandish, that simple things that are inalienable to us, like scarcity or mortality, probably do not exist for them. Our childish conceptualizations of "self-interest" or "interplanetary resource harvesting" or "fear" are probably similarly inane in the presence of one of these higher tier civilizations.
Yeah, but who's to say that, under the aegis of their benign wisdom, we wouldn't be bred and "farmed" as slaves, and conditioned ("Brave New World"-style) to relish that fate?
The more likely scenario is they do not care about our existence. It is equally, possibly more, likely that one of their teenagers while playing some sort of incomprehensible game accidentally destroys our solar system and doesn’t notice. We project our hopes and fears on to them with all of our scenarios, even in mine with the concept of a “game” or a “teenager” — the fact of the matter is they would probably be utterly incomprehensible to us. We have about 500 years of scientific learning under our belt. On the scale of the universe, and in terms of understanding, we are probably closer to single cell organisms than we are to them.
Could it also be equally likely that extraterrestrial life is far simpler than us? I suppose that's much less relevant or interesting to our interstellar curiosity than equal or more advanced/intelligent beings, so we tend to contemplate the latter, rather than the former.
If extraterrestrial life is far simpler than us, we had better take that into consideration -- or we might stumble into something far worse than Covid!
And then again, who's to say that such an apparently simple (albeit potentially lethal) life-form might not be a manifestation of a larger, more comprehensive "living" phenomenon operating on a scale we're not advanced enough to comprehend?
I loved the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man". Who doesn't? But what struck me years later is that the time and expense and resources it would have cost the Kanamits just to get a culinary treat would hardly have been worth it.
That's why the history of humans conquering other humans is not a good parallel. Distances in space are so much vaster than distances on Earth that it's hard to even comprehend. So what are the odds that a civilization from a distant star could gain more from conquering and exploiting Earth than it would cost them to get here?
Is that vast distance really so much more of a stretch than it would have been for a 17th-century Englishman, gazing out at the Atlantic (or for Natives warily casting their eyes in the opposite direction), to contemplate a vision of a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard, full of patrons ordering foie gras (or Shanghai dumplings)?