I think you are completely right, and I don’t mean to say that in general people with right-wing politics are incapable of empathy (though it does seem like too many actual right wing politicians fall into this category). Those right-wing church going folks are actually more charitable than the left-wing Bill Maher watching folks.
So it’s not a lack of empathy in general, but I think it might be a lack of empathy for people beyond a certain radius around you. It’s easier to care about the Muslims next door than the Muslims in the Middle East.
Anyway, I don’t want to categorize people too much based on their politics, but I think the thoughts of the progressives do find their way into Fox News crowd and we are living in an era of deep moral relativism (of the kind that was imagined by the right wing when they used to complain about it).
I did appreciate the idea of shifting past the “who’s had a crappier history” issue (BB will simply not let me quote that post for some reason). But I think the solution to that problem starts with developing the fortitude to hear someone else’s complaint and accept it and sit with it. I think a lot of the time people interpret complaints (and maybe conversations in general) as power plays, where the goal is to achieve dominance.
But that’s difficult because when I start going down that road and thinking we need to accept other people’s complaints without making it about us, I can just hear white people mimicking that back with regard to black people or Muslims or indigenous people. Why aren’t we more understanding of them? I think it’s very hard for people to accept that, in fact, minorities have always been very understanding of white people because they’ve had to be.
Sometimes someone is just going to be defensive no matter what. I just try to be accepting of people’s emotions while still insisting on limits on acceptable behaviour (basically I treat other adults the same way as I treat my four-year-old). I try to do a lot of “That sounds really rough,” and to cut back on the one-upping (though clearly on message boards I do my fair share of one-upping). I guess I’m trying to “be the change” and hope that works?
I remember seeing a comedian saying something about people talking about their “black friends.” And he said, “A friend is someone you’d call to come look after you kids for a couple hours because you have to take your wife to the hospital. You don’t have black friends.”
If they have taken over the term secular humanists then the rest of us had better abandon it quickly. Or are we confused about whether the terms means “humanists who are secular” or “people who think only secular people are human.”
