"Feeling For You"

To file under failings of empathy (and the urge to simplify and reduce humanity into a problem that can be fixed only if you point it out often enough?), from Timothy Burke:

When the streams do cross and someone in a group or a discussion suddenly says, “Actually, I feel pretty hurt or offended by the way you folks are talking about this issue, because I’m actually the thing you’re talking about”, what happens? Sometimes people make non-apology apologies (“sorry that you’re offended”), sometimes people double-down and say, “You’re crazy, there’s nothing offensive about talking about X or Y”. A turn or two in the conversation, though, and what you’ll often hear is this: “Look, I just care about you and people like you. So I want to help.” (Or its close sibling: “Look, not to insult you personally, but people like you/behavior like that costs our society a lot of money and/or inflicts a lot of pain on other people. Don’t you think it would be better if…”)

I’d actually like to concede the sincerity of that response: that we get drawn into these discussions and the judgments they create out of concern for other people, out of concern for moral and social progress. That we feel passionately about people who let their children go to the park by themselves, about people who train their children to go hunting, about people who are overweight, about people who drive big SUVs, about people play their radios too loudly in their cars, about people who buy overly expensive salsa, about people who play video games, about people who raise backyard chickens, about people who demand accommodations for complex learning disabilities, about people who follow the fashion industry, about people who post to Instagram, about people who feed their kids fast food twice a week to save time, and so on.

I’d like to concede the sincerity but the problem is that most of these little waves of moral condemnation or judgmental concern don’t seem to be particularly compassionate or particularly committed. The folks who say, “I just want to help, because I care about you” show no signs of that compassion otherwise. They usually aren’t close friends to the person they’re commenting on, they usually have little empathy or curiosity overall. The folks who say, “Because I care about progress, about solving the bigger problem” don’t show much interest in that alleged bigger problem. The person who hates the big SUVs because they’re damaging the environment is often environmentally profligate in other ways. If the SUV-judger is consistently environmentally sensitive, some other aspect of their concern for the world, their vision of a better society, may be woefully out of synch or weakly developed.

The people I know who really care about others generally aren’t the people going on Facebook to say, “Man, I’m sick of people hiding behind claims of depression” or “If I meet another mother who thinks it’s ok to bring cupcakes to my child’s class, I’m going to go berserk”. The people I know who are really think about incremental moves to improve the world don’t get hung up on passing judgments on someone they’ve witnessed fleetingly in public.

I also liked this comment on the same post:

I think that at least part of these kinds of incidental judgements that people have and the weird fierceness of them in contrast to their weak post-hoc justifications (false compassion) comes from not having a good way to talk about non-instrumental aesthetic concerns.

We (I mean Westerners I guess) cannot really appeal to aesthetics as a justification. Think about grammar. People always justify things like lay/lie or “12 items or fewer” in terms of clarity, as though it were actually likely to confuse someone about meaning. Of course, no one is ever confused about meaning in those cases. However, for someone who has a strong aesthetic sense of which is correct, there is a moment of annoyance, a kind of disgust-related aversion to hearing the wrong one. This is actual source of the grammar pedant’s complaint, but it can’t be expressed as a valid justification because it’s not instrumental to some commonsensical social goal. So they invent concerns about clarity of language. Ditto the driver who is momentarily annoyed by a bicyclist and then concocts arguments about how not sharing in licensing fees makes riders freeloaders. The presence of an element that doesn’t fit smoothly into a mental model of how a system should work (for people like themselves) is the real problem. People do have some interest in keeping their mental model of the world well-defined, if only to lighten cognitive load. What’s problematic is the prioritization of one group’s aesthetic concerns over another’s very lives (e.g. drivers who bully cyclists on the road).

I’m a fat person, or I have been on and off, and I more or less share your take on the situation there. I’m quite sure that people aren’t expressing their real concerns when they talk about health or medical costs. (After all, runners have an extremely high rate of injury and no one thinks that they are anti-social; much to the contrary.) Although I don’t really want to sign up for some kind of identity politics of fatness either, I think it is ultimately rooted in the disgust response, much like the kinds of aesthetic judgements that go along with racism.

I think that not being racist and not being homophobic etc. are special cases of suppressing these extraneous aesthetic requirements with the understanding that some specific dimension of variation needs to be tolerated and integrated into the mental model of how things work — but that tolerance is the result of hard-fought gains specific to each case.

Which of the mental health categories get this type of hate the most?