"All of our martyrs are in Heaven, and all of their martyrs are in Hell."
Not sure who said it, what side they were on, but that's hardly the point, is it? Here we have, in perfect example, Daniel Gilbert's point in a very interesting article, "He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn't." To wit:
What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is
actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses
point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own.
Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own
thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest
that our reasons for punching will always
be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the
opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s
punches.
Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge
on Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics
retaliate against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and
since 1948, it’s hard to think of any partisan in the Middle East who
has done anything but play defense. In each of these instances, people
on one side claim that they are merely responding to provocation and
dismiss the other side’s identical claim as disingenuous spin. But
research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely different
perceptions of the same bloody conversation.
If the first
principle of legitimate punching is that punches must be even-numbered,
the second principle is that an even-numbered punch may be no more
forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it. Legitimate
retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye is
fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union
condemned Israel for bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping
of two Israeli soldiers, it did not question Israel’s right to respond,
but rather, its “disproportionate use of force.” It is O.K. to hit
back, just not too hard.
Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the second
principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and
colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were
hooked up to a mechanical device that allowed each of them to exert
pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers.
The
researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the
first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert
precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger.
The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of
pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers
took turns applying equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers
while the researchers measured the actual amount of pressure they
applied.
The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to
respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically
responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just
experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder,
which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as
a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then
hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to
respond in kind.
Each volunteer was convinced that he was
responding with equal force and that for some reason the other
volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the
natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we
receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually
give more pain than we have received.
Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more
palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of
others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion
that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our
actions are justifiable responses to theirs.
None of this is to
deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in
human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human
psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we
learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and
to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears
and recriminations in the wayback.
And in the payback.
But the system's stacked against us. And by 'system' I mean capitalist. How, when overwhelming numbers of peope live in poverty or near poverty, spending all their time subsisting, having little time to rest, play, engage in civic life, spiritual life, a life of the mind (not that it's impossible to engage these parts of ourselves even in hardship; it's just harder), can we find the energy to teach each other and remind ourselves to stop trusting our own minds and start trusting others? The sheer numbers of bereft, exhausted, hopeless, angry people are so many, how do we simultaneously sooth and inspire them? I can't imagine it happening in hyper-capitalist, dog-eat-dog, white flight, SUV-by-God Murka, where empathy is seen as a weakness by a large swath of the population. [See: swaggering cowpoke George Dubya as logical end result of that line of thinking.]
Am I wrong in thinking that we have to alleviate the inherent inequalities of capitalism before we even begin this long journey to retraining our instincts and empathies? Maybe we expend our energies on both projects simultaneously?
