Empathy

Empathy And Vulnerability In The Digital Age

January 28, 2017 Richard Raber, www.opendemocracy.net Create! Digital, Empathy, Vulnerability

By Richard Raber for Transformation - While the technological advances of the 21st century have brought us unparalleled ways to connect with each-other through social media, they may also be producing a greater sense of isolation. We are drawn towards feelings of loneliness as we navigate an increasingly digitized world, even though the vulnerability of human life is on full display: from cell phone recordings of the murders of Americans of colour to videos from those who are documenting their precarious existence in the rubble of Aleppo; from the Facebook livestream of the torture of a Chicago teen with special needs earlier this month to the video-recording of the infamous ‘Coffin Assault,’

Without Empathy For Trump Voters, Movements Can’t Succeed

November 11, 2016 George Lakey, www.wagingnonviolence.org Resist! Donald Trump, Empathy

By George Lakey for Waging Nonviolence - This was a highly emotional election, and we need time to feel our feelings and sort out what it means for us and for the country. Donald Trump is a con man; his game is to manipulate emotions and activists can be as vulnerable as anyone else. Knowing that, we can give ourselves some space to breathe rather than hype each other’s fear. We can also begin to ask, what does his victory mean for social activists on the left? First, and most obviously, Bernie Sanders was not Trump’s opponent.

Why We Need Empathy Now More Than Ever

November 9, 2014 Roman Krznaric, www.salon.com Educate! Activism, Empathy

The latest neuroscience research shows that 98 percent of us have the capacity to empathize wired into our brains and, like riding a bike, it’s a skill we can learn and develop. No wonder Google searches for the E word have more than doubled in the past decade. The art of imaginatively stepping into another person’s shoes and seeing the world from their perspective is, it would seem, a most valuable and valued twenty-first century asset. Not so, says Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, leading the counter-charge against empathy’s popularity surge. It is, he claims, a poor moral guide, lacking the power to inspire us to act on, say, child poverty or humanitarian disasters. “Our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside,” says Bloom, insisting we should instead, “draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation.” But in doing so, Bloom creates a false – and dangerous – dichotomy

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