[davidb_]

This article feels like a direct response to the ideas of Stephen Pinker, summed up by this quote:

> one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them

and, in the context of:

> Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa. > > To be sure, empathy is not enough. But another Enlightenment principle is that people can appreciate principles of universal rights that can bridge even the gaps that empathy cannot span. Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition.

[ABCLAW]

I feel like it's an extension of the "Love is evil" rant that Slavoj Zizek put together [1]. The structure is similar, the conclusions are the same.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJPhA9TGRls

[dmix]

Those are good examples of the author's ability for empathy but I believe this article is delving more into the function of art as a method to promote empathy to the audience (from author to the reader via art).

Although the two may be somewhat in sync as it requires empathy to promote it.

[davidb_]

Fair point. I probably should have found a better quote from Pinker. I chose him as his books "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" and "Enlightenment Now" seem to put forward the ideas of art as a vehicle for empathy that the author of this article is discussing.

[mlthoughts2018]

I'm sorry, but I'm baffled by the extended quote you pasted. It reads like a rhetoric 101 essay of a college freshman, deeply contrived and not hitting at any real point. Just meandering under the pretense that this is Serious Discourse.

[davidb_]

The quote was taken from: https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker...

I posted it to give context to the "debate" Pinker was engaged in. I don't have much of an opinion on whether or not it is "Serious Discourse."

[jerf]

That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books.

On the flip side, there are some people who would still accuse him of being glib. On the flip flip side, though, the numbers often support Pinker.

Some of the people complaining have serious academic issues. But some people complaining are simply people who have incorporated some degree of doom-saying or even outright misanthropy into their core identity and find it offensive when someone makes an at-least-semi-decent argument against everything being inevitably doomed. Separating the two can be a challenge because there is a lot of overlap between the two sets.

[mlthoughts2018]

> “That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books.“

The details within Pinker’s books are irrelevant to my criticisms of this article and of the quote you pasted. Further, it’s also irrelevant that your pasted quote is a summary or not.

The issue is that it’s juvenile, contrived writing that isn’t rooted in any coherent position on anything. It’s a smattering of ideas that loosely touch on different things, but are presented as if together it constitutes some type of bigger picture about art and empathy, which it doesn’t.

[jerf]

My point is the only solution to that criticism is to elaborate on it more.

It reminds me of one of my favorite observations by Scott Adams (from long before he turned into a political commentator), which is that all characters start out as shallow caricatures. The only solution to that is giving the author time to elaborate; if you instantly and irrevocably label the character as a caricature and don't give that time, you'll never have find any characters that aren't caricatures. Similarly, yes, this quote may be shallow, but unlike a freshman essay where this is the conclusion, Stephen Pinker does elaborate, expand, and defend at some length. If you judged all arguments this way, you'd look around you and find that the world has nothing but shallow freshman arguments.