3 ms·

If empathy is a social construct, shouldn't, we see e. g. societies without empathy as we (e. g. cultural Christians) know it? Is there some example of that?

tazu 2y ago
[flagged]
- mrkeen 2y ago
  You should probably tie it back to the disputed point somehow - religiosity and values. If you see bad values - "extremely frequent killing, cannibalism, rape, incest, etc" - what's their religiosity? > Arguably, nowhere is this scholarly silence starker than in Sub-Saharan Africa (hence- forth SSA), often cited as the world’s most religious region. > The two most extensive data sources on the topic, however, are the Pew Research Center (2010) and Afrobarometer (2018), both of which assess the proportion of unaffiliated individuals across the region at around 3.2 per cent. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00020397211052567 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/000203972110525...
  - tazu 2y ago
    [flagged]
harimau777 2y ago
I don't think that it's necessarily a binary "empath" or "no empath" so much as differences in who a given culture says you should be empathetic towards, what you should be empathetic about, how empathetic you should be, what obligations empathy entails, etc. So you might see a society that says that certain races, cultures, or "sinners" do not deserve empathy or deserve less empathy. Another example are highly free market oriented political philosophies which argue that businesses should be governed by maximizing profit rather than empathy.
thinkingemote 2y ago
I'd say that western societies have a lot of empathy. We notice two things: 1. a general reducing in the amount and 2. a change in the meaning (or construction) between places and cultures. So for a favourite HN topical example it might be considered to be more empathetic to let homeless people sleep on the streets of San Francisco. In the past it might have been considered to be more empathetic to the people in the city to remove homeless people and put them in special nice shelters instead. "What gives people more dignity?" There are other, many and much important issues at play with this example but I think this could be an example about a change in how we think about empathy. For the general trend of reduce of empathy, I think that goes in hand with individualism - thinking about oneself at the expense of thinking of others. Possibly it might not really be a reduction of the potential for empathy but perhaps just a reduction of the applications of it, like how a muscle reduces in size when its not being used. Alternatively we may express empathy in certain spheres of life from before. Different muscles being used but same energy being expended.

tazu 2y ago

[flagged]

mrkeen 2y ago
You should probably tie it back to the disputed point somehow - religiosity and values. If you see bad values - "extremely frequent killing, cannibalism, rape, incest, etc" - what's their religiosity? > Arguably, nowhere is this scholarly silence starker than in Sub-Saharan Africa (hence- forth SSA), often cited as the world’s most religious region. > The two most extensive data sources on the topic, however, are the Pew Research Center (2010) and Afrobarometer (2018), both of which assess the proportion of unaffiliated individuals across the region at around 3.2 per cent. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/00020397211052567 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/000203972110525...
- tazu 2y ago
  [flagged]

harimau777 2y ago

I don't think that it's necessarily a binary "empath" or "no empath" so much as differences in who a given culture says you should be empathetic towards, what you should be empathetic about, how empathetic you should be, what obligations empathy entails, etc. So you might see a society that says that certain races, cultures, or "sinners" do not deserve empathy or deserve less empathy. Another example are highly free market oriented political philosophies which argue that businesses should be governed by maximizing profit rather than empathy.

thinkingemote 2y ago

I'd say that western societies have a lot of empathy. We notice two things: 1. a general reducing in the amount and 2. a change in the meaning (or construction) between places and cultures. So for a favourite HN topical example it might be considered to be more empathetic to let homeless people sleep on the streets of San Francisco. In the past it might have been considered to be more empathetic to the people in the city to remove homeless people and put them in special nice shelters instead. "What gives people more dignity?" There are other, many and much important issues at play with this example but I think this could be an example about a change in how we think about empathy. For the general trend of reduce of empathy, I think that goes in hand with individualism - thinking about oneself at the expense of thinking of others. Possibly it might not really be a reduction of the potential for empathy but perhaps just a reduction of the applications of it, like how a muscle reduces in size when its not being used. Alternatively we may express empathy in certain spheres of life from before. Different muscles being used but same energy being expended.