By Terry Eagleton

Eagleton

The soothsayer seeks to predict the future in order to control it. He peers into the entrails of a social system so as to decipher the omens, which will assure its rulers that their profits are safe and the system will endure. These days, he is generally an economist or a business executive. The prophet, by contrast, has no interest in foretelling the future, other than to warn that unless people change their ways there’s unlikely to be one. His concern is to rebuke the injustice of the present, not dream of some future perfection; but since you can’t identify injustice without some notion of justice, a kind of future is implicit in the denunciation.

literary critic.^[1][2] Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at theUniversity of Lancaster, and as a former Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Empathy, like height, is a continuous variable, but for convenience, Baron-Cohen splits the continuum into six degrees – seven if you count zero empathy. Answering the empathy quotient (EQ) questionnaire, developed by Baron-Cohen and colleagues, will put you somewhere on the empathy bell curve. People with zero degrees of empathy will be at one end of the bell curve and those with six degrees of empathy at the other end.

Empathy excess, however, is much rarer than empathy deficit. And while people with empathy excess suffer alone, those with empathy deficits cause others to suffer. Or at least some of them do.

Zero-negatives are the pathological group. These are people with borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. They are capable of inflicting physical and psychological harm on others and are unmoved by the plight of those they hurt. Baron-Cohen says people with these conditions all have one thing in common: zero empathy.

The question is: did people with these personality disorders lose their empathy or were they born that way?

Given that testosterone is found in higher quantities in men than women, it may come as no surprise that men score lower on empathy than women. So there is a clear hormonal link to empathy. Another biological factor is genetics. Recent research by Baron-Cohen and colleagues found four genes associated with empathy – one sex steroid gene, one gene related to social-emotional behaviour and two associated with neural growth.

Does that mean, in the future, we will have gene-therapy to correct for low empathy?

Indeed, but we are all capable of making moral choices. Making the right choice may be more difficult for people with compromised empathy circuits, but the choice still exists.

If you consider the big atrocities in history – the ones we think of as evil – the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slave trade, communist purges, Rwandan genocide, apartheid, etc, it took the support of the masses to make them happen. Can we blame evil on this scale on psychopaths (who comprise less than one per cent of the population) and narcissists (also less than one per cent of the population)?

Surely beliefs are a much bigger cause of evil than biology or upbringing? Negative memes are spread by the church or state about the outgroup until they become thoroughly dehumanised. And the thing to restore humanity to the outgroup is not drugs and therapy but re-humanising narratives.

So far, science has made little progress in treating empathy deficits. Psychopaths, for example, are notoriously untreatable as are children who present with callousness/unemotional (CU) trait. And trying to improve the empathy of sex offenders is one of the least effective interventions, according to Tom Fahy, professor of forensic mental health at the Institute of Psychiatry.

Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty’ is published by Allen Lane on 7 April (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £18 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Donald Trump, snarling. This comes natural to the Donald.

In the past few months, Obama has had time to play golf. He’s had time to fill out his NCAA basketball playoff bracket. He’s had time to go to Chile, a country prone to terrible earthquakes, and sell them new nuclear reactors. He’s had time to go to Florida and tell Jeb Bush what a great job he did on education. He’s had time to be a “bridge” between John Boehner and Harry Reid.

Obama did not have time to go to Wisconsin.

That would be the same Wisconsin whose unions donated money and turned out for him at mass rallies so that Obama could collect Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in 2008.

That would be the same Wisconsin which was so demoralized by Obama’s first two years of broken promises that Democrats didn’t turn out in 2010, thus dooming Russ Feingold to defeat in the Senate and allowing the election of Scott Walker as governor.

All of which is fine with Obama. Having Republicans in Congress and in statehouses makes it easier for him to break his promises to the voters and do what Wall Street wants him to do. It’s a formula that worked for Bill Clinton, the man from Hope. Why wouldn’t it work for the man from Hope and Change?

I suppose Obama will be shameless enough to go back to Wisconsin in 2012 and ask for votes from the same union members whom he betrayed when they needed him. I also suppose that the people of Wisconsin (and the rest of the United States) will be even more demoralized in 2012. Why should they help re-elect a president when he won’t help them fight a governor who is trying to destroy their way of life?

If I were Obama, I’d be ashamed to go back to Wisconsin. I’d be ashamed to go anywhere.

Will anyone challenge Obama from the left? Seems unlikely in the primaries. Maybe Nader again outside the party. I’ve been voting for him since 1996, but I suspect he’s not too jazzed at the prospect of taking all the abuse again.

That leaves the Republicans, almost all of whom are stupid and insane. I say “almost.” There is one among them who just went to second place in the NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll for the Republican nomination. He’s one of the most obnoxious creeps on television. He’s a real estate speculator. He’s a casino owner. He’s a bully. He names all his buildings after himself. He tears up ecologically sensitive areas to build golf courses. He’s written a lot of terrible books, which inspired hundreds of terrible books by other obnoxious creeps. He runs a bunch of beauty pageants. He is the butt of jokes every night on television because of his strange hair. He makes $1.5 million for one-hour lectures at the Learning Annex. He’s one more blowhard in the parade of rich guys who think that hoarding money qualifies them to run the government.

Who is this political savior? Donald Trump.

I would say there’s nothing not to hate about Donald Trump, except that there is one thing I don’t hate about Donald Trump. He is a traitor to his class.

In 1999, when he was vaguely running for president, he proposed a wealth tax.

Donald Trump: Best in class

Wealth is the difference between your assets and your debt. The overwhelming majority of Americans have negative wealth, no wealth, or a tiny sliver of a smidgen of wealth which serves as an insurance policy against tough times, like now. The most wealthy among us have truly unimaginable amounts, more than anyone could spend in a hundred lifetimes, enough to control pretty much everything. They get the wealth, and everyone else gets credit cards and the spectacle of a bogus democracy.

The first time I heard that Donald Trump wanted to tax wealth, I thought, “You mean we don’t already do that? What the hell are we taxing?”

Apparently they have heard of it in barbaric backwaters like France, which taxes accumulated wealth progressively at a rate if 0 to 1.8% per year.

Bill Gates has wealth to the tune of $56 billion. He says he wants to give it all away, but since his wealth was $54 billion last year, it’s fair to say he’s not giving it away fast enough. What is the guy’s problem? He thinks there aren’t enough worthy causes out there? If we taxed Gates’ wealth at the same rate they do in France, the government would get over $1 billion more every year, and Gates would still be getting richer.

In 1999, Donald Trump proposed a one-time wealth tax of 14.25% on people worth more than $10 million to pay off the national debt. Why not? Is there any legitimate argument against making the ruling class pay off a debt that they bribed Congress into running up? Bill Gates would be out almost $8 billion at the Trump rate. You could invade several small countries with that kind of money. Or pave roads. Fund Planned Parenthood. Pay teachers fairly. Do all kinds of things to make the United States livable again.

Why, we could even make Trump’s one-time wealth tax an annual thing, and have enough money to dismantle all our rickety nuclear power plants and convert to clean energy. All the former billionaires could be given jobs sucking plutonium out of the Pacific with straws.

It would make a nice scene, Trump delivering his inaugural address in 2013, walking off the grandstand and handing Bill Gates a tax lien for 14.25% of everything he owns. “Thanks, Don. This will really expedite reducing extreme poverty and all that other stuff I was supposed to be doing with my foundation.”

As far as I can tell, Donald Trump hasn’t mentioned the wealth tax in his current campaign. Worry not. It just means he learned in 1999 that you can’t get coverage in the corporate media unless you talk about trivial diversions. Instead of the wealth tax, Trump is talking about Obama’s supposedly missing birth certificate, which gets him discussed a lot on the talk shows and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, where he is having a feud with Gail Collins. Trump knows that if he talked about taxing rich people, like the owners of the New York Times, then the New York Times would give him the Dennis Kucinich treatment, which is no mention at all.

Source URL: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/553

By David Edwards |  April 10, 2011 @ 11:45 am
In Breaking Banner,  Nation |

It may just be wishful thinking.