People who can - and do - think about how others experience the world are more likely to reach out and help those people - or, at a minimum, are less likely to harm them. Kafka once described war as a "monstrous failure of imagination". In order to kill, one must cease to see individual human beings and instead reduce them to abstractions such as "the enemy". One must fail to realize that each person underneath our bombs is the center of his universe just as you are the center of yours: He gets the flu, worries about his aged mother, likes sweets, falls in love - even though he lives half a world away and speaks a different language. To see things from his point of view is to recognize all the particulars that make him human, and ultimately it is to understand that his life is no less valuable than yours. Even in popular entertainments, we're not shown the bad guys at home with their children. One can cheer the death only of a caricature, not of a three-dimensional person.
Less dramatically, many of the social problems we encounter on a daily basis can be understood as a failure of perspective taking. People who litter, or block traffic by double-parking, or rip pages out of library books, seem to be locked into themselves, unable or unwilling to imagine how others will have to look at their garbage, or maneuver their cars around them, or fail to find a chapter they need.
Labels: Gender Issues, Politics, Social Justice, War
At 5/21/2007 02:14:00 PM, Katherine
Being relatively new to your blog, I clicked on the link to read your earlier post about the conversation with an Afghani woman, but it would not work. Maybe you could check it out--I would love to read that post. But no worries if it doesn't work out. I always look forward to reading what you write.
At 5/21/2007 03:16:00 PM, Julie
katherine - thanks for the head's up. I fixed the link, so it should work now!
Sonja - you're right about the cumulative effect. I believe that it is possible for someone to learn how to care and love others (turn away from the dark side as it were). "Deprograming" would be theoretically possible under the right circumstances. But given how bad the military's track record is on taking care of the soldiers' physicals needs, I doubt that helping them to be good people would rank as a priority. But I question the need to teach them to objectify others in the first place...
Excellent point, Julie.
Although, I would say that it's the cumulative objectification that causes the increase in sex crimes. The men have been subjected to a culture which objectifies women all of their lives and then undergo intense training which further teaches them to objectify and subject any "other" which they choose to master and we have thus created the environment in which sex crimes will multiply. It's not really rocket science.
The military spends millions teaching these men and women how to fight. I wonder if it's worth it to our culture to figure out how to deprogram them once the war is over? Or can we?