I’d like to return to an essay I wrote in 2009, Darwin, Einstein, and the Totemic Mind:
In the totemic mind of ancient hunters of elk, we see the possibility of modern hunters of the secrets of God’s Creation, hunters who carry out their quest in the acts of shaping their minds to embody the very actions and traits of what they study. There is nothing mystical going on here, simply normal events in a universe which rewards, at least with survival and perhaps reproductive success, those who are able and willing to reshape their minds to encapsulate their environments, to put themselves in the place of their prey for greater success in hunting, more recently to put themselves in the place of Nature in pagan terms or of the Creator in Christian terms. It’s interesting that Einstein was an atheist more than not but one of his speculative strategies was to put himself in the place of the Old One. At other times, he’d ride a wave of light, putting himself in the place of a photon.
To understand the other, radically other or slightly other, we must be able to put ourselves in their place. Criminal investigators know this as do fighter pilots and anthropologists. Of those three, I suspect fighter pilots are the best at the task.
Empathy isn’t some kind of sentiment but rather a serious effort by a human being, mind and heart and hands, to take on another identity. After all, the most economical understanding of `self’ in light of modern neuroscience is as a narrative of sorts we create in our brain, a narrative that shades and shapes, blackens and deforms, all of our relationships with our own bodies and with all that lies around us, material and immaterial alike. This is a crude description of mind, easily expandable to include moral and other forms of reasoning, as well as such relationships as loves of various sorts. More generally, it is a description of `person’ and not just of `mind’. We are closer to our own bodies and our own perspectives than we are to those of our friends or someone from Greece or Russia, but a strongly empathetic brain works in both cases to create a model which might be described as a `person’. I also claim this process is what makes us our communities. To a Christian, this process culminates in the state where we are fully Christ, that is—the Body of Christ, and yet remain our individual selves.
All of this could be labeled `mystical’ if your are so inclined, but it can all be described in terms of modern knowledge of what we Christians call Creation, knowledge which was abstractly anticipated by mathematical work in the 19th century—work used by Einstein in describing a Universe which is one though the individual galaxies and planets and living creatures retain their individual being and even physical properties not quite those of the Universe. (See one of my earlier essays, A Universe is More than it Contains, for a very short discussion I’m working to enlarge as part of a new book which might prove to be multiple volumes.)
Unfortunately, Americans don’t seem to be able to deal with their own brain processes well enough to see themselves honestly and clearly; brainwashed by the gray water of modern liberalism, right and left, we don’t have any plausible understanding of the parts of ourselves which are the public political communities of the United States. We wander around as if billiard balls which bounce off of other billiard balls or the cushions of the table but never enter into truer relationships. We behave in such a manner because we’ve allowed ourselves to see ourselves as hard, unyielding individual entities and because we are daily trained by schools and the entertainment industry and the words of our leaders, cultural and religious as well as political, to behave in such an atrocious manner.
When it comes to alien communities, whether those of Eastern Europe or of Detroit and San Francisco—I grew up in New England, Americans seem to have very little ability to piece together an understanding rational enough and coherent enough to be labeled empathetic. Perhaps, we do have some limited ability to understand our own emotions and those of others.
Our inability to see ourselves truly even in our individual selves, our inability to see ourselves as communal human beings as well as individual human beings, our inability to put ourselves in the place of the alien others—even as our leaders unleash brutal military power against them—are incapacities quite intertwined. We need, first of all, to realize we don’t inherently or naturally exist as anything which could be truly called a `person’. We create even that persona, our own higher selves, by way of constructing that narrative I proposed above, a narrative which can be regarded as a model in our brains, a model of our brains and our livers and our toes and our relationships with pets and the landscape and our cars and with other human being whether individual or communal. Once we admit this and begin to integrate it into our ways of thought and feeling and behavior, then we can move on to establish better relationships with our own communities and with alien others, individual and communal.