Bottom-Up Empathy

One problem that I've always had with liberalism was its supposition that we need to care about the whole world's problems the way we care about our own. Of course, that would be the right thing to do, but it seems so unnatural and difficult. In fact, caring about the lives of strangers can devolve into condescension, which can devolve into an imperial "white man's burden" to save everyone from themselves. We all care about our children's suffering much more than the suffering of strangers. We care about people we know. Emerson, quoted by a reader of Andrew Sullivan's, puts it this way:

And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact: his party, his sect, his church, his class of society: the man may be called, by comparison almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age.

The conservative would respond that that's the way things have always been. Let's preserve those old structures and not "remake the world anew." It's not good to spread your affections too broadly, the traditional conservative would argue. Keep your affection mostly for yourself, and then give it to your family, and then to your country, and only very rarely give your love to the rest of the world -- to strangers.

It's possible that a middle-ground solution is to simply develop policies which encourage individuals to form authentic relationships with more people around the world. If we can use technology to develop personal, authentic relationships with people across the globe, instead of "saviour/victim" relationships, then we won't need liberalism to convince us or force us to care about each other. We won't need liberalism to convince us that we are all one human family. Instead, that's what we'll naturally be.

Take the gay marriage debate as an example. The key to the growing acceptance of gay marriage is the fact that the culture changed and more gay people began coming out of the closet. As the majority of the population developed relationships with openly gay people, denying them the right to marry became more and more difficult. Gay marriage can be hard for people to accept, especially as a government mandate -- but only so long as they don't know any gay people who would love to be married.

Bottom-up, natural, authentic empathy is the middle ground -- and perhaps the future -- of politics.