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Notes -
I think it’s at least somewhat true. What modern technological society tends to do is uproot deeper communities. Modern societies are often highly individualized, and often uprooted from traditional culture and extended families. And I think the destruction of those things tend to create a lack of empathy in society. In a traditional society, most people are friends, family or acquaintances— people you’d know by name and greet on the streets. Any decision you made you knew was going to either help or hurt the community you actually lived in. And it does make a difference. If I make the choice to lay people off and I work in that factory and live in that town, it’s impossible for me to completely remove myself from the human side of the equation because I’ve actually met the people about to lose their jobs. Maybe they go to my church, maybe my wife plays cards with his wife, maybe I just pass him on the streets, and I worked with him. He’s a human.
And in most discussion of war crimes and the like one of the first things done is to dehumanize the subjects of abuse. They aren’t real people, they don’t have families or needs or wants. Except that especially in the high up positions in society where those decisions are made, we’ve sort of accidentally dehumanized people in our own society through abstraction. The person deciding to lay people off at a factory he’s never been to and in a country he can’t find on a map only sees them as numbers on a spreadsheet. They aren’t depriving a human of a means of supporting themselves and their families, they’re reducing headcount. It’s impersonal, sterilized of any thought that you’re the cause of human suffering. And a lot of decisions made at the top end up working that way. If you’re fighting a war, you do it by drone and aircraft and long range missiles, not stabbing someone with a sword. Make hurting people distant and done at the push of a button and there’s no pause to think about it.
The other thing is that our relationships are shallower. We have a loneliness epidemic in America where very few people have a close friend (someone they can rely upon to help them and who they’d likewise help if they were in serious trouble). Most people have moved away from family and maybe only see siblings and cousins a couple of times a year. This doesn’t help develop empathy and might make people more comfortable dehumanizing other people. If you’re only talking through the screen and rarely close to other people, it’s easy to dismiss the other person.
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