Crying About Death
We have some dramatic things going on that give me pause and make me think. I just watched a clip of presidential candidate Andrew Yang (a marginal candidate who has gotten some exposure lately, but who is far from a central or likely candidate who could be nominated to the Democratic ticket). He had talked with a woman whose child had watched her sibling get shot and killed in El Paso. He was describing that interaction on stage and he broke down in tears thinking about how he would have felt if one of his young children had witnessed his other child being shot and killed. This is called true empathy. It is what happens to caring people when they imagine the tragedy that someone else must endure. I see this phenomenon every day when my lovely wife Kim watches the unfolding of one sad story after another on TV. The ability of human beings to put themselves in another’s place and share, absorb and feel their pain is an important phenomenon in the human experience.
I recall the movie called Runaway Jury, which is about a court case over a mass shooting. The incident was over hate, but the hatred seemed to be about money and financial distress (it took place in a day-trading office) rather than about ethnic or White Supremacy hatred as occurred in El Paso. My thought is less about the main movie plot, which is quite interesting and well-done, but about one interaction in the courthouse men’s room between the attorney for the plaintiff (Dustin Hoffman) and the jury consultant for the defendant (Gene Hackman). To be clear, Hoffman plays the poor and righteous warrior fighting against the gun companies and Hackman is the well-paid mercenary for the gun companies, using all the dirty jury tricks he can muster to disconnect the verdict from any semblance of justice. At one point in the tense dialogue, Hoffman asks Hackman how he sleeps at night, given his tactics and uncaring views. Hackman laughs and says with a shrug in an offhand manner, “that’s the funny thing, I just don’t care.”
It is a fact of life that some people care, and others don’t. Some people have empathy for other human beings, and some feel nothing. I am going to take a leap here and say that those with the capacity to care are both more humane and, indeed, more human. To be human is to have grace. To lack grace is to be prone to the baser instincts that we know as nature. Nature is at once something we all feel is wonderful and holistic and yet is very brutal. To be one with nature sounds to us like a good and caring thing. We care about the natural environment and respect it. But we have all seen Marlin Perkins (for Millennials, he hosted a show called Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom back in the bad old days of TV) as he described why the lion chasing down and eating the gazelle is OK and is just the way things need to be in the natural world. Predatory behavior is not only natural, but necessary to keep nature in balance. That is the argument that the ecosystem demands a degree of indifference to life.
That is a very hard concept to grasp in modern society. We are supposed to be empathetic. All the norms of almost all organized religions (at least the modern ones that have avoided human sacrifice) have some version of the Golden Rule. We are taught to do onto others as we would want others to do onto us. Everyone wants some degree of empathetic treatment from others. The fact that there needs to be a rule sort of reminds us that this may not always be everyone’s natural tendency. Religion seems to be organized around the recognition that the uncaring of the world must be reminded by the caring ones that they should overcome their natural instincts and be more caring, whether it is in their nature or not. That is convoluted thinking because grace and nature really are opposing and balancing views. Can you imagine a person driven by nature organizing a cult that seeks to convert people of grace to be more uncaring for their own good? That does happen occasionally, but civilization quickly polices that sort of “aberrant” behavior and puts an end to it. Jim Jones and Kool-aide will forever be remembered as the keynote example.
Civilization is defined as the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is most advanced. Advanced in this instance means the furthest from nature and the closest to grace and civility. That implies that those who care are more civilized and those who don’t care as much are less civilized. That makes sense to me, but then I tend towards the caring (despite 40+ years on Wall Street in one of the great remaining predatory mosh pits in the civilized world). I imagine the uncaring would disregard that definition of civility or at very least, not care.
It is considered completely unacceptable, whether a politician is caring or uncaring by nature, to do anything but denounce mass shootings of innocents at places like El Paso, Parkland or Sandy Hook. The most uncaring go so far as to deny the occurrence as Alex Jones (no relation to Jim Jones I suspect) did of Sandy Hook. They understand the impossibility of saying or thinking that such shootings are acceptable or desirable (even if they secretly just don’t care that they happened), so the denial route seems to them to be the best political defense against anything that might impinge on their ability to arm themselves to give them the freedom to repeat the heinous acts. In the meantime, all the politicians comment negatively about the events, but only a few can honestly muster the empathy to cry about it on stage. I applaud Andrew Yang for allowing himself that moment, if for no other reason than to remind us that empathy matters.
And now we have the Jeffrey Epstein suicide. No one is crying. There must be some people somewhere who cared about him. Even mass murderers and child molesters have mothers and cry for their young innocent children who morphed into the ugly beasts that they became. I suspect no one will cry in open for Jeffrey. And that is the bottom line. People who don’t care about other people, and it is fair to conclude that Jeffrey Epstein did not care almost at all about people if he could do the horrible things that he did, are ultimately not cared about. It is the final scene in Gladiator, when the praetorian guards and the mob or Rome leave the bloodied body of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) in the dust of the coliseum and carry out the body of the slain Maximus (Russell Crowe) on his proverbial shield.
The moral of the story is simple. Don’t expect anyone to cry for you if you cannot cry for others.