Tread lightly on the things of earth

I am struck today by this comment in this thread (props to ThatBritGuy) that addresses — with more understanding than I usually display — how psychology influences worldview:

My experience of Right Wingers is that their psychology revolves around two poles. One is lack of empathy. So when you and I see people suffering, they see a blank space. The other is lack of imagination. So when you and I see what’s coming, they see a row of dots and no trend line joining them up.

Hence, for example, the conservative shortfall of outrage and heartbreak (so far) at the loss of life and limb among all players in the Iraq war, and the non-acknowledgement that U.S. actions there have inflamed anger and escalated danger in the world as night follows day.

Another example: blaming the devastated residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast instead of assessing leadership accountability top to bottom, identifying points of failure, and replacing incompetence with competence for a more effective next time.

It’s really a kind of pathology. The pattern only breaks when sooner or later the trend line [IOW, connecting the dots] becomes really obvious and unavoidable. That’s when you get conversions. The rest of the time you have to sit on your hands and remind yourself that these people have cognitive disabilities that make it impossible for them to connect to the real world without a big effort.

Now I probably wouldn’t have accepted this explanation 5+ years ago, because I hadn’t witnessed this psychology in action again and again. Now I have.

I think this empathy/imagination explanation dovetails with George Carlin’s observation on the September 9 edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher that the Right Wing focus is usually property (“interested in property values, property, property rights”) while the Left Wing focus is usually people (“concerned with … human beings and human concerns, … the care of humans”). (I paraphrase; transcript not yet available to verify my recollection now available.)

Property concerns are valid, of course, as are people concerns. But in any contest between property and people, people is the choice I want to make every time. (It’s well to remember, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth … For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”)

This leads me to my big question —

Maybe in the wake of Katrina the trend line among the last five years’ dots has finally become “really obvious and unavoidable” and now the conversions have begun. (Poll numbers finally imply this.) Maybe our collective conversion is toward a saner way of being that values people, nurtures competence, faces problems head-on, and transcends political polarities.

That’s the most hope I can muster today. But it may be enough.