rebecca solnit on humanity in harper’s:

“Something that’s really important to me is to be clear that madness, criminality, forgetfulness, selfishness, cluelessness are not someone else’s attributes; the question is not who has those qualities but to what degree each of us possess them and how aware are we of that, and how gracefully and maybe compassionately do we try to work with those limits, stains, and sins that are our own, as well as other people’s. There’s such a tendency to render the world in binaries: you’re a paranoid schizophrenic and me over here I’m sane; you have a disease that makes you forget things and my memory is impeccable; you drive a car/eat meat/pay taxes and I am beyond reproach (or situated to reproach you in a left-puritan way). We’re all implicated.”

hugo barros , collage, 2013

paul bloom advocates for thinking beyond empathy in the new yorker

“…moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family and the tribe to humanity as a whole. Yet it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”