Empathy and Rigor

In a recent piece in Slate magazine, Dahlia Lithwick provides a much-needed clarification of the meaning of the word “empathy” in light of President Obama’s citation of this as a crucial qualification in his nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. “The opposite of empathy isn’t rigor,” she writes.   “It’s pretty close to solipsism, or the certain conviction that everything you’ll ever need to know about judging you learned from your own fine self.”

This got me thinking about the much-maligned study of the Humanities. “Humanities doesn’t teach people to be rigorous,” a friend recently told me.  “It’s better to look at things scientifically.  Once you learn to see things in terms of the systems that drive them, you can address virtually anything in a precise and appropriate manner.”

He has a point.  So much of society is dependent on systems.  The Judicial system in particular tries to set a clear, generalizable set of standards for appropriate behavior that is enforceable in a wide variety of circumstances, abstracted out above the buzz and noise of the statistically unpredictable behavior of an individual human being.

The problem is that once a system has been set up and its rules formalized, it can be very difficult to break.  Staying in the realm of abstract theoretical principles and smoothed out statistical models, any kind of system can be unquestioningly, imperviously, indefinitely sustained to the point at which it loses sight of what it was created to manage in the first place.  Our immigration system, for example, has strayed so far from dealing, empathetically, with the problem of people that we now have close to 11 million people living on U.S. soil who are, according to the system, “criminal” solely because they are foreign-born.

It is at this point, when the legal system begins to perpetuate a perverse and even ethically questionable logic, that the study of the Humanities becomes relevant. Studying literature gets to the core of what makes us human, accounts for the static that all our vital scientific and civic systems have to leave out in order to be comprehensible.  Literature’s unique strength is that it explores what is, systematically (or legally) speaking, incomprehensible and makes it comprehensible.  In other words, studying literature facilitates our capacity for empathy.

If we want the U.S. Judicial system to function as it should, to do the correct – the rigorously correct – thing by its citizens even at the point where the law, humanistically speaking, breaks down, Obama’s call for empathy in a Supreme Court Justice is a crucial place to start.

Getting past the fact that it was Hugo Chavez …

At the Summit of the Americas last week, the smiling encounters between President Barack Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez had pundits speculating about the new administration’s approach to Latin America, in particular to the controversial, America-is-the-Devil President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (and to his shunned political ally Raúl Castro of Cuba).

In a gesture caught on camera and analyzed ad infinitum , Hugo Chavez gave President Obama a book entitled Open Veins of Latin America, a critique of Imperialist American involvement in Latin America written in1970 (revised 1978)  by the Uruguayan journalist and writer Eduardo Galeano.  The book presents the history of Latin America from its initial colonization and exploitation by its Spanish and Portuguese colonizers in the 1500’s through the 20th century, in which it argues that the very structure of the world economic system (organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank) encourages the prosperity of the United States and the continued exploitation of Latin America.  The IMF, for instance, is said to have preferentially given loans to Latin America’s right-wing military dictatorships of the 1970’s and ‘80’s, whose economic policies were beneficial to U.S. and European corporations, despite these regimes’ flagrant abuse of human rights.

That Hugo Chavez is the giver of this well-reasoned and influential book certainly adds another layer to its interpretation, Chavez himself having positioned himself as something of a radical ideologue (albeit a radical ideologue of the left).  However, thinking of Chavez’s rise to power in light of the historical context laid out in Galeano’s book certainly should be a crucial aspect of the Obama administration’s consideration of diplomatic relations with Latin America, the majority of whose current governments have been deeply influenced by theories like Galeano’s.  Reading it certainly won’t hurt the thousands of people who have obtained a copy in the wake of Chavez’s gesture.

The Murky Legal Ground of the post-9/11 “Enemy Combatant”

An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times brings attention to the fact that, although the Obama administration has fulfilled its promise to close Guantánamo bay, it has appealed a recent Supreme Court ruling that grants habeas corpus to some detainees at a military detention center in Bagram.  For this small subset of non-Afghan detainees, the court found “the process for determining whether a person has been properly labeled an ‘enemy combatant’ even ‘less sophisticated and more error-prone’ than the process the Supreme Court deemed inadequate at Guantánamo” (as quoted in the Times).  That the new administration is contesting this ruling is uncomfortably reminiscent of the sometimes questionable detention policies of the Bush administration (as in now-being-closed Guantánamo – contradictory much?).

The murky legal territory relating to imprisonment of enemy combatants overseas has given rise to numerous worrisome instances of judicial abuses and human rights violations on foreign soil.  But David Mikhail’s recent Boston Review piece reminds us that the post-9/11 detention of so-called “enemy combatants” has had an effect closer to home as well.

In 2001, directly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Canadian national Shakir Baloch (of Pakistani descent) was detained and held for five months in a Brooklyn-area maximum security prison as part of a federal dragnet that rounded up 762 illegal immigrants.  Upon his release, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.  In the past eight years, his wife has divorced him  and he has found it extremely difficult to hold a job (he is trained as a doctor), due to what he refers to as his “sluggishness” and an inability to concentrate.

Baloch’s case was not even one of the worst casualties of the Bush administration’s military detention policies.  He escaped the indefinite detention of suspects in Guantánamo or the year-long imprisonment and torture of a Canadian engineer who the Bush administration detained and sent to Syria. The wrenching psychological impact that his imprisonment has had on his life, however, is very clear.   Innocent of any crime, he was detained by the U.S. government under circumstances that sound more like the policies of an authoritarian dictatorship than the democratic ideals we tend to associate with our justice system.

Stories relating to the constitutionality of the detention of enemy combatants have become commonplace in the last year or so, but rarely do we actually hear about the impact of “military detention” on an individual level.  Baloch’s case is a symptom of the state of affairs in which “detention of enemy combatants” has become a sort of nondescript buzzword to the general population, passed over in many reports as a sort of vaguely bad policy that is nonetheless vaguely necessary to prevent terrorism.  Zooming in on a case like Baloch’s, though, makes vivid the consequences of the Bush administration’s messily defined but forcefully imposed post-9/11 detention policies.

The closing of Guantánamo, along with last month’s court ruling limiting presidential power to detain people indefinitely with the term “enemy combatant” seem like steps in the right direction, but as long as U.S. policy reserves the right to indefinitely redefine the terms under which it detains potential terrorism suspects, we will continue to run the risk of catastrophically mistreating innocent people like Baloch.