Fraternising with the Enemy

A while back a friend, and again more recently, another friend emailed me a TED talk by Sam Richards on empathy. Here is the talk:


Quite powerful, eh? I love the way he takes you through the whole exercise. I'm quite sure anyone other than the most deeply-entrenched redneck would be able to see the light after watching it. However, in all fairness, empathising with the plight of our Arab brethren is in vogue these days. The 'Free the Arab World' rage sweeping the globe today, the anti-American sentiment and the Israel-bashing zeitgeist has predisposed us to 'easy empathy' with the Arabs. So I feel, the talk's power is slightly blunted that way.
I think the real test lies with empathising with the likes of Bush, the Taliban, rapists and the rest of the scum of the earth. Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Don't bring the mob on me. EMPATHISING is COMPLETELY different from CONDONING. I'm not asking you to justify rape. I'm not asking you to justify genocide. I'm not asking you to justify the invasion of Iraq. Stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, there's no two ways about it. What I AM asking you to do is to delve into the why's of the crime. This is important so that you realise that no crime, no matter how inhumane, how perverse, is committed by human beings. And no human being alive today is entirely good or entirely evil. Mediocrity is human, perfection divine.
I'd like to relate an incident from the caliphate of Hazrat Umer (RAA), when a boy who was caught stealing food was not given the usual Islamic punishment of cutting off the hand. Why? Empathy. There was a famine and the starving boy stole to survive. The justice system took that into account.
What of the Australian Muslim cleric who compared raped women to meat left out for the dogs to eat? Whereas his choice of words were completely out of place, have you tried to, to quote Atticus Finch, 'delete the adjectives' to get the facts? In a world where scantily-clad hot women traversing your screens, billboards and books can only be seen but not touched by men, is it smart to live in the lalaland where they will still control their testosterone levels, not look at women as sexual objects and never lose control and never commit rape?  Empathy allows you to suppress your emotions when the time comes to deal out cold, impartial justice. That way, we don't exaggerate or downplay the issue at hand. Yes, it pains and frightens me no end to say this (I'm still undergoing training to become Empathiser Extraordinaire), but I include the likes of Hitler, Milosevic, Ted Bundy, Albert Fish, Karla Homolka etc. Everyone deserves empathy. As I said in an earlier post, we have a tendency to go to the extreme. We classify everything in the world into two neat categories: good and bad, instead of recognising the world for what it is, in shades of grey. There is a hadith:
“If a friend among your friends errs, make seventy excuses for them. If your hearts are unable to do this, then know that the shortcoming is in your own selves.” [Imam Bayhaqi, Shu`ab al-Iman, 7.522]
Sure, sitting in the safety of our homes, far from the madding crowd, it's easy to say that yes, we do understand where these criminals 'come from', attributing why such people turn out the way they do to a plethora of socio-economic reasons (e.g. troubled childhood, bad friends, born in Compton/Queens/Gaza, having me as a neighbour etc). But if we ever were, say, the victims of said scum, would we be as charitable? I'm referring of course, to the cliche 'Walk a mile in someones shoes before passing judgement on them'.
Let's apply empathy to our workplaces and institutions of learning (WAIL). As such places are centres of most of the human interaction one has during the day, needless to say, they are a large part of ones social life. We have our versions of the Nerds, Jocks, Goths, Cheerleaders, albeit not as neatly compartmentalised as these Hollywood-versions of social hierarchy. And it would be naive to say that these various social circles never have their altercations, just like their Hollywood counterparts (though we alhamdulillah don't usually descend to burning the homecoming queen's hair the day before the prom!). Every WAIL has some people who are universally despised, usually because they're 'different' in a not-very-nice sort of way. And we do gossip, pass judgement on and badmouth such people as well as other cliques. We never apply the empathy rule to such social misfits. Why? Because we are directly affected by them. We aren't exposed to the pressures the government of the US faces from its people when it can't provide them with cheap fuel for their SUVs and iPads. So its easy for us to 'empathise' with the Arabs and ironically, do the opposite with the perpetrators. We forget that Hitler was a product of a Germany that was hurting from the cruel clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. Which doesn't make the gas chambers okay, but doesn't make Hitler the devil's advocate either.
I'm lucky my blog isn't as popular as the Cheerleaders, or I'm pretty sure the comments below would be inundated with flamers calling me a 'Jew-loving Nazi Fag' (Yes, trolls usually aren't the most coherent people out there). Good think I can moderate the comments section, eh?