Amoeblog > Tag > normalization Amoeblog posts marked with normalization. Empathy for the Devil: The Lives of Others (2006), Black Book (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) <blockquote><em>Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on &quot;normalization.&quot; This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as &quot;the way things are done.&quot; There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public.</em> -- <a href="" target="_blank">Edward S. Herman</a><br /> </blockquote><br /> Sympathy is much easier to come by than empathy.&nbsp; Funny that, since it would seem easier to disinterestedly understand the conditions leading to another's feelings and reasons behind his or her actions than to actually share those feelings and agree with those reasons, particularly when the other is so different from oneself.&nbsp; I suspect the dominance of the word 'sympathy' is largely due to not enough people appreciating the need for 'empathy,' or even understanding what the word means, as if the two terms were synonyms.&nbsp; Thus, when the more ethnographically inclined among us suggest America needs to understand the environs or rational structures of a foreign entity perpetrating some act that we deem immoral, they get called traitors, or sympathizers.&nbsp; HUAC in the 50s springs readily to mind, as well as the right-wing media's reaction to the intellectual Left's take on 9-11.&nbsp; Classical liberalism, which serves as the bellwether for America's moralizing, defines the human as a self-regulating rational individual, and thus any action taken by an entity (our state, another state, or some hodge-podge collection of disagreeing radicals) that violates the rights of the human so defined is, ipso facto, inhumane.&nbsp; Thus, any attempt at humanizing, eliciting empathy for, the ad hoc devil will be received about as judiciously as Hannah Arendt's &quot;banality of evil&quot; in 60s Israel -- which is to say, not very to downright hostilely.&nbsp; This negative reaction is always despite any potential moral agreement that the devil should still be hanged.<br /> <br /><div style="clear: both;"><a style="font-size:13px;" href="/blog/2007/12/writings-from-the-holy-texan/empathy-for-the-devil-the-lives-of-others-2006-black-book-2006-the-bourne-ultimatum-2007-.html">Continue reading...</a></div> Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:12:00 GMT