"If I were to make a rather speculative bet, it would not shock me if the broken American pedagogy of the last 75-100 years is tied to the continued decline in empathy we see in our society. How the causal direction goes is not something I can venture a guess on."
I was reading through Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning the other day and had a thought along these lines.
Bruner was one of the early fathers of the anti-behaviorist cognitive turn in psychology, who later became critical of the computational and information-processing models of the mind. His main objection is that these theories ignore or downplay the importance of *meaning*, in the form of narratives, discourses, and personal interpretations, in favor of reductive causal explanations that localize "the Self" in the brain.
(His work anticipates and influences Taylor's work in certain key respects, as you can see.)
Anyway, I got to thinking about this in the context of psychiatric therapies and even medicine at large. Health today isn't even the right word for the concerns of the medical-industrial complex. The art of medicine has become mechanized, transforming living bodies into nothing but physical and chemical interactions in a lump of tissue. (Which very profitable drugs can "fix", naturally.)
We've seen this mechanization in effect worldwide over the last 18 months (and counting). The integrity of the physical and biological system takes precedence over any and every other goal and good. Our personal desires, interests, valued goods, sense of the worthwhile and significant all take a back seat to the proper functioning of the system.
You could easily fit this situation into what you've argued here. And what we're seeing can be understood as a contraction of valid vocabularies.
Instead of being able to discuss values, purposes, meanings, giving interpretations of ourselves and our deepest concerns and goals, we're living through the later stages of a social process that has -- among other things -- winnowed down the range of acceptable languages and conversations.
And I mean that in the sense that you implied by reference to vocabularies of analogy. That's forbidden now when we've got shiny AI, info, cognitive, neuro-whatever languages that get to the only real and genuine reality of the human condition.
We're seeing a deficit of empathy in part because, at least within the scope of these bloated institutions, we're limited to an impoverished language that can only refer in any serious and non-derived way to objective physical properties.
We're learning to treat each other the way we treat the car and the toaster.
"If I were to make a rather speculative bet, it would not shock me if the broken American pedagogy of the last 75-100 years is tied to the continued decline in empathy we see in our society. How the causal direction goes is not something I can venture a guess on."
I was reading through Jerome Bruner's Acts of Meaning the other day and had a thought along these lines.
Bruner was one of the early fathers of the anti-behaviorist cognitive turn in psychology, who later became critical of the computational and information-processing models of the mind. His main objection is that these theories ignore or downplay the importance of *meaning*, in the form of narratives, discourses, and personal interpretations, in favor of reductive causal explanations that localize "the Self" in the brain.
(His work anticipates and influences Taylor's work in certain key respects, as you can see.)
Anyway, I got to thinking about this in the context of psychiatric therapies and even medicine at large. Health today isn't even the right word for the concerns of the medical-industrial complex. The art of medicine has become mechanized, transforming living bodies into nothing but physical and chemical interactions in a lump of tissue. (Which very profitable drugs can "fix", naturally.)
We've seen this mechanization in effect worldwide over the last 18 months (and counting). The integrity of the physical and biological system takes precedence over any and every other goal and good. Our personal desires, interests, valued goods, sense of the worthwhile and significant all take a back seat to the proper functioning of the system.
You could easily fit this situation into what you've argued here. And what we're seeing can be understood as a contraction of valid vocabularies.
Instead of being able to discuss values, purposes, meanings, giving interpretations of ourselves and our deepest concerns and goals, we're living through the later stages of a social process that has -- among other things -- winnowed down the range of acceptable languages and conversations.
And I mean that in the sense that you implied by reference to vocabularies of analogy. That's forbidden now when we've got shiny AI, info, cognitive, neuro-whatever languages that get to the only real and genuine reality of the human condition.
We're seeing a deficit of empathy in part because, at least within the scope of these bloated institutions, we're limited to an impoverished language that can only refer in any serious and non-derived way to objective physical properties.
We're learning to treat each other the way we treat the car and the toaster.