The Absence of Empathy

Posted on Friday 7 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m still working this past week on summarizing and assessing the 2006 Jonathan Haidt book THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS. I can’t quite wrap it up today, or soon, because we’re doing a quick trip down and back to LA tomorrow and Sunday, and probably won’t do any posts over the weekend. For now, I’ll note the usual political items.

The story all over the news yesterday and today:

The New Republic, 6 Nov 2025: Trump Just Stands There After Man Collapses During Press Conference, subtitled “One of the guests at Donald Trump’s press conference on weight loss drugs passed out during the event.”

A man appeared to collapse Thursday during a press conference to debut a deal to make those drugs more affordable, while President Donald Trump simply looked on.

As if annoyed that his press conference had been interrupted. Concern? Of course not; that would betray compassion. Trump (and MAGA) is not compassionate, or empathetic.

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Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 4

Posted on Friday 7 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

(Post 1, Post 2, post 3)

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Ch10, Happiness Comes from Between
Quotes from the Upanishads and by Willa Cather

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Cave Man Morality and the Normalizing of Racism

Posted on Thursday 6 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Right-wing panic and hypocrisy over the election of Zohran Mamdani;
  • While the right-wing increasingly embraces the racist views of Nick Fuentes;
  • How the election clapped back at Trump; Robert Reich on how Trump has put America into reverse;
  • Brief items about the actual Trump economy; Trump “news”; how Republicans are obsessed with issues that don’t matter to most Americans; and how the fossil fuel industry continues to spread climate change denial.
– – –

The right is hysterical about the newly elected mayor of New York City, because he’s not an old, white, Christian dude.

Slate, Molly Olmstead, 5 Nov 2025: Let’s Check In on How the Right Is Handling Mamdani’s Big Win

Tuesday night was, by any reasonable metric, a disastrous night for Republicans. Democrats were elected to the governors’ mansions of Virginia and New Jersey. Pennsylvania kept their liberal Supreme Court justices. Californians backed redistricting to counter Republican efforts. Even Georgia elected two Democrats to statewide offices.

But the greatest cultural shock to the class of Republican pundits and politicians who dominate social media conversations came from the night’s biggest news: A democratic socialist was elected mayor of the country’s largest city.

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Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 3

Posted on Thursday 6 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

(Post 1, Post 2)

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Ch7, The Uses of Adversity

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Bill Gates and Climate Change

Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

There has been much consternation over a piece published by Bill Gates last week, about climate change.

NY Times, David Gelles, 28 Oct 2025: Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead to Humanity’s Demise’, subtitled “In a memo, the Microsoft co-founder warned against climate alarmism and appears to have shifted some of his views about climate change.”

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder who has spent billions of his own money to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change, is now pushing back against what he calls a “doomsday outlook” and appears to have shifted his stance on the risks posed by a warming planet.

In a lengthy memo released Tuesday, Mr. Gates sought to tamp down the alarmism he said many people use to describe the effects of rising temperatures. Instead, he called for redirecting efforts toward improving lives in the developing world.

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Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 2

Posted on Wednesday 5 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

(Post 1)

Once again, there are lots of familiar ideas here, from books about psychology and human nature, from Stephen Pinker and Jonathan Haidt. That’s the point of the book: to assess modern understanding of topics about happiness and meaning, and contrast them with the ‘traditional wisdom’ about these matter. Three more chapters today. I’ll save my takes and summaries until the last post, but here I occasionally insert [[ personal comments ]].

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Ch4, The Faults of Others
Quotes by Matthew, and Buddha.

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Survival, Revelations, Falling Standards

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Samuel McKee on how our brains are wired to survive, not to find truth;
  • Adam Gopnik from 2012 about an Elaine Pagels book on Revelations;
  • Jonathan Chait on how falling standards of behavior in Washington;
  • Brief items about tariffs on people moving to Texas, and a bailout to coal plants.
– – –

This piece isn’t news, but it is something core to my own understanding and themes, and something which I suspect is not widely understood.

IAI.tv (Institute of Art and Ideas), Samuel McKee, 4 Nov 2025: Our brains evolved to survive, not to find truth, subtitled “We are social animals, not truth-seeking ones”

Intro:

We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. Our brains were shaped not to perceive reality, but to survive within it. Evolution has optimized us for social cohesion rather than accuracy, leaving false beliefs not as evolutionary errors but as features of our survival. In an age that prizes truth, philosopher of science Samuel McKee argues that our greatest obstacle may be the very mind that seeks it.

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Jonathan Haidt, THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS, post 1

Posted on Tuesday 4 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”
With second subtitle “Why the Meaningful Life is Closer than You Think”

(Basic Books, 2006, xiii + 297pp, including 54pp acknowledgements, notes, references, and index. Hardcover with no dust jacket.)

Here is a fascinating book that I didn’t get around to reading until the writer published later books, especially THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review begins here), that I read first. This one seemed intriguing when I bought it in 2007, despite the whiff of self-helpiness about it, for presuming to compare “ancient wisdom” with modern-day scientific findings. This is exactly one of my core themes, even if in the guise of the discussion of base human nature with more modern enlightenment thinking. In fact, it’s almost exactly analogous to the theme of my book, which compares the assumptions by science fiction writers of how the world might be with the discoveries by actual science of how the world actually is.

So this book focuses on 10 great ideas, as discovered by the world’s civilizations, and then considers them in light of current scientific research. But they’re not just any 10 great ideas; they’re ideas, as the second subtitle says, about how to live, and how to be happy.

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Troubled Children, Cognitive Collapse, Cave Man Morality

Posted on Monday 3 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Paul Krugman about how Trump has ceded the future to China;
  • Tom Nichols on how the Trump administration resembles a bunch of toddlers, and what Americans who care about democracy should do.
  • Salon’s Sophia A. McClennen on how the Trump administration is leading to Americans’ cognitive collapse;
  • Short items about Christian hypocrisy, Trump’s 60 Minutes lies, Musk’s mispronunciations, cave man morality, and Trump’s investing in the past.
– – –

Paul Krugman, 3 Nov 2025: We’re Number Two!, subtitled “How Trump ceded the future to China”

Does Donald Trump realize that he has ceded world leadership to China? Probably not: During his recent Asian trip, foreign leaders flattered him and showered him with personal gifts, so he came home with his ego even more inflated than usual. Nobody close to him would dare tell him that if you look at the substance of what he agreed to, it amounted to an ignominious retreat. When Chuck Schumer pointed out the reality of what Trump didn’t accomplish, his reaction was hysterical:

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Politics is more about tribal human nature than about solving problems

Posted on Monday 3 November 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • David French on why Trump gets away with everything;
  • Ezra Klein on how to beat Trumpism: something about Democrats not being so judgmental;
  • Short items about Norman Rockwell, Nigeria and Christians, the welfare queen stereotype, how faith-base bigotry is just fine in Texas; and Noem’s lie about arrests of American citizens.
– – –

Everything we think we know about the world, the universe, about reality, is necessarily filtered through the perceptual limitations of the human body and the biases of human nature. As fish with water, there are some things we simply can’t see. And the things we do see are interpreted through protocols that evolved to promote human survival, not for accurate perception of reality.

All the political stories I mention here are of interest because they reveal, implicitly, these filters. All interactions among humans, politics broadly, come not so much from different takes on reality (though they’re a good part of it), let alone good vs evil (a simpleton’s take on reality), but from different goals, which ultimately boil down to my tribe vs your tribe. And the rules we establish, or ignore, about how to deal with each other. Those rules amount to different types of governments.

NY Times, opinion column by David French, 2 Nov 2025: Why Trump Can Do No Wrong

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