Empathy - Its What Sociopaths Lack!

It seems that our Department of Homeland Security is enlisting Science Fiction writers to come up with ideas to fight terrorism. As someone who reads sci-fi compulsively, I can see pros and cons to this approach. Many science fiction stories are cautionary tales about the effects of technology on the human condition. As we begin the vetting process for Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor, I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about empathy and how that's a bad thing for a judge to have.

Putting aside the argument that the lack of empathy is the classic symptom of a sociopath, the fact that Constitutional literalists would be forced to make slavery legal again and women would lose the right to vote, this empathy free future would play out like Mike Judge's 2006 movie, Idiocracy.

In the movie, a slightly below average intelligence couple from the present wake up 500 years in the future. Since dumb people have more babies than smart people, the future is populated by stupid, mindless consumers. So our visitors from the past, a hooker (Maya Rudolph) and average Joe (Luke Wilson) become the smartest people in the world. This future world is running out of food. Luke Wilson discovers that the crops are all being watered by the future version of Gatorade. When Wilson suggests that they try using water for irrigation, our future descendants are aghast. The Gatorade has "electrolytes-- It's what plants crave," according to the constant advertisements. They laugh at Wilson because he wants to use water ("You mean like outta the toilet?")

Conservatives who will oppose President Obama's Supreme Court nominations on the basis of their empathy, are simply revealing themselves as sociopathic individuals who lack the emotions that make us human. They are the people who laugh at putting toilet water on plants because they have not the ability to think for themselves and accept the lies they hear on TV.

Science Fiction can have a extreme right wing philosophy such as in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which takes place in a war torn society where military service is required to earn the right to vote. Or science fiction can celebrate liberal values like in the recent Neal Stephenson novel, Anathem. In Anathem, a group of monk like scientist philosophers manage to defeat the trans dimensional invaders in a spaceship full of atomic bombs armed with only a protractor and logic. The non-scientists in this society subsist on a diet of sugary drinks and plants that have soporific effects.

While certain macho impulses might make using powered amour and ray guns against the giant alien Bugs seem like fun, the ability to deter conflict and find peaceful solutions are the values I teach my children. The future I want to live in is like Star Trek's.

I want to live in a future where Man's greatest ambition is to "to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before." But I'm afraid that Conservatives desire a future of endless war, cheerfully blasting the big bad aliens, who due to their green blood and insect like bodies, deserve no human sympathy.

If we chose to consider empathy a weakness, a forever war is our only future.