Pity Bad

Trinity 2012 <File Name>NR <Tournament>

Pity.Empathy Bad


ShellEmpathy is selfish – it is always accompanied by pity which establishes a power relation with the other in a position of weakness, only ethics based on responsibility solves by recognizing the other as truly radical alterity that is unknowableMolloy, Ph.D. in Education from the University of Toronto and has taught in the areas of war, cinema and popular culture, 1999

(Patricia, Moral Spaces, 217-218)Given the misunderstandings and dangers of empathy, is it a concept worth holding on to? As Megan Boler asks in reference to multicultural education, just "[w]ho and what ... benefits from the production of sympathy and empathy?"35 In other words, even if it were possible to empathize with "someone for whom one feels no affection,"36 say, a rapist and killer, is it any less problematic than an appropriative sympathetic gesture? Perhaps, as educational philosopher Ron Glass suggests, "these `others' whose lives we imagine do not want empathy, [but] justice."37 To be sure, in Dead Man Walking what is clear is that the condemned man is not seeking sympathy , repeatedly claiming "I ain't no victim," but justice: "Do not let me die ." To return to Boler, one of the risks of empathy in reading and teach ing textual representations of violence and historical trauma (such as the Holocaust) is that it is often accompanied by pity in the form of a moral judgment of the other' s experiences . In this sense "pity encom passes a power relationship through which we estimate the extent of suffering— whether the person 'warrants' our pity, and whether or not the person is to blame and then does not deserve our pity."38 Moving closer to a Levinasian position, Boler frames the problem of empathetic identification in terms of responsibility and obligation . Boler suggests, in fact, that empathy is an emotional construct that, in effect, abdicates responsibility.39 The considerations raised by Boler are especially significant for an ethical reading of a film such as Dead Man Walking, wherein the exteri-ority of the Other (the criminal's liminality and the liminality of "the Criminal") is what is at stake. As Foucault points out, capital punish ment is maintained less by invoking the enormity of the crime itself, than the "monstrosity" of the criminal.40 It is precisely this exteriority of the killer/Other that is utterly " beyond " Sister Helen's and the viewer's, indeed beyond my and your, grasp . Furthermore, just as there is no knowing the Other, there is no knowing death.41 What I want to suggest is that rather than being an act of sym pathy or empathy, pity or compassion, the nun's relationship with the killer/to-be-killed stems from a responsibility that, in a Levinasian sense, is "beyond" empathy (if empathy is to be understood as knowing the Other). Responsibility, in other words, is not an altruism, but an oblig ation : "No one is good voluntarily."42 In the next section I will look further at how this notion of responsibility issues from "the face" of the Other, as a response to one's fear for the Other, and for the Other's death. As we shall see, for Levinas, violence is aimed at the face of the Other. Murder, Levinas maintains, is a negation of alterity.43

Guilt feeding fuels resentment.Enns 12—Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of Victimhood, 28-30)Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective appealing, and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this “mainstream” group must not speak for other women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in situations of conflict

where the stakes are much higher. ¶ We witness here a twofold appeal: otherness discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to the resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to “embarrassed privilege” exposes the operation of guilt in

the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing world, or white women from women of color. The guilt of those who feel themselves deeply implicated in and responsible for imperialism merely reinforces an imperialist


benevolence , polarizes us unambiguously by locking us into the categories of victim and perpetrator ,

and blinds us to the power and agency of the other . Many fail to see that it is embarrassing and insulting for those identified as victimized others not to be subjected to the same critical intervention and held to the same demands of moral and political responsibility. Though we are by no means equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we are all collectively responsible for the world we inhabit in common. The

condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral responsibility. I will return to this point repeatedly throughout this book.¶ Mohanty's perspective

ignores the possibility that one can become attached to one's subordinated status , which introduces the

concept of ressentiment, the focus of much recent interest in the injury caused by racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the

overwhelming sentiment of “slave morality,” the revolt that begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. 19 The sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering—“ a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering”— someone on whom he can vent his affects and so procure the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation behind ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the desire “to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all.”

20 In its contemporary manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that ressentiment acts as the “ righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured ,” which “delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the

‘injury’ of social subordination.” Identities are fixed in an economy of perpetrator and victim , in which revenge, rather than power or emancipation, is sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21¶ 30¶ Such a concept is

useful for understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of the triumph of a morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has any access to power or contains a will to power . Politicized identities arise as both product of and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a substitute for action — an “imaginary revenge,” Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social virtue at the same time that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in its own subjection not only through its discovery of someone to blame, and a new recognition and

revaluation of that subjection, but also through the satisfaction of revenge . 22¶ The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference

and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness the further reification reification of the very oppositions in question and a simple reversal of the focus from the same to the other. This observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no serious impact on mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the eagerness

to rectify the mistakes of “white, middle-class, liberal, western” feminism, the other has been uncritically exalted, which has led in turn

to simplistic designations of marginal, “othered” status and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new moral code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is granted to the victimized other. Ranjana

Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of transnational feminism, the reification of the other has produced “ separate ethical universes ” in which the privileged experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized, crippling resentment . The only “overarching imperative” is that one does not comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out to be a nonresponse . 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.


Ext.Images of suffering only create pity – which foregoes all opportunities to have any true relationship with the victims outline in 1ac Bruckner 1986 [Pascal, Tears of the White Man, p. 77-79]

We all know that newsmaking follows the lure of trouble, and broadcasting means telling about what has gone wrong. The only thing that catches people's attention is dramatic and shocking news , in the form of mass murders or catastrophes. The trouble is that the media also pretend they are presenting what is really going on. They pretend they are showing the real world. This leads to distortion , because people see foreign lands always as if they were full of dissidents fleeing dictators, pariahs, and the sickly. In the public mind forms an image of a world in disintegration, where life can subsist only by some miracle. This deformation of reality is not a momentary lapse or an ideological perversion; it seems to be a precondition for reporting the news. In the apparent truthfulness of journalism, where there seems to be no trickery or falsification, a subtle process is at work. Cruel and violent scenes shown almost nightly do not simply transmit real famines and obvious suffering. In the guise of facts, they objectify these things , and so a single moment in the life of a people is thought to be the sum of their life. The periodic sufferings of some tropical republic or the seasonal malnutrition of some region in Africa symbolize the constant and timeless anguish of continents beyond Europe. What can be concluded from these images? They are honest and guileless, but above all they are stereotypes. In their desire to move us emotionally, the newsmakers produce poverty as the single truth of underdeveloped countries, and newscasting assumes the character of testimony. The image we see, therefore, is both a copy and a model of reality. It reflects real events that are presented as the prototypes of all events. This is a double deception, because the camera denies that life "over there" is anything but a long cry of the oppressed. With regard to our far-off brothers, it means that happiness is a pathological symptom. Compassion is no longer one of the arms of charity, it has become a tool of geography. If, in spite of terrible difficulties, Indians, Thais, Koreans, Angolans, and West Africans feel joy, if those men and women are brought together by laughter and love exactly the way we are, if these people refuse to be defined by our compassionate view of them, it can only be a sign of corruption or of subversion by imperialist propaganda.83 Man in the Third World is either a victim or a warrior, [he] is caught in a logic of martyrdom or warfare, and has no right to exist except as a rebel or as one repressed. His reaction can only be one of depression or of outrage; there is no middle ground. A happy native is a contradiction in terms, a squared circle. It is much better to depict him as bent down in a valley of tears, and to mourn his loss of liberty by weeping over him. This law of compassion precludes any real relationship with him, and forbids free rein to feelings such as anger, admiration, mistrust, and fascination . It is so much easier to sympathize abstractly with unhappy people, because sympathy with happy people requires more nobility of the soul, because it makes us fight against the obstacle of jealousy within us: “If man is capable of having compassion for the sufferings of others, only Angels share in others' joys. . . . " The Southern hemisphere is presented in a true, but one-sided way; at the same time, it is raised to the level of a symbol, and this false projection is hailed as a "new" and "revolutionary" perspective. This is defining what the Third World should be, and the act of definition gives it the power of a moral principle, the quality of liberation . So the new crusaders, under the pretext of mobilizing the conscience of the Western World and showing the misdeeds we are guilty of, are pouring out stereotypes that are just as naive as the reports of Loti, Colette, and Paul Morand were in their day. The leftists portray the poor countries in shades just as stereotypically dark as the pamphlets of the colonial era were stereotypically rosy . Whom are we supposed to believe? The spokesmen of multinational corporations that are quietly pillaging the Southern hemisphere? Or the


querulous leftists who value man in the Third World only as poor, crushed, and wretched? Where is the prejudice greater? Is it in the curses heaped on the Southern hemisphere by the adherents of Raymond Cartier, or in the tearful image the so-called sympathizers present? It comes down to asking the far-off "other" what kind of subjugation he prefers—strangulation by neocolonialism or routinization through pity. This is a hopeless choice, and represents nothing but two aspects of the Western imagination.

The act of pity takes out solvencyBruckner 1986 [Pascal, Tears of the White Man, p. 49-50]

The result is a terrible paradox. The more widespread hunger is, the greater is our indifference to its ravages. Pathetic appeals to our conscience and manipulation by shock are reiterated by the tireless television. The phrase "You are all murderers" does not mobilize people, it makes them yawn . What remains is a guilty conscience that has no strength and no will. We have passed from being tragically ignorant of the Third World to being tragically inured to it. When it was not normally mentioned, famine was deeply touching whenever it was. What is remarkable today is that it is too well known, too much a part of the norm. Rather than a blackout there is a welter of studies, statistics, and calls to alarm on these burning topics. Our emotional appetites are beset from all sides, and rather than being misled by propaganda, we are being told far too much. When catastrophe becomes an everyday thing, it ceases to be catastrophe .

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Pity Bad