The Buie Knife

Ode to a Restless Man, Roy Parker Jr.

Roy Parker Jr., founding editor of The Fayetteville (NC) Times and my first boss, has passed away at the age of 83. I learned about it from a post by my former colleague Seth Effron on Facebook. I'm very saddened by this news. I followed Seth into the position of Roy's assistant, and he was a great boss, giving me freedom to cover a wide variety of topics and to write editorials, always accenting the positive in his reviews of my work. He was a good teacher and mentor, and I think of him often. I wish I weren't so far away and could attend his service.

I was in awe of his ability to pound out, in about two hours, three well-written editorials on almost any topic -- from politics to international, national and local history to birding and bicycling -- and of his deep connections within the community and throughout the state of North Carolina. He also had a talent for expressing political disagreement without being disagreeable, frequently looking for areas of agreement with those who had a different ideology. 

Penny Muse Abernathy's inspiring UNC Journalism School tribute "from the heart" is here. Obituary here, linked to some great Facebook comments from journalists far and wide. Gene Smith, the Observer's senior editorial writer, offers a fine character sketch of Roy, titled "What Made Roy Run? Progress, Mostly." 

There's a wonderful Fayetteville Observer editorial tribute here, describing Roy as a "restless man," quoting Thomas Edison: "Restlessness is discontent," Thomas Edison wrote, "and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure."

And yet Roy's life is a testimonial to the notion of staying in one place, developing deep roots and committing oneself to a community. He had lived and worked in Fayetteville since 1973, made frequent trips to the legislature in Raleigh and the university in Chapel Hill, and cast long shadows in all three places. Few of us will make such a deep mark.

At this time, I especially remember Roy's irreverant remark that journalism may not pay very well, the hours may be long and hard, but after a long career, you can be sure "you'll get a great obituary." In Roy's case, every word of tribute is well-deserved. 

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NC journalist Roy Parker Jr. dies at 83

Is Absence of Empathy the Beginning of Evil?

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him. - Dostoyevsky

 

"By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand -- not approve of, but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?"

Direct Link. (Hat tip, Sa Lim)

Empathy is “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion,” writes Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of actor Sasha Baron-Cohen, and author of "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty."

Evil is "empathy erosion," he writes. "Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect."

He wants to know why humans turn other humans into objects. "How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for another human being who is suffering?" he asks. His argument is that "when you treat someone as an object, your empathy has been turned off.

"Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings.

"When people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests, they have all the potential to be unempathic," he writes.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, points out in a NYTIMES review of Baron-Cohen's book that one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. He acknowledges that empathy is often eroded by situations people find ourselves in. A study by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford illustrated, for example, how normal students were transformed into brutal torturers simply by being given the part of prison guards. Zimbardo argued in his book, The Lucifer Effect, that his experiment explains the events in Abu Ghraib, as well as Nazi concentration camps, and the Japanese massacre of 350,000 Chinese civilians at Nan King in 1937.

Included in Baron-Cohen's book (and also online) is an Empathy Quotient survey, which can supposedly determine if someone lacks any empathy (sociopathic), tends toward autism or Asperger's Syndrome (low empathy), or scores high on empathy. Predictably, women score slightly higher on empathy than men. Take the quiz and see how you score. I scored 64, highly empathetic, not a bad trait for a writer or teacher but probably not a good trait for a CEO who may have to fire people. Three percent of CEOs have no empathy at all and are classified as sociopaths, according to the author.

Drill Deeper:

• Amazon.com page for The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.

• Excerpt from Baron-Cohen's book.
  

• NYTIMES review of Baron-Cohen's book.

• Empathy Quotient survey

• Article on The Lucifer Effect

America's Basic Values, Which We Hold in Common

"There is much that unites us. We [as Americans] share a profound commitment to basic rights for all—rights to life and liberty, to opportunity, to a decent education, to a job. We believe in fairness and honesty in business. We believe in a free press eager to speak truth to power. We believe that the government cannot tell us whom we can marry or where we can worship or intrude on any of our other important personal and family decision. With so much to unite us, we must join together in rejecting those who coarsen our political system and divide us for their own political purposes." -- Senator Edward Kennedy, America Back on Track, 2006. Hat tip, New Yorker.