Laser Attacks and Loving the Neighbor

Empathy requires the capacity to imagine the outcomes of one's actions and the impact of those actions on others.  It also requires the capacity to imagine the outcomes of one's actions and the ways that others experience those outcomes.  It is possible to have one capacity and not the other, as Simon Baron-Cohen notes in The Science of Evil.

Let's take a story from the day's news.  Pilots report an increase in the number of laser attacks they experience while operating the planes on which we all fly.  You can read the article at http://www.ketv.com/national/Nearly-4-000-laser-attacks-hit-pilots-in-2013/24427582.  These attacks can disorient pilots and have the potential to damage their eyes.  As the article notes, such attacks have not yet produced a crash, but it is only a matter of time.

On the one hand, it seems clear that the attackers can imagine the outcomes of their actions to some extent.  Without that imagination, it seems that they would get no reward from the behavior.  The attackers know that they some measure of power and control as they use their laser lights.  On the other hand, they may not have the capacity to imagine the mayhem and injury which may result.

That is the best construction for these actions.  Some people have under-developed or damaged empathic capacities.  Some people may well be unable to to imagine the impacts of their actions on others.

The more likely and more sinister construction for these actions is that the offenders are quite capable of imagining the impacts of their actions on others.  And they don't care.  This is a failure to imagine the ways that others experience the laser attacks.  This is the other dimension of empathy--the narcissistic or psychopathic dimension of empathic failure.  

It is one thing to know that a person lacks the imagination to connect a laser attack to a potential plane crash.  It is quite another thing to know that a person can imagine the potential crash.  It is quite another thing to know that a person can see that crash and enjoys the fear and anxiety that such a potential creates.

We all know people who don't have the self-awareness and imaginative capacity to take the experience of others into account.  We are usually able to make allowances for the various levels of "mindblindness" from which we and/or others suffer.  What is frightening is the ways in which people may read clearly the potential impacts of their actions and conclude that the experiences of others simply don't matter.

As I work with troubled young people, I see both kinds of imaginative failures.  I see young people who have great difficulty envisioning the impacts of their criminal behavior.  And then I see young people who are quite adept at such imagining and who enjoy the resulting terror.

As parents, educators, pastors, and other concerned folks, we can work diligently with young folks to develop their empathic imaginations.  I include this as part of my philosophy of Sunday School and confirmation instruction.  We spend time practicing  the skills necessary to identify with the hurts and hopes of others.  We begin by imagining the minds and hearts of people like us and people we know.  We move on to imagine the minds and hearts, the hurts and hopes of people unlike us--people who are the stranger, the enemy, the Other.

In this way, we seek to expand the capacity of our community to see the Other as the Neighbor.