This won't change many (if any) Republican minds, because mistrust of science has become a foundational G.O.P. position. Facts, after all, are inconvenient when unsupported assertions are the central presidential campaign strategy.
Nonetheless, here's a passage that I came across this morning in Iain McGilchrist's fascinating book, "The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World." McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and expert in how the human brain functions.
Here he alludes to the impossibility of any man or woman being an island sufficient to him/herself. Or of building anything unaided, including a business. "You didn't build that" is absolutely true, regardless of what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say.
One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world 'calling forth' something in me that in turn 'calls forth' something in the world.
That is true of perceptual qualities, not just of values. If there is no 'real' mountain, for example, separate from one created by the hopes, aspirations, reverence, or greed of those who approach it, it is equally true that its greenness, or greyness, or stoniness lies not in the mountain or in my mind, but comes from between us, called forth from both and equally dependent on both; as music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist's hands, the sculpture neither from hand nor stone, but from their coming together.
And then the hands are part of the lived body -- or, put more conventionally, are the vehicle of the mind, which is in turn the product of all the other minds that have interacted with it, from Beethoven and Michelangelo down to every encounter of our daily lives. We are transmitters, not originators.
A dozen pages further on I read another passage that supports the progressive/Democratic emphasis on empathy and caring unselfishly for our fellow human beings, even if this means raising taxes or otherwise sacrificing something of our own for the good of others.
Altruism in humans extends far beyond anything in the animal world, and also beyond what is called 'reciprocal altruism' in which we behave 'altruistically' in calculated expectation of the favour being reciprocated.
It is not a matter of the genes looking after themselves at the expense of the individual, either; human beings co-operate with people with whom they are not genetically related. It is also far more than merely co-operation based on the importance of maintaining one's reputation; we co-operate with, and put ourselves out to help, those we may barely know, those we know we may never meet again, and those who can in no way reward us.
...It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation. And the outcome, in utilitarian terms, is not the important point; it is the process, the relationship, that matters.
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