Brooks today: "...people are usually pretty decent to one another when they relate person to person. The odd thing is that when people relate group to group, none of this applies. When a group or a nation thinks about another group or nation, there doesn’t seem to be much natural sympathy, natural mimicry or a natural desire for attachment. It’s as if an entirely different part of the brain has been activated, utilizing a different mode of thinking.
Group-to-group relations are more often marked by calculation, rivalry and coldness. Members of one group sometimes see members of another group as less than human: Nazi and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi, Sunni and Shiite.
Political leaders have an incentive to get their followers to use the group mode of cognition, not the person-to-person. People who are thinking in the group mode are loyal, disciplined and vicious against foes. People in the person-to-person mode are soft, unpredictable and hard to organize.
There’s a scene in Anthony Trollope’s political novel, “Phineas Finn,” in which young Phineas, about to enter Parliament, tells a party leader that he is going to think for himself and decide issues as he sees best. The leader, Barrington Erle, looks at him with utter disgust. To Erle, anybody who thinks that way is 'unstable as water and dishonest as the wind.'"
Brooks goes on to use this argument to indict the Democratic approach of using reconciliation to pass health care. But I would assert the horse is already out of the barn on this one. It's the rock-ribbed loyalty of the Republicans that has killed the individual interaction dynamic of the Senate. His broader point is well taken, though -- examples of empathy and sympathy on a national/international level are hard to come by. How could such empathy be generated? Maybe by making such interactions more interpersonal, or defining our in-group more expansively. Citizen-to-citizen diplomacy can be quite effective in combatting the stereotyping and demonization that's possible on a group level. But maybe this is just part of the way humans work, a relic of our inability to connect emotionally outside our immediate geograpy, with no easy answers.