24A031 Humanity by Jim Davies, 8/13/2024  

There's a certain quality about humans, and some other mammals too, notably dogs, which reaches a bit further than strict reason - vital though that is. It has to do with compassion and empathy. If AI gains prominence in the coming decades (and I'm not sure that it will) this will be one quality that differentiates between real humans and artificial ones.

We can readily tell the difference between the warmth of sympathy expressed by one person toward another in distress - such as when strangers embraced Mrs Comperatore on the bleachers at Butler July 13th, in intense grief right after her husband had suddenly been shot dead - and the soul-less, mechanical disbursement of stolen money to those the government says are "entitled" to it, by bureaucrats. That's the quality in question.

Recently I watched a couple of different movies. One was "Pretty Woman", with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Gere plays a mogul who performs the useful function of buying inefficient companies, breaking them up and selling off the assets to those who can use them to make greater profit, who falls in love with Roberts and rescues her from a depraved life; the same idea as Shaw's "Pygmalion" or "My Fair Lady." The kicker is that the Woke script writers have her "rescuing" Gere right back, so that he no longer breaks a company up but joins the owner in trying to restore its fortunes.

That's plain silly. Profit is indispensible for reducing poverty, and optimal use of resources is vital for maximizing profits; the socialist writers failed to grasp that and focused only on the short-term loss of jobs during the break-up. Even so, they did a good job portraying Gere's character as having a change of heart, adding compassion to his business acumen. Nothing wrong in that; it's a key part of being human.

The other movie I re-watched was "Schindler's List", which dramatizes the true story of how a German businessman saved the lives of 1,100 Jewish employees during WW2. A Nazi Party member, he took a fine opportunity in 1941 to acquire (for negligible cost) a factory in Poland and make pots and pans for the Army, using ultra-cheap Jewish forced labor. But very gradually, as he watched the way his friends were treating Jews in Krakow, his humanity surfaced; he sensed that their casual extermination of life was wrong, and began to form relationships with his workers. Ultimately he broke down in tears, remorseful that he had not been able to save more from the gas chambers.

At some point Schindler "tipped" from indifference to their fate, to being earnest in preserving their lives; it may or may not have been historically accurate but producer Spielberg identifies that moment as when he watched a little girl in a red coat, on her own, trying to hide from the soldiers. Whether so or not, his humanity took over. Having made a vast fortune from the war, he spent it all on limiting the slaughter.

Now, socialists will say that "Schindlers" are very few and far between, and society cannot depend on a few compassionate millionares but must arrange for needs to be met by compulsion, by forcefully redistributing wealth. They conveniently overlook the fact that it was government force that began WW2 and all its killing, including that of Jews, and that Schindler's forced-labor resource was itself provided by socialists; note what the "S" stands for in "NSDAP." In the US, they also overlook the abject failure of the government's vaunted "War on Poverty."

In any case, compelled compassion is hog wash. There is no such thing. The pretense of it has been put in place, and the main effect has been to squeeze true compassion out - and with it, a part of the humanity of society. That is a failing that will be reversed, when government and its force are ended. All real need will be met by real compassion, applied by real people behaving as real humans.