The Ethics of Empathy – Pt. 2 (Guest Post)

I’m hijacking a comment to yesterday’s post on the dynamics of how the U.S. delegation should enter into the victim’s sufferings in Hiroshima on the 65th anniversary of the nuclear attacks.  My good friend Nolan Sharp, who is currently in Zagreb, Croatia, left this as a comment – but it really merits its own space as comments don’t often get viewed in RSS readers and emails.   This is worth reading as a follow up to what I posted yesterday and it raises a couple more great insights and issues.If you get a chance read Nolan’s reflections and leave a response!

________________________________

I loved reading about WWII history, especially about the war in the Pacific, as a child. I think there was something about airplanes, ships, and the idea that America fought its way back out of a huge hole in the beginning. As an adult it’s been interesting to read more complex accounts of the whole thing and rethink parts of what I internalized as a child. I think one of the best books I read on this subject was “Flags of our Fathers,” by the son of one of the men who raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi. He eventually lived and worked in Japan but because his father almost never talked about the war it wasn’t until relatively late in life that he started to piece together his own experience of Japanese culture with his father’s.

I think what I took away from him, which I really appreciate, is the idea that the war in the Pacific was a horrible downward spiral between two great peoples who had very little interest in really understanding each other. He puts the main responsibility on the totalitarian Japanese system of the time, but tries to look at the whole picture. The ethos of the Japanese Imperial leadership just didn’t care to take a look at the kind of resources and backbone that America would employ in response to an attack. I recently read a book that suggested that the whole war with America started because the Imperial Japanese Navy (which interestingly was always the junior partner to the Imperial Army politically) was itching to get its own fight after watching the Army fight in China for years.

On the American side, it seems what little understanding we had of Japanese culture just went down the drain after Pearl Harbor. There was enough nasty stuff in the months afterward – like Bataan – to ensure that no further reflection happened. The overt nasty racism of WWII Navy documents and training guides is shocking today. It seems maybe there were enough Germans in America to force us to try to distinguish between the government system and endemic characteristics of race, but not with the Japanese.

There was a lot going on in August 1945 – including the declaration of war by the USSR on Japan. One thing the USA conceivably could have considered – had it wanted to look at the Japanese side and see anything but utter bloodthirstiness – was that there was tension in the Japanese leadership over the continuance of such a ruinous war.

I think you’re really on to something in suggesting that there is a way to meet a historical adversary like Japan outside of the prisms of victimhood and guilt. I think James Bradley comes close to it in Flags of our Fathers. It’s to come together and lament that our forebears so tragically misunderstood one another, to acknowledge that there was great heroism and sacrifice on both sides, but also that their misunderstanding led to a horrific fight to the death.

I think a lot can come out of that kind of exchange, without any kind of compromise on the issue of whether the right side won. Although, it’s interesting to me that in this case the survivor’s association is not only looking for an apology, but also for a much larger political commitment – for the USA to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons. What you’re trying to say and what you’re heard as saying can be so different… So maybe another angle in this is cross-cultural understanding of apology.I think this does have an interesting tie in to leaders facing the messiness of their decisions, especially in excruciatingly difficult situations. What I wonder is how often the people who make the call can handle the psychological burden of facing into the massive scope of their decisions. I can empathize with the stance of Paul Tittle and his son – how do you find a place from which to question your own role in something of that magnitude that without maybe losing your own mind?It seems to me, from observation, that people who can tolerate the kind of ambiguity are rarely the ones in those positions of leadership. That to me is a big mystery.

__________________________

What thoughts does this bring to mind?  Do you agree that the people who can enter into the ambiguity of these situations with humility aren’t often the ones in leadership?  Why do you think that might be the case?