A Friend’s Short Incisive Note On Compatibilism

I'd add that the compatibilist argument, as I see it, hinges on the notion that we have different frames, or modes, or systems for coping with our situation in the world. One, but only one, of these is the empirical or utilitarian, which is founded on the notion of cause, and in which the notion of "will" simply doesn't make sense. Another is the moral frame, founded on the notion of agency, or the ability to choose free of external force. These have different functions, and apply to different situations or circumstances, but both are essential aspects of how we manage our experience of the world. Conflating the two, as in asserting that "free will" is an illusion, is just a basic category error. 

On Misreading A Point Made By Jonathan Gottschall

 Jonathan Gotschall: “In the very act of generating empathy for protagonists and victims, storytellers simultaneously produce an extreme dulling of empathy that allows us to revel in the suffering of villains.”

I misread this point.

My mistake was to think that…1 

…we dull our empathy by sympathizing with villains, thereby losing our sympathy for their victims.

This seemed acute to me as I’m in the midst of re-watching The Sopranos for the first time since originally seeing them so many years ago. 2 

In depicting Tony’s complexity, partly homicidally horrid, partly touching and vulnerable, in getting inside his head and the heads of his fellow thugs, in putting Tony on the “couch,” in humanizing them all, even in showing certain entertaining aspects of the thugs’ lives…3 

our sympathies, along with other emotions, can’t help but be aroused. And this, I think, perforce tends to blunt or at least complicate our sympathy for various victims. 

The Sopranos’ theme in one way of putting it is that gangsters are people too. 4 

I thought this an acute insight, one which works, that such aroused sympathies blunt our compassion for the victims. 

But that’s not want he means. 

Art depicting rounded villains, whom we’re led to feel something for in complex response to them, subsumes Gottschall’s point. 5 

Consider the classic example of Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice and our bifurcated responses to him, to his daughter Jessica, to Antonio, even to Portia.

They seem to make Gottschall’s specific point, which I’d misunderstood, wanting much fuller and deeper exploration. 6/6 

A Note On Being 2/3ds Through Jimmy Breslin’s The Good Rat: A True Story

 I’m 2/3ds through Jimmy Breslin’s 2008 The Good Rat: A True Story. It’s essentially about Burton Kaplan, who dealt with various mobsters, with side stories flowing off the main narrative. 

A curious shift takes place. The opening bid is that the Mafia is essentially dead kept alive only by journalistic and film stories about it. Breslin scorns mobsters as basically lazy high school drop outs without the wherewithal to do anything requiring discipline and brains. They’re all, so to say, members of “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” Breslin’s name for Crazy Joey Gallo’s crew. 

But some mid way through the book, Breslin becomes Damon Runyon, glorying in these now colourful characters, how they confer genial liveliness in the saloons they hang out in and in the good company they provide over drinks or a meal. 

Complementing this shift, at one point Breslin rails against how New York has changed with imprisonment depleting the mobsters’ numbers, how 9-5 dull saloons and the city itself have become owing to how boring and square regular folks are. 

He at another point speaks warmly affectionately of Jimmy Burke, a stone killer who left dead bodies in his wake, the outrage over that nowhere to be seen due to a big favour Burke tried to do Breslin. 

In this, Damon Runyon trumps the opening bid.