Wisdom and empathy

President Obama has nominated Sonia Sotomayor to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The president cited empathy as a trait he found important in a justice. Judge Sotomayor has been quoted as saying in a speech published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal in 2002, "Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases," she declared. "I am . . . not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, . . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Parsing this statement could fill many essays. First of all I agree that wisdom goes beyond intelligence. Many wise people do not have high IQ's and many many people with high IQ scores are not wise. That being said why exactly would a wise Latina woman be more wise than a white male? This is taken in our group politics world as being conventional wisdom, but for what reason? Are we to assume that Latina women are more likely to be from a disadvantaged life and therefore that is what she means by their experiences? If a white male had made that statement any hope of being confirmed would be over. Are we to assume that ethnicity is a predictor of wisdom? Are Latinas known to be wiser than Caucasians? Are women generally known to be wiser than men? Are Latina women generally known to be wiser than white males? None of these things are true of course.

Is Judge Sotomayor a wise woman? I can not answer that but our Senators will be asked to. As for empathy, President Obama seems to think this is an important component for a justice. I think it is an important component for all humans but not for a judge in their professional capacity. I expect Justices to affirm law plain and simple. If the personalities involved in a case are rich or poor should have absolutely no bearing on any case. A case before the Supreme court which Judge Sotomayor ruled on illustrates this. A test for promotion for the New Haven fire department was allowed to be thrown out because not enough blacks scored high on the test. The judges ruling this way showed empathy for the blacks but showed anything but empathy for the people who did well on the test. One of the fire fighters Frank Ricci went to enormous lengths to prepare for this test. See more detail on this in a piece by Charles Krauhammer today. A key disagreement I have with government action in most cases is that by trying to show empathy or altruism for a single group or many groups they necessarily show the opposite to other groups. They usually defend this by saying they are of the majority group and therefore have built in advantages. The problem is they are individuals. Just as Fire fighter Ricci went to person expense and inconvenience to obtain a promotion, being a member of a Caucasian group had no effect on his personal life. Empathy would have required the court let the results of the test be made to stand regardless of ethnicity.

Judge Sotomayor most certainly will become Justice Sotomayor. The Republicans do not have the votes to defeat her if they chose to. They must use this however as a chance to explain why using empathy as a judicial philosophy is not only wrong, it is anything but empathetic, and certainly not wise.

What the world needs now is ... Gordon Ramsey

I must confess I have not written to this blog recently. I have for about three months been successful at losing weight. While not busy all the time exercising, much of my focus has been health and not as much politics and world events. I personally am trying to find more balance in my life between the many aspects.

I have become very much a fan of the British chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsey. While I try not to take on his vocabulary, I think the standards he displays in his line of work are something every one should admire in their own line of work. He is a poster child for excellence, and through his television shows both on American and British networks show us what we as a culture need badly to pursue. I have no idea of Chef Ramsey's political leanings and quite frankly am not in the least bit interested. He pushes himself and his employees and contestants to the brink of their ability. Couldn't we use a bit more of that?

In America he has two television shows Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen. In the Kitchen Nightmares show he examines failing restaurants and tries to find the answer to why they are failing and gives the owner guidance (sometimes very loudly) as to how to improve. In the Hell's Kitchen show he runs a traditional reality show competition where the winner usually wins a job as an executive chef in a top notch kitchen. This is where I will take this discussion. In the competition which I have only seen a couple of seasons, most of the contestants are in the food service industry, but not all. While Chef Ramsey is sometimes insufferable, his standards are always consistent and at the highest caliber.

In each season I have seen, there have been contestants that while not in food jobs at present, he recognizes their desire, hunger and hard work and keeps them in the competition until near the end. Put in a societal sense this would be the opposite of what we do in public policy. We take people that show desire, aptitude and hard work and we take from them to give to people who have show none of those qualities. Instead of giving incentive to excel and push harder we show people how to survive by doing the least effort possible.

In one season of Hell's Kitchen the chef took the player that was last eliminated before the finale and showed his opinion of her by paying for her to go to culinary school. He rewarded drive, desire and hard work. In our public policy we reward the people that achieve the least with lots of incentive to keeping achieving nothing. Make no mistake, I am saying nothing about the people on government supported programs only about the incentives we send through public policy. People receiving government aid need to rely on their inner selves for the desire to achieve and too many just don't have it. Sometimes this is because of lack of role models, sometimes because they just don't know what it is to achieve. They don't however get any incentive from our governments to rely on themselves. They only get dependence.

I suggest our politicians watch Chef Ramsey. If they don't learn anything maybe they will be entertained. In addition, when politicians aren't legislating, they can't do harm.