In an article in the liberal online rag The Huffington Post, Michael McAuliffe points out that several Republican leaders and leading conservatives are asking for the poor to pay more in taxes. McAuliffe quotes Senator John Coryn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a speech given in the Senate this past July: “A majority of American households paid no income tax in 2009. Zero. Zip. Nada. No income tax was paid by 51 percent of the households in America in 2009.” Coryn added, “[T]o show how out of whack things have gotten, 30 percent of American households actually made money from the tax system by way of refundable tax credits — the earned income tax credit, among others.” Republican Senator Orrin Hatch chimed in during the same Senate debate with this: “The poor need jobs! And they also need to share some of the responsibility.”
McAuliffe notes that among presidential candidates, there’s general agreement (whether through a Perry-like flat tax plan or Cain’s 9-9-9 proposal) that the poor should pay more. Michelle Bachman expressed the idea this way: “I believe absolutely every American benefits by this magnificent country. Absolutely every American should pay something, even if it’s a dollar.”
These Republicans are right that just about half of American households pay no income tax at all. Of course, as McAuliffe says, there’s a reason for this: The median income in the United States is now $26,364—the lowest figure since 1999, before the Bush tax cuts went into effect. Think about that: $26,364 a year to support a household in modern-day America. That’s a lot of pain and suffering right there.
In trying to figure out how Republicans could have become so cruel as to believe the poor aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, while the richest of the rich should have their tax burden eased, I admit I’ve been flummoxed. Are Republicans more cruel than Democrats? I couldn’t get an angle on a fully satisfying answer until I recalled the Enlightenment thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise on the differences between painting and poetry, the Laocoön (1766). Strange as it sounds, this magnificent work of aesthetic criticism offers unusually deep and provocative insights into human nature, including, especially, how the emotion of sympathy works.
Lessing argues that sympathy, rather than being an almost natural occurrence in moral beings, is a far more rarely experienced emotion than we realize. Sufferers frequently do not elicit sympathy in observers—either in real life, when we observe our own family members and friends suffering, or see suffering strangers from a distance, or in art. In art, for example, Lessing points out that upright Roman citizens (not merely the mob) enjoyed watching gladiatorial combats that were fought to the death—so long, that is, as the gladiators hid their suffering and died without grimacing.
Lessing’s profoundest insight was to see that the emotion of sympathy depends on a slew of things that extend far past the absolute suffering experienced by the sufferer. For example, we might sympathize more with someone with a minor injury than someone with a major injury simply because the one with the major injury is suffering quietly while the one with the minor injury is making a lot of noise. But even this isn’t always the case. If the sufferer of a major injury suffers too stoically, we might not be moved.
Or consider how we might find ourselves readily sympathizing with someone who has physical injuries we can see—bleeding wounds, a broken elbow—compared to someone who has a hidden physical illness, or who suffers from depression, a misery, to be sure, but a misery that lies deep inside, often hidden from view. Or think about how sometimes, when a person suffers too noisily over a minor injury, we find their groans to be incommensurate with their suffering, and feel contempt. Sympathy flees rapidly whenever it’s tested, never more so than when injuries or illnesses are accompanied by disgusting sights or smells. In this respect, the poor, as a whole, are in deep trouble; it can be hard for people living on the edge to either look good or smell good, or to help their children look good or smell good.
Lessing’s subtle understanding of human nature helps us understand—but not forgive—the many Republican leaders who seem to find sympathy such a dispensable emotion.
