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Because culture is a response to the environment, empathy can be considered a sort of “cultural memory”

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes. Two related viewpoints include:

  • empathy as literally imagining and feeling what it would be like to live another person’s life
  • using your direct experiencial knowledge to judge/interact with a situation, because it’s very similar

A popular example is modern German culture and its relationship with hate symbols, after the horrific genocide of Jewish people during the Holocaust. Hate symbols are not tolerated by most Germans, because there is a deep memory of how it affected them and their loved ones.

However, as the generations who lived and fought in World War 2 die and no longer share their stories, future generations lose that living memory that comes with someone sharing their experiences that no one else has lived through. We better understand, then, how Knowledge transfer through generations.

If a culture is long away from the memory of why it was formed in the first place, such as people who keep that memory alive dying off or not sharing stories, then we are doomed to repeat histories that we should have “learned from”

This is directly related to “knowledge” being a self-contained bubble moving through space-time, rather than a cumulative sum of past discoveries and learning