This morning (June 2, 2015), I was inspired to think about empathy and its importance for moral development after watching this brief RSA video:
I’ve also written about empathy on my TROUBLE blog: On Empathy. Here’s another video about empathy from that post:
a source to check out: The Tender Instinct is the Hope of the World
from October 22, 2015
I can’t stop thinking about empathy; I’m finding references to it all over my twitter feed. Is being empathetic an important quality of character to pursue? On the surface, the idea of trying to see the world through others’ eyes/perspectives, which is how empathy is popularly understood, seems like a great idea. But, is this perspective-taking possible? When does our desire to understand others lead to arrogant claims that we know them? Why do we need to understand in order to connect and care for and with others?
As I struggle to articulate my own thoughts, which are conflicted and very critical, here are a few ways that people are talking about empathy right now:
Sherry Turkle on how smartphones lead to lack of empathy:
(Atlantic interview)
Turkle: The empathy that I’m talking about is a psychological capacity to put yourself in the place of another person and imagine what they are going through. It has neurological underpinnings—we know that we’re “wired” to do it, because when you put young people in a summer camp where there are no devices, within five days their capacity to watch a scene, and then successfully identify what the people in the scene might be feeling, begins to go back up again from being depressed when they first arrived, armed with their devices. We suppress this capacity by putting ourselves in environments where we’re not looking at each other in the eye, not sticking with the other person long enough or hard enough to follow what they’re feeling.
Roman Krznaric and the Empathy Museum:
The items in the Empathy Library will catapult your imagination into other people’s lives. What might it be like to be a child growing up in Tehran, or to be born without sight, or to be a soldier fighting someone else’s war? The library takes you on these journeys into unknown worlds. It offers a unique form of armchair travel that can give you a taste of a different culture, a different generation, a different life.
Ceridwen Dovey on responsibility instead of empathy:
A friend my age who is in medical school recently chose to specialize in geriatrics, and over drinks with some other doctors she was asked why. “Because I love old people,” she replied. “I like hearing their stories and what they have to say about the world.” One of the doctors made a dismissive sound. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Old people are just regular people who happen to be old.” My friend stuck with geriatrics, but realized that she had been fostering an idealized notion of the elderly. “At the end of the day,” she told me, “an old person can be just as trying as any other person; just as messy, just as unthankful.” She has also become wary of her instinctual empathy impulse when dealing with elderly patients. In this, she draws on the academic work of Kate Rossiter, who advocates fostering “ethical responsibility” rather than empathy in medical practitioners. “There’s something almost greedy about empathy, because it relies on the notion that we can somehow assimilate the other,” my friend explained. “A respectful and thoughtful distance is also part of what enables us to respond to the other’s needs.”
One more thought: In her RSA short (which I site above), Brené Brown describes empathy as feeling with people, NOT feeling as people. This is a big distinction. You’re not attempting to be another person, to feel their pain. You’re attempting to connect with that person, to hear/bear witness to their pain and feel with them.
She also says:
In order to connect with you, I have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling.
You’re not walking in someone else’s shoes, trying to know someone who is completely different/Other to you. You’re exploring/making visible a connection that you have with them and feeling together.
from February 26, 2016: This morning, during the troubling hour, I found an article (via twitter) about the dark side of empathy. Here’s the author’s main point:
While empathy can push us to help others, it can also exhaust our emotional bank or push us to retaliation. And, importantly, it can cloud our judgment.
According to the author, it clouds our judgment not only because we are burned out and angry for revenge, but because empathy is biased (we express it more for people who look like us) and narrow (we empathize with the story of an individual, which can be used to manipulate us, but ignore statistical data).