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Review: Empathy and Desire in 20th Centry Dystopian Fiction
Thomas Horan has produced an engaging, even eye opening, treatment of five dystopian novels including – Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986). The leading thread, knitting together what these five works have in common is the transgressive relation between an individual representing the repressive totalitarian regime and a would-be revolutionary. The transgression is not the sex as such, which is pervasive even under totalitarian domination. The transgression is that the pair – sometimes master and slave – get romantically involved, “fall in love,” aspire to a “meaningful relationship,” in diverse combinations and permutations.
Review: Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction by Thomas Horan (London and New York: Palgrave Publishing, 2018: pp 212
One of the benefits of engaging with Horan’s even-handed and concise reporting is that the reader is given a bird’s eye view of the complex and entangled dynamics of all of these dystopian novels. That saves the reader a lot of work, allowing the reader to return to the novel(s) in which she or he sees the most value. A definite strength of Horan’s contribution is to call out the aspects of desire – from impersonal sexual coupling to aim-inhibited sublimation of desire into love poetry. Therefore, this review will not attempt to provide more than an oversimplified paragraph of each of the novels as such to highlight the role of desire.
The revolutionary potential, limitations, and dynamics of desire (including its aim-inhibited transformation into love) are illuminatingly explicated. However, such is not the case for empathy. I read every word in this book, and there are 14 occurrences of the word “empathy” (or its derivative such as “empathetic” in the book), and “empathy” is nowhere defined. This is not a softball review, and this will be discussed in detail below. However, the reader should be made aware that this review has to speculate as to what the author (and/or editor!) might have been thinking by putting the word “empathy” in the title of the book, since there is so little explicit engagement with the topic.
From an empathic point of view, totalitarian rule is the systematic canceling and nullification of empathy, indeed of the possibility of empathy. Though it is an oversimplification, it is a useful one, that in each case the selected novels narrate an account of a forbidden, romantic liaison in between a couple (not necessarily heterosexual) in which the possibility of empathy is implicitly contained, though rarely called out. The relation between empathy and love is taken for granted, left undeveloped, and remains implicit in Horan’s work. It does not live up to its promise in this respect, granted developing an account of empathy in the extreme situation of totalitarian domination, in parallel with the better documented account of desire under duress, might have taken another hundred pages.
Still, Horan has done an admirable job of demonstrating how, if one wants to disrupt an organization, including a totalitarian form of governance, then introducing sexual and romantics dynamics is an effective way to do so. Along with nuclear power and aggression (note “Hate Week” in 1984), desire is the most powerful force in the universe. In case after case, both totalitarian bureaucratic and revolutionaries are undone by libidinous and romantic entanglements. Invoking desire is like throwing a libido bomb – the result is going to be an explosion of emotional anarchy. No one escapes the chaos. In so far as one has to tear down the old temple (or government) before raising up the new one, desire will do the job nicely. According to my reading, unmediated desire produces anarchy, which, as a form of governance, greatly overestimates citizens abilities to manage their aggression and greed, putting the community on the regressive path to Hobbes’ “war of all against all.” Therefore, step back to the point where the old temple is in ruins (for whatever reason). What does one do then? How does one build the new organization? One might expect at this point to invoke empathy as a means of team building, and there would be value and truth to that. Never underestimate the power of empathy; yet the complexity of the matter requires that we suspend judgment until we have reviewed the five novels in question, to which we now turn.
Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) tells of the conflict between the trade labor movement in the USA and a fascist dictatorship that reads like President Grover Cleveland calling out the US Army as strike breakers to operate the railroad during the Pullman railway strike in 1894 under the pretext of delivering the US Mail (calling the junta of the dictatorship “the Iron Heel”). As a historical footnote, the reader may recall that the railroad magnate, George Pullman, built an ideal “city” on the southside of Chicago for his workers in a utopian moment of flush profits when other capitalists were squeezing workers as hard as they could. This good start came to a violent historical end in 1893 when revenues plunged and workers were laid off – but the rents were not reduced. The President of the Railway Union, Eugene Debs, went on in historical fact to run for President from prison in 1920 (Debs was sent to prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing US participation in World War 1), garnering nearly a million votes for his socialist party while in prison and unable to campaign. In the novel, the capitalists seize power and form an oligarchy that restores hereditary transfer of pollical authority. This provides the narrative wrapping for a sexual relationship between Eva and Ernest Everhard. He is. According to Horan 2018: 26, 40, 45 (italics added):
“The Iron Heel reads like an amateurish piece of fiction by D. H. Lawrence, complete with the strapping, passionate proletarian who rejects the stale existence of the upper classes for “real life” among the common people [. . . .] ‘Everhard—no Viagra needed.’ It is not through word or example that he wins converts, but rather through his appealing physique. [. . . .] Ernest, who is “ever hard,” and so has potency to spare, becomes the defender of virility and manhood itself, as well as the sacred guardian of social justice. Desire for Ernest initiates the process through which Avis comes to empathize with and realize her responsibility to Jackson and the other disadvantaged people affected by the injustice done to him. This compassion prepares Avis, a beneficiary of the market system, to stand in solidarity with capitalism’s numerous victims.”
The privileged gilded-age woman, Eva, is persuaded as much by the biceps as the rhetoric of this vanguard of the proletariat, Everhard, and she embraces the idea of revelation along with the biceps (and other parts). Alas! The first revolt against the Iron Heel fails (the junta, not the title of the book), and long centuries of suffering lay ahead before final victory. Everhard has a certain animal magnetism – entry level empathic receptivity – and Eva is like the sparrow hypnotized by the snake. The folk definition of empathy suffices here – Eva takes a walk in the shoes of the oppressed (named Jackson) and has an “Ah ha” moment of empathy. Wouldn’t it be nice?
In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), the beautiful I-330 attracts D-503’s regime subverting desire. She (I-330) is the leader of the revolutionary Mephi. The animal magnetism (my term not Zamyatin’s, but a summary of the text) that attracts the couple to one another transforms them in the direction of a humanizing individualiaty and consequent critical thinking (Horan 2018: 55):
Through this process of critical thought, morality emerges: I-330’s sensuality does not reduce her to a male-pleasing object of lust; instead, she becomes the first Number to achieve full personhood in D-503’s eyes: “I stared at her […] as something that had dropped out of nowhere. She was no longer a Number, she was simply a person” (Zamyatin 1924/1993, p. 122). Whereas previously everyone was literally a number, D-503 can now recognize and value individuality as well as his responsibility to both himself and at least one other person. Although skeptical of eroticism’s power to effect a successful revolution, [there is a] [. . .] humanizing effect
Meanwhile, the totalitarian system in We strikes back. The individuality is crushed and the possibility of love thwarted in a kind of soul murder (not Horan’s term (see Shengold)) (Horan 2018: 58):
D-503, like many other Numbers, is subjected to a medical procedure that disables the portion of the brain responsible for imagination, an operation that makes desire impossible, which Elaine Hoffman Baruch (1983) calls a “fantasiectomy” (p. 52). After this surgery, D-503 becomes totally amoral—placidly watching the torture of I-330 through suffocation and even finding it beautiful
The narrative does not end happily for I-330 and D-503 (rather like Winston and Julia in Orwell’s 1984). The people in One State are being turned into human tractors by the equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy. More soul murder occurs, and the survivors live on like Zombies. However, We also ends with a general uprising by Mephi and with the One State’s survival in doubt. A character not mentioned until now, O-90, escapes to a rustic community in the wilderness, carrying a baby who has messianic potential in her womb. Everyone was a number; but just as there is no highest number, there is no final revolution. Get ready for the next one.
Taking a step back, from the perspective of empathy, D-503 aligns with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and thinks aloud (Horan 2018: 52 – 53):
And so I felt that I—not generations of people, but I myself—I had conquered the old God and the old life, I myself had created all this, and I’m like a tower. (Zamyatin 1924/1993, p. 7) In comparing himself to a tower and presenting collective human achievement as a challenge to divinity, D-503 evokes the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a myth that showcases the godlike achievements possible through human cooperation. Here, however, the meaning of the original myth is inverted: a story that for the ancient Semites cautioned people to relegate their endeavors to mundane matters and remain firmly on the ground now suggests that people can and should claim the heavens and live as gods: “The gods have become like us—ergo, we’ve become like gods…”
This is the fallacy of the undistributed middle of course. In the myth of the Tower of Babel, there was only one language and humanity lived in peace. In a sin of pride, humans thought itself powerful enough to build a Tower to move into heaven. They were frustrated in this by the scattering of tongues – the generation of the ten thousand languages that people have spoken and (more to the point) misspoken throughout history. The sound of foreigner’s talking sounded like “bar – bar – bar,” hence, they were called “barbarians,” and treated as such. Since understanding was perfect, empathy was not needed prior to the scattering of tongues. History begins at the point of the scattering. Empathy becomes necessary to attain understanding of the Other. The “We” of the title blows up. I hasten to add this potential is not developed by Horan (or Zamyatin), but would not be that hard to do.
In Kathrine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), the thousand-year Nazi Reich is well underway. All the Jewish people are already dead. History is rewritten to make Hitler into a blond god – there is one subversive picture of him as small, brown, and with a paunch – are women have been reduced to the sole reproductive function. In a questionable interpretation, misogyny, not antisemitism, is the basis for the totalitarian state. Meanwhile, at a human scale, the protagonists Alfred and Hermann have an illicit gay (same sex) relationship, which sustains the hope of a return to humanness. The couple share an intimate moment as Alfred (English) gets didactic with his younger German friend, Hermann (Horan 2018: 104):
“Then, if you can love and trust an Englishman, can you grasp the idea that there might be something important, some knowledge, some wisdom, that’s for all of us, for all men alike?” “Yes, I think I see.” (Burdekin 1937/1985, p. 63, emphasis in original). Desire for Alfred allows Hermann to transcend racism, nationalism, and classism, replacing them with an appreciation for a shared human heritage, a heritage that Hermann accesses through subversive lust.
Connecting the dots between the “love and trust” (and lust!) between the couple and empathy remains implicit, nor is it argued for or even called out by Horan. This review shall have a proposal about the connection and what is implied thereby for Horan’s overall position.
Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) aims to exemplify that psychopharmecutical and behavioral conditioning are much more effective in dominating the people than force and violence. Huxley writes:
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” (Letters of Note, Shaun Usher (ed.), Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2021 Huxley, Letters of Note, 1984 v. Brave New World)
Thus, John, The Savage (“savage” because he was “natural born,” not “hatched” and conditioned) is the perfect “unavailable object” that inflames Lenina’s passion because of his very inaccessibility. Lenina’s love for John the Savage is unconsummated but, for her, all consuming. Even though the sexual encounter is not in the present tense (or less so), the narrative turns on John’s mother’s (named “Linda”) sexual transgression with Thomas Tomakin, the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, which results in the birth of John, The Savage. Lenina’s promiscuity is not transgressive but affirms the norms of the World State that relationships should not be monogamous or filled with romance or affection. Horan 2018: 74
Huxley, like Zamyatin, demonstrates that the subversive power of desire lies not in sex itself but in the longing for bodies that are forbidden. The urgent awareness of self brought on by deferred desire triggers what Marcuse refers to as erotic cognition: “[E]rotic as well as logical cognition break the hold of the established, contingent reality and strive for a truth incompatible with it [….] In the exigencies of thought and in the madness of love is the destructive refusal of the established ways of life” ([Marcuse, One Dimensional Man,]1964/1991, p. 127).
This is where the revolutionary potential of sexual libido starts to reach its limit. To be sure, sex is powerful and should never be underestimated in its disruptive potential. However, igniting the sexual fuse can be like doing so and awaiting the explosion. One had better have a plan as to what to do after the dust from the explosion settles. Just as transgressive, maybe even more, is learning to read. John does that with the only two books available to his mother, a scientific treatise and the complete works of Shakespeare. He spends the rest of the novel quoting Shakespeare like you or I might issue a social media post. The people are fascinated with John’s asceticism and self-flagellation and flock to see him. Thus, Huxley’s ultimate recommendation to combat the dehumanizing effects of psychopharm and behavioral conditioning – read Shakespeare!
Horan likes to invoke Herbart Marcuse, whose revolutionary potential should never be underestimated:
According to Marcuse, when sexual urges go temporarily or entirely unfulfilled because culture and environment restrain them, these impulses beget dreams and aspirations that transcend the self, encouraging the individual to realize and struggle for something beyond quotidian reality. The individual envisions the realization of these lofty desires as taking place in an ideal landscape, which—even if unachievable—embodies the encouraging dream of a utopia and inculcates the will to work toward establishing it. Unlike the complacent, sated Londoners, John the Savage, who is the product of sexually frustrating circumstances, never stops believing in and searching for a better world, even though he ultimately judges himself to be unworthy of one (Horan 2018: 74)
However, this is hardly any different than basic Freudian sublimation of libido. Love is aim-inhibited sexuality (i.e., “libido” the Latin word for “desire”), and the advances of civilization require delayed gratification and the transformation of libido into cultural artifacts. In turn, this unleashes a dynamic whereby the more advanced the civilization the more extensive the guilt, repression, and sublimation; and, whereas sublimation transforms the raw libido into something artistic or socially useful, the guilt and repression remains, well, guilt and repression and a source of visits to the psychoanalyst:
Every renunciation of instinct now becomes a dynamic source of conscience and every fresh renunciation increases the latter’s severity and intolerance. [. . . .] The effect of instinctual renunciation on the conscience then is that every piece of aggression whose satisfaction the subject gives up is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter’s aggressiveness (against the ego) (Freud, (1930), Civilization and its Discontents: 128–129).
The issue is that he who lives by Freud also dies by him. In a passage that Marcuse strategically cites, the revolutionary potential of sexuality is strictly limited:
[…][W]e derive the antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals. When a love-relationship is at its height there is no room left for any interest in the environment; a pair of lovers are sufficient to themselves, and do not even need the child they have in common to make them happy. In no other case does Eros so clearly betray the core of his being, his purpose of making one out of more than one; but when he has achieved this in the proverbial way through the love of two human beings, he refuses to go further (Freud 1930: 108); see also Marcuse, (1955), Eros and Civilization, New York: Vintage Paper (Random House), 1961: 38).
If Freud’s assertion is accurate, then it puts an end to the revolutionary potential of desire. Two is a good start to a community. However, the lovingly entangled pair has no need for expansion, hanging the “Do not Disturb” sign on the bedroom door. To create an expanding community, empathy is required, and that is conspicuous by its absence in the dystopian novels and in Horan, nor is the revolutionary potential of empathy itself clear. Natural empaths make poor revolutionaries. Indeed one method of domination in a totalitarian dictatorship is precisely the systematic nullification and denial of empathy (once again, not noted or debated by Horan). The emergence and development of empathy requires a safe space for critical inquiry and taking the point of view of one’s opponent, even if it is the better to thwart and defeat that opponent (see Zenko 2015 on thinking like the enemy). Add politics into the mix along with the issue of the relationship between empathy and a constellation of phenomena such as sexuality and romantic love.
Ayn Rand’s Anthem was (and to an extent still is) a best seller. The summary sounds awful, but Rand writes a good story. Set in a primitive world that resembles medieval Europe, Equality 7-2521 is working by candlelight in a world lit only by fire on the discovery of electricity. In spite of his intelligence – or perhaps because of it – the faceless unempathic bureaucracy (my term, not Rand’s) responsible for career assignments, decides to assign him to sweep the streets.
Equality 7-2521 meets Liberty 5-3000 and – get ready – here is the transgression – they fall in love. Sex is not prohibited. Indeed it is recommended during the bureaucratically sanctioned time of mating. Equality presents his discovery of electricity to the Council of Scholars, but instead of being vindicated, he is further punished. They require his innovation because it would damage the candle industry. John manages to escape to the forest, where Liberty joins him. They go “off the grid,” renaming themselves Prometheus and Gaea, respectively. Gaea (Liberty) becomes pregnant, and the pair in the hope that the off spring will become a leader in transforming the world. But see the above from Freud about the unwillingness of the pair to broaden its boundaries. So far this is not an amazing narrative.
What launches the narrative to a new level is a framework about language in which individual personal pronouns – especially “I” – have been eliminated. This innovation in self-identity is a linguistic “castration” that results in people losing their individuality. Without the language to say “I,” people are unable to conceive and relate to themselves as individuals. Spontaneity, initiative and the ability to start something new are inhibited, cancelled, negated. The story ends with the emergence of the ability to say “I.” Without the “I,” the “We” is an undifferentiated blob that does not distinguish self and Other; and without self and Other one can have merger, but one cannot have empathy, which, by definition, distinguishes self and Other while allowing for crossing the boundary back-and-forth between them.
George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is the best known and perhaps the grimmest of the dystopian novels, though that is a race to the bottom in which no one wants to be the winner. Here the reader encounters all the vocabulary that has become standard to describe totalitarian domination – Big Brother, the thought police, thoughtcrime, the Ministry of Love (which tortures people), doublethink, Newspeak (“Poland invades Germany” (September 1939)).
The seminal event – no pun intended – is the transgressive relationship between Winston and Julia – of course sex occurs but that is not the transgression – they fall in love. They are betrayed, tortured, and in this extreme situation, say things such that it would be preferable to torture the other person, the beloved. Though under duress, this has the effect on the person of “soul murder.” It kills the possibility of love. It kills the possibility of possibility as such. Though Horan does not explicitly call out the possibility of soul murder, it is fairly close to the surface in the subtext. Reading 1984 is itself something to be “survived” in that it grabs the reader by the throat prior to ripping out their emotional guts. Most readers come away shaken.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaiden’s Tale (1986) is now a Netflix series and the position being satirized in it reportedly has representation on the US Supreme Court. As with the misogynist judgment of the ancient Greeks in the Eumenides ruling against Clytemnestra and in favor of Orestes, woman is just the receptacle. Deeply debunking of the subjugation of woman in diverse contexts, especially Canada after World War 2 and prophetic in its anticipation of the reversal of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court, this negative fantasy of the Republic of Gilead is a page-turner. In the narrative, most women have been rendered infertile by toxic waste and a coup d’état installs a quasi-fascist US government that is a mix between Old Testament prophets and Afghanistan 2023 where women’s education is outlawed. Controlling sex is a mark of fascism – the strange fascination of certain state legislative assemblies – including a significant (though not majority) number of vocal woman legislators to control woman’s bodies through reproductive constraints
In short, the heronine (Ofred) makes the best of bad situation and signs up to engage in ritual rape (sex) with the Commander in the presence of his wife in order to sustain the population. In this case, the transgression includes getting emotionally involved with the Commander – they are already having sex so the transgression includes reading together and playing Scrabble. All of this is a serious violation of protocol, which gives Ofred power. In the end the Commander is executed for treason. (You can’t make this stuff up!) Meanwhile, Ofred has Hot Sex with Nick, one of the Commander’s staff, and they too get emotionally involved. Amidst diverse classifications of women such as Martha’s, Aunts, Econowives, Jezebles, and Handmaidens, it remains unclear what happens to Ofred after she is taken away in the secret van, but the existence of her report is evidence that she survived. Horan gets the last word (2018: 21)
I argue [Horan writes] that it is the bizarre sexual relationship [in addition to ritual rape they play a lot of Scrabble (the board game)] between the narrator and the Commander that awakens her moral sensibilities and inspires her to leave her record. Under the pretense of having illicit fun, the narrator and the Commander vigorously debate social and political issues. The narrator’s assignations with the Commander give her the requisite information to tell her tale, including secrets about the government and what motivates those who run it, facts about her ill-fated predecessor, and knowledge of clandestine spaces where she discovers what became of her best friend. The Commander never disavows the tenets of his society, but his sexual transgressions inflame his arrogance, causing him to take unnecessary risks that bring about his eventual trial and execution for treason
Notwithstanding the master slave implications here, one can interpolate an empathic moment between the two and perhaps even an empathic attempt, however limited in its success, to take a walk in the Other’s shoes.
This brings us to the ultimate question, which remains unaddressed by Horan. What is the relationship between empathy and desire? This must be read to include the transformation of desire represented by the aim-inhibited desire of romantic love. One seeks in vain for any proposal to address this in Horan, nor does he provide a definition of “empathy,” and that is a significant shortcoming in an otherwise engaging and thought-provoking treatment of dystopian fiction. Since Horan has not conceptualized the relationship, the following makes no claim to represent Horan’s position. The book review of Horan’s work ends here. Therefore, the following may be read as using Horan’s provocative juxtaposition of desire (including romantic love) and empathy (and politics, dystopian and otherwise) as a springboard for understanding and explanation of the issues around empathy and politics.
The proposal here is to conceptualize the difference between desire (including romantic love) and empathy. Folk wisdom, thus, suggests that love is blind; Bob Dylan, that love is just a four letter word (which makes explicit the ambiguity of “love” as libidinous desire); Plato, that love is a kind of madness. So far, love sounds like tertiary syphilis—it makes one mad and causes one to go blind. People say that they want to be loved; people speak the truth in saying so; and they will even become manipulative about it, saying that if you truly loved me, then you would give me what I am asking for right now, thus misusing love to bully another individual.
People also want to be understood. People want to be “gotten”—appreciated, and acknowledged—for who they authentically are as they are and who they authentically are as a possibility. For example, the waiter is an aspiring actor; the barista, a novelist; the help desk worker, a software entrepreneur. People want other people to know how they have struggled to succeed and overcome adversity. In hoping to be understood for who they really are as a possibility, people are asking for love, but even more so they are asking for empathy.
Less dramatically, the folk definition of the practice of empathy urges one to take a walk in the other person’s shoes, presumably with the other person’s shoe size, not one’s one. Take off one’s own shoes prior to trying on the Other’s shoes. Take a walk in the shoes of someone who is going mad and blind? This might not turn out to be as simple or easy as it at first seems.
The goal of desire is to erase the boundary between the self and other. Merger of one’s mind and body with the desired beloved’s mind and body is the main aspiration and outcome. So desire emerges as a breakdown in empathy—from the perspective of too much or too little engagement with the other. It is desire versus empathy. Yet in desire, empathy lives. In contrast to desire, empathy navigates or transgresses the boundary between oneself and other such that the merger is temporary and the integrity of the self and other are maintained. The boundary between self and other are firmly maintained in empathy, though one goes back-and-forth across the boundary. It is like in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” in which it is asserted that “good fences make good neighbors.” Empathy adds one thing not literally present in Frost’s poem, extending the metaphor. There is a gate in the fence, and over the gate is a sign with the word “Empathy.” One has a vicarious experience of the other—but the difference and integrity of the self and other are preserved in empathy.
When approaching empathy from the direction of love (desire), the more one is enthralled by the beloved, the less empathy one has. The negative aspects of love such as being blind to the
faults of the beloved or the hypnotic obsession with the beloved that Socrates/Plato compared to a kind of divine madness (more on that shortly) reduce the access of empathy to the authentic experience of the other person. Thus, love expands and empathy contracts. The contraction of empathy in the breakdowns of empathy in emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and getting lost in translation expand the aspects of love (desire) included in animal magnetism, agreeableness, “unconditional” acceptance of the other’s shortcomings, and speaking in tongues, the wonderful, incoherent nonsense of two lovers cooing at one another.
However, such an inverse relationship between love and empathy is only the case when
considering the negative aspects of love. When one considers the positive aspects of
empathy, access to the shared humanity of the other person, access to the diversity and
differences in common with the other individual, then expanding empathy also expands the possibilities of love. Expanding empathy opens up the possibilities of love that work in building community, authentic relatedness, and the experience of satisfaction and fulfillment. But what about the positive aspects of love – unconditional acceptance, affection and affinity, recognizing the other person as an end in her/himself and not a mere means? These aspects of love are indistinguishable from empathy, which constitutes love’s kernel.
At this point, the fan out of possibilities explodes. In an attempt to manage the dynamically changing variables, we narrow the focus and ask: What then are the revolutionary possibilities of desire (love) and empathy?
Even in politics empathy is always empathy. However, politics brings along a whole new set of questions, issues, and challenges by with which empathy is confronted and to which empathy gets applied. The political becomes personal, upsettingly so at times. When Lincoln spoke in his 2nd Inaugural address to “bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and is orphan” the rhetorical empathy created a clearing for compassionate action. When Malcolm X said to his African American audience in an example of “out bound,” rhetorical empathy: “You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth rock landed on you,” the audience felt heard and appreciated in its long suffering and struggle for social justice.
What then is the limit of empathy in politics? This is the limit: the practice of empathy does not work well with bullies, sociopaths, psychopaths, QAnon style delusional thinking, the criminally insane, totalitarian dystopias, and [some] autistic children.
The prevalence of bullying in the school playground and politics is notable; and one should never underestimate the power of empathy. Yet, if your political opponent is behaving like a bully, empathy is not going to be enough. You will need to find a supplementary methods – empathy alone will not work on her or him. These hard cases literally will not “get it.” They will not perceive the empathy. They will not experience your empathy.
Worse yet, some bullies and psychopaths will accept your empathy and turn it against you, the better to control, manipulate, and dominate you. If the practice of empathy is not the way forward, how then does one deal with bullying without becoming a bully oneself?
The answer is direct: set limits. Set boundaries. Thus, far and no further! Stay in your own lane. Get back into your own corner. Stay in your own space. Keep your hands to yourself! In so far as empathy is all about firm yet flexible boundaries between the self and the other, a rigorous and critical empathy is engaged here; but until the boundary is reestablished, empathy cannot come into its own. Indeed once boundary violations occur and safety or security is at risk, the issue is no longer an empathic one – call for backup, implement self-defense measures, or escape and continue the struggle on another day.
The FBI hostage negotiating team understands that empathy reduces rage and upset; and they use empathy in context for that purpose, though, as far as I know, they do not use the word “empathy” as such. Yet once the bullets start flying, the time for empathy has passed. Send in the swat team. For an illuminating article on the margins of empathy see Elizabeth Bernstein on “Advice From a Hostage Negotiator” (WSJ.com 06/14/2020) [https://on.wsj.com/3ajoYon]. Never underestimate the power of empathy. Never.
In so far as empathy is all about respecting the boundaries between self and other, one group and another group, boundary setting is relevant to politics and empathy. So if one can reestablish a boundary, then empathy can be reintroduced, gradually, to guide us in how to cross back and forth across the boundary without submitting to bullying, provoking a temper tantrum, or getting stuck in breakdown.
Yet the shadow of the tribalism falls over empathy in politics. Empathy gets a bad rap because empathy is often limited in contemporary political debates to empathy of identity. However, empathy – and that is the innovation here – empathy is also empathy of differences. Key terms: empathy of identity and empathy of difference.
With an empathy of differences, in addition to identity politics, we get a politics of recognition.
Empathy shows up when one person encounters the other person and recognizes his or her differences. I hasten to add no one is asking anyone to give up or devalue his or her identity. The suggestion is that the Empathy of Differences lets identities flourish in a space of acceptance and toleration created by empathic recognition. The empathic recognition in turn creates a political arena where people can debate and compromise and get things done.
Talking a walk in the other person’s shoes yields an empathy of differences. One discovers the otherness of the other. The shoe rarely fits exactly right. One discovers where the shoe pinches – but the other’s shoe almost inevitably pinches at a different spot when it pinches one’s own foot, because the other foot is slightly longer or shorter than one’s own.
Though we are different, our interests, experiences, and aspirations as human beings are recognized. Our interests and aspirations have areas of overlap – for example, we want our children to flourish; we want to be able to make a contribution to the community; we want to be secure in our private lives and preference. With goals pursued along different paths, our possibilities converge or diverge without conflict. Our opportunities align in parallel or intersect at right angles instead of clashing. We are able to cooperate and embrace workability instead of obstructing one another. We are able to build instead of tear down.
Once again, there is nothing wrong with the empathy of identity, but something is missing. What is missing is difference. The empathy of identity is ultimately that of proximity to family, tribe, and local community. As noted, there is nothing wrong with that. It is excellent. We would be less than human without it. But the empathy of identity is ultimately derivative and incomplete without an empathy of differences.
If one is limited to an empathy of identity, the result is tribalism. “I get you, man, and you get me, bro, because we are alike.” No one is proposing to try completely to abolish tribalism (which might not even be possible), but tribalism is definitely limiting and constraining.
All these different tribes set in motion a trend, which arguably is tribalism’s own undoing, dissolving its identity – Republicans, Democrats, Progressive, Conservatives, Libertarians, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Quakers, all 198 member nations of the United Nations – not to mention the Chicago Cubs Baseball team. So many identities – so many tribes. If one gets and belongs to enough of them, identity starts to dissolve.
Tribalism itself sets in motion a dialectic whereby each individual can belong to multiple tribes with multiple identities and affiliations. If you participate in enough tribes and enough overlap between tribal identities, the notion of identity starts to dissolve into a kind of melting pot of multiculturalism, communalism, or ecumenical spirituality, market place of competing political ideologies. Even if the melting pot never completely melts, it can at least become a colloidal suspension – cosmopolitanism – where the identities and differences are fine-grained enough not to subvert individual diversity or the aspiration to commonly shared values.
But absent such a dialectic of dissolution into a melting pot of identities– for example, in traditional societies or insular communities – the empathy within the communal group works well but breaks down at the boundary at which one encounter the other individual and group and their differences.
The innovative point here – to emphasize once again – is that empathy is about identity and similarity, but it is just as importantly about differences.
Speaking in the first person, when I encounter an individual who is different than I am, then I have an experience of otherness. However, every person I encounter, without exception, is different than I am, even if there are similarities. The other is different than I am. But without the other individual there is no empathy. Empathy is born in otherness. Empathy is born in the difference. Empathy is born in the difference of otherness and in the otherness of difference.
If that starts to spin, enjoy the ride. At least you are not alone – as the practice of empathy is the one thing you cannot do all by yourself. Empathy is a function of otherness. Without the other individual, there is only myself – oneself.
Solipsism is the philosophical position – the illusion – there the entire universe consists of oneself very alone – hence, solus ipse. One is the creator of one’s entire universe – life is literally but a dream – until one encounters the other – then one wakes up to the reality of the resistance of the other – and the resistance of the other emerges from differences – the otherness of the other. You need an other – and the other individual’s differences – to get empathy started.
Being open to the other person’s feelings, affects, experiences, beliefs, and resonating in tune with the other individual, yields inevitably both the similarity and differences of those feelings, affects, experiences, and beliefs. That is the empathic moment: I realize we are different and that difference lives and becomes accessible in the space of acceptance and toleration between us.
This brings us again to the limit of empathy in politics. Thus, the fundamental political question for a rigorous and critical empathy in politics is what to do politically with individuals and groups that one cannot stand.
What to do with individuals and groups who arouse a visceral dislike and antipathy that are acknowledged to be irrational? What to do with individuals and groups with whom one disagrees on policy, practices, perspectives, procedures, customs, or spiritual practices? The tribalism of the empathy of identity is not going to get you of this impasse.
The reduction to absurdity of the empathy of identity is humorist Tom Lehrer’s satirical song, “National Brotherhood Week”: “Shake the hand of someone you can’t stand.” The rhyme is key here.
Humor and empathy are closely related. One crosses a boundary between self and other in both cases. In humor one crosses the boundary with aggressive or sexual innuendo; in empathy one crosses the boundary with gracious permission and generosity.
Lehrer predictably succeeds in being wickedly funny, though deeply cynical, as he sings an upbeat tune: “…The rich folks hate the poor folks and the poor folks hate the rich folks. All of my folks hate all of your folks – it’s American as apple pie! But during National Brotherhood Week – Sheriff Clarke and Lena Horne are dancing cheek-to-cheek.” Note that Clarke was a notoriously committed racist and segregationist during the early Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and Lena Horne was a celebrated African-American singer of romantic smoky ballads – not a likely match up on anyone’s dating site.
While shaking the hand of one’s sworn opponent (or an elbow bump in a pandemic) is always a good start, it is ultimately incomplete. Unless an empathic context of toleration and acceptance is established for the hand shaking, the risk of shaking hands with someone you can’t stand is that one will end up despising the other even more.
Lehrer’s song ends by expressing the unexpressed elephant in the room “…[Be] nice to people who are inferior to you / It’s only for a week so have no fear / Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year.”
As the song implies, absent additional training in and work on empathy and critical thinking, the hypocrisy and prejudice live on. The practice of empathy becomes the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy.
The disciplined practice of a rigorous and critical empathy is on the path to well functioning political community and successful engagement with one’s political opponents and rivals. A rigorous practice of empathy requires critical thinking to guide it, and, in turn, critical thinking requires empathy to open the space of relatedness, acceptance, and toleration of differences.
This rigorous and critical empathy includes critical thinking. Critical thinking includes such skills as questioning in the sources of one’s facts and beliefs, examining and questioning one’s assumptions, assessing conflicting reports in the media, looking for hidden assumptions and biases, examining one’s own for conflicts of interest, recognizing one’s own mistakes and cleaning them up at once, basic listening skills, taking turns, and seeing if one’s conclusions are actually implied by one’s facts and reasoning from these facts. These are all important. But the number one skill of critical thinking is putting oneself in the place of one’s opponent, competitor, or colleague and considering the alternative point of view – cognitive empathy. Such empathy becomes a priority in a political context.
In conclusion, when empathy becomes a rigorous and critical empathy, then the limits of empathy in politics are the limits of politics, not the limits of empathy.
References
S. Freud, (1930), Civilization and its Discontents. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21: 57– 146.
Thomas Horan. (2018). Desire and Empathy in Twentieth-Century Dystopian Fiction by (London and New York: Palgrave Publishing, 2018
Tom Lehrer, “National Brotherhood Week” [performed]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIlJ8ZCs4jY
Herbert Marcuse. (1955). Eros and Civilization, New York: Vintage Paper (Random House), 1961.
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
Paul Ricoeur, Philosopher of Empathy
This article on Paul Ricoeur, empathy, and the hermeneutics of suspicion in literature will be engaging to students of Ricoeur and empathy alike. One can download the PDF directly from the journal Etudes Ricœeurienne / Ricoeur Studies website: http://ricoeur.pitt.edu/ojs/ricoeur/article/view/628
The article is in English and an abstract is cited below at the bottom. If the above link does not work for any reason, then scroll to the bottom, where one can download the PDF within this blog post.
Meanwhile, I offer a recollection of my personal encounter with Professor Ricœur starting when I was a third year undergraduate at the UChicago. (This is an excerpt from a pending manuscript on empathy in the context of literature.)
By the time I was an undergraduate in my junior year in college, Paul Ricoeur had just arrived at the University of Chicago. Professor Ricoeur had attempted to play a conciliatory role in listening to and addressing student grievances in the face of entrenched method of lecturing by ex cathedra by mandarin professors at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, and related schools in the system. Though Ricoeur did not use the word “empathy” in his role as administrator at the University of Nanterre, he was attempting to play a role in conflict mediation, during the strike of student and workers in Paris in May 1968, a role in which empathy is famously on the critical path.
[Photo: Paul Ricoeur, circa 1970 upon his arrival at the University of Chicago, looking for all the world like the Hollywood icon, James Dean. University of Chicago News office: Detailed photo credit below.]
Ricœur’s intervention in the dynamics of academic politics and expanding the community of scholars the way he had done in setting up a kind of philosophy university in the German prisoner of war camp for his fellow French prisoners in 1941 did not work as well as he had hoped. Though it would not be fair to anyone (or to be taken out of context), the Germans (at that moment) were less violent than the striking French students and Peugeot workers in 1968. The French students threw tomatoes at Ricœur and called him a “old clown”; whereas the University of Chicago “threw” at him a prestigious named professorship. He liked the latter better. Ricœur’s courses were open to undergraduates who got permission, too, so I signed up for two of them – Hermeneutics and The Religious Philosophies of Kant / Hegel. Insert here a mind-bending blur of hundreds of pages of reading interspersed with dynamic and engaging presentations of the material. After the somewhat softball oral exams, for which he charitably gave me a pass, my head was spinning, and I needed to take a year off from school to regroup. I am not making this up. I worked as a parking lot attendant selling parking passes, which was an ideal job, since I could read a lot—you know, German-English facing pagination of two separate philosophical texts. This interruption also gave me time to go out for theatre to work on overcoming my painful social awkwardness and try and get a date with a girl. This “therapy” worked well enough, though, like most socially inept undergraduates, I had no skill at small talk and tended to utter what I had to say out of the blue and without creating any context. When I returned to school the next year to finish up, I proposed doing a bachelor’s thesis on Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, and I went into Professor Ricoeur’s office to make my proposal. Ricoeur was team teaching “Myth and Symbolism” with Mircea Eliade, and the “Imagination and Kant’s Third Critique” with Ted Cohen. Without any introductory remarks—I don’t think I even said my name—I presented the idea for my bachelor’s thesis. Without further chit-chit, raising one finger in the air for emphasis and smiling broadly, the first thing he said to me was: “An internal temporal flux implies an external spatial permanence.” With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, I consider this a suitably empathic response, albeit an unconventional one. My paper eventually got published in the proceedings of the Acts of the 5th International Kant Congress. Fast forward a couple of years, comprehensive written exams in philosophy, and I proposed to write a PhD dissertation in philosophy on empathy [Einfühlung] and interpretation. Max Scheler’s Essence and Forms of Feelings of Sympathy [Wesen und Formen der Sympathiegefühl] contains significant material on empathy, and is (arguably) an early version of C. Daniel Batson’s collection of empathically-related phenomena. I was reading it with Professor Ricœur. Meanwhile, a psychoanalysis named Heinz Kohut, MD, like so many, a refugee from the Nazis, was innovating in empathy in the context of what was to become Self Psychology. I told one of the faculty at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis who was a mentor to me (and a colleague of Kohut), Arnold Goldberg, MD, about Ricœur’s Freud and Philosophy. Whether at my instigation or on Dr Goldberg’s own initiative (Ricoeur really needed no introduction from me), Dr Goldberg introduced Professor Ricoeur to the editors at the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) and the result was Ricœur’s publication “The Question of Proof In Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings” in JAPA August 1977 [Volume 25, Issue 4 6517702500404]. Using graduate students as a good occasion for a conversation to build relationships, we all then had dinner at the Casbah, a middle eastern restaurant on Diversey near Seminary Avenues in Chicago’s Old Town.
It always seemed to me that Professor Ricoeur was a teacher of incomparable empathy, though he rarely used the word, at least until I started working on my dissertation on the subject of empathy and interpretation. I am pleased, indeed honored, to be able to elaborate the case here, while also defending Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion from a misunderstanding that has shadowed the term since Toril Moi’s discussion (2017) of it at the University of Chicago colloquium on the topic shortly before the pandemic, the details of which are recounted in the article.
ricouerempathyinthecontextofsuspicionDownload
ABSTRACT: This essay defends Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion against Toril Moi’s debunking of it as a misguided interpretation of the practice of critical inquiry, and we relate the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to the hermeneutics of suspicion. For Ricoeur, empathy would not be a mere psychological mechanism by which one subject transiently identifies with another, but the ontological presence of the self with the Other as a way of being —listening as a human action that is a fundamental way of being with the Other in which “hermeneutics can stand on the authority of the resources of past ontologies.” In a rational reconstruction of what a Ricoeur-friendly approach to empathy would entail, a logical space can be made for empathy to avoid the epistemological paradoxes of Husserl and the ethical enthusiasms of Levinas. How this reconstruction of empathy would apply to empathic understanding, empathic responsiveness, empathic interpretation, and empathic receptivity is elaborated from a Ricoeurian perspective.
Photo credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, [apf digital item number, e.g., apf12345], Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.
This blog post and web site (c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Top Ten Empathy Trends 2024
This is going to be a tough year—heck, some of these trends were formulated before January 1st, 2024, and it was already a tough year, not having even started! I am sick at heart for the atrocities and killing. I begin the year in grief for all the dead. I am regularly donating blood at the local blood bank, so I bleed in solidarity with the victims and survivors of boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. Based on empathy, I am confident that you, dear reader, will do whatever you can. As Lenin said, “You ask me for a contribution—we’re all doin’ what we can.” Just so there is no misunderstanding—that would be John Lennon. We need a lighter moment, too, amid all the bad news. Meanwhile—I am going with Paul Simon:
“Who says, “Hard times?” / I’m used to them / The speeding planet burns / I’m used to that / My life’s so common it disappears / And sometimes even empathy / Cannot substitute for tears” (1990, “The Cool, Cool River”)
—okay, I substituted the word “empathy” for “music”—but the point is similar.
(10) The first casualty of war is truth—the second is empathy. Empathy has to call for backup. The backup is in the form of radical empathy. In time of war, the power of empathy consists in putting oneself in the shoes of the opponent, thinking like the opponent, and thereby anticipating and thwarting the opponent’s surprise attack. Putting oneself in the opponent’s shoes requires taking off one’s own shoes first. Empathy should never be under-estimated, but empathy requires a safe space of acceptance and tolerance.
Yet, empathic engagement in such predicaments must be limited to cognitive empathy—use critical thinking to try to figure out what the Other is thinking and feeling in order to intervene in a way that is useful according the standards of a humane community. When confronting an aggressor, the empathic approach is to set limits, set boundaries, establish a safe space of one’s own that can be grown to include those willing to join.
The world was on fire last year at this time. The conflagration is spreading. Empathy is one of the few proven methods of deescalating anger and rage—but only if the parties are willing to do so. Empathy is based on creating a safe space of acceptance and tolerance within which the opposing parties can engage with the possibilities for expanding community. Killing everyone in sight and/or signing up for a suicide mission is indeed a solution—but all the evidence is that it is a bad solution. Once someone throws the first stone, or the first bomb, then self-defense, limit setting, drawing boundaries is appropriate. Empathy does not work with psychopaths, certain kinds of autism, most bullies, suicide bombers, totalitarian bureaucrats, and lynch mobs. It is not joke, but especially in the latter cases, call for backup. Many of these individuals will take your affective, emotional empathy and use it against you.
The FBI hostage negotiating team understands that empathy reduces rage and upset; and they use empathy in context for that purpose, though, as far as I know, they do not use the word “empathy” as such. Yet once the bullets start flying, the time for empathy has passed. Send in the swat team. For an illuminating article on the margins of empathy see Elizabeth Bernstein on “Advice From a [FBI] Hostage Negotiator” (WSJ.com 06/14/2020) [https://on.wsj.com/3ajoYon]. Never underestimate the power of empathy. Never.
Though not a new book, Micha Zenko’s Red Team considers the dynamics of thinking like one’s opponent, and it is as timely as it was five years ago.
(9) Radical empathy lands hard, and a grim empathy lesson hits home: If one wants to end a cycle of revenge killings and get peace, one is going to have to negotiate with the people who have killed one’s children and parents. As an analogous case, this grim empathy lesson was expressed by Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin (Oct 13, 2023) during Q&A in her talk, “The Triumph of Counter-Terrorism and the Despair of Human Rights” at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Aoláin draws on the example of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, The Troubles, between 1960 and 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. This had all the characteristics of intractable hatred, perpetrations and human rights violations, the British government making every possible mistake, the Jan 30, 1972 shooting of 26 unarmed civilians by elite British army troopers, internment without trail, members of the Royal Family (Louis Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy of India, and his teenage grandson (27 Aug 1979)) blown up by an IRA bomb, the IRA (Irish Republican Army) launching a mortar at 10 Downing Street (no politicians were hurt, only innocent by-standers), and many tit-for-tat acts of revenge killing of innocent civilians. It is impossible to generalize as every intractable conflict is its own version of hell—no one listens to the suffering humanity—but what was called The Peace Process got traction as all sides in the conflict became exhausted by the killing and committed to moving forward with negotiations in spite of interruptions of the pauses in fighting in order to attain a sustainable cease fire. The relevance to ongoing events in the Middle East will be obvious. An organization widely designated in the West as “terrorist” changes the course of history in the Middle East. Hearts are hardened by the boundary violations, atrocities, and killings. The response requires radical empathy: to empathize in the face of empathic distress, exhausted by all the killing. Though neither the didactic trial in Jerusalem (1961) of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann nor the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995) lived up to their full potentials, they formed parts of processes that presented alternatives to violence and extra judicial revenge killings. In this frame, the survivor is willing to judge if the perpetrator is speaking the truth and expressing what, if any, forgiveness is possible. The radical empathy that empathizes in the face of empathic distress acknowledges that moral trauma includes survivors who are also perpetrators (and vice versa). (See Tutu 1997 in the References for further details.) In a masterpiece of studied ambiguity, radical empathy teaches that two wrongs never make a right; they make at least twice the wrong; and one who sews the wind reaps the whirlwind.
(8) In the USA, librarians are the point of the spear in expanding empathy. Reading teaches one to walk in someone else’s shoes. Reading takes one to worlds that don’t exist, like the world of Harry Potter. One can feel what it was like for Rosa Parks to refuse to sit in the back of that segregated bus in 1955. This trend calls out the convergence of reading and empathy—both open up new worlds, both provide vicarious experiences of the lives of Others, both point to possibilities that had not previously been imagined. In both reading and empathy, we relate to an Other—in the one case in-person, in the other case, in-fiction or the vicarious presentation of historical narrative. Librarians will receive expanded empathy—just not in Florida or similar cultural swamps—but will continue to struggle with unemployment insurance and lost healthcare benefits—empathy for the reader goes into reverse as more books are banned from library shelves (by volume count) than are added to the library inventory. To be sure, parents are responsible for vetting the reading material that their children encounter. According to a Washington Post article, a majority of book ban complaints were filed by eleven (11) people (Hannah Natanson, “Objection to sexual, LGBTQ content propels spike in book challenges,” Washington Post, May 23, 2023 [see shortened URL: https://shorturl.at/hpEHM%5D; see also Reshma Kirpalani and Hannah Natanson, “The lives upended by Florida’s school book wars,” Washington Post, Dec 21, 2023). Your library’s reading list is being dictated by someone whose fears and inhibitions are inspiring her to legislate morality. Never has the power of the word—or magical thinking—been greater—if one says the word “gay,” that calls it forth and gives it reality. Might be worth a try: “Empathy, empathy, empathy!” “Peace on earth, peace on earth, peace on earth!”
(7) Rhetorical empathy emerges as a new practice and the distinction expands. Empathy is generally understood as a listening skill with responses being limited to short speech acts of recognition and acknowledgment, “I get you, man!” Rhetorical empathy refers to empathic responsiveness—speaking into the listening of the person with whom one is attempting to empathize with a form of words that indicates one understands what the Other has experienced. Not just listening, but also speaking empathically. For example, when Abraham Lincoln called in his 2nd Inaugural address to “bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and is orphan,” Lincoln’s rhetorical empathy created a clearing for compassionate action. When Malcolm X said to his African American audience in an example of “out bound,” rhetorical empathy: “You didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth rock landed on you,” the audience felt heard and appreciated in its long suffering and struggle for social justice. The “Amens!” and laughter of knowledge that erupted in the audience were evidence of the accuracy of Malcolm’s empathic responsiveness. Arguably the Parables of Jesus of Nazareth—especially that of the Good Samaritan—are examples of rhetorical empathy—getting inside the experiences of the listeners to overcome their blind spots—in the case of the Good Samaritan of the understanding of who is one’s neighbor—the one who is in need right now. (See Blankenship 2019 in the References for more on rhetorical empathy.)
(6) Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense—about empathy. The trend is to confuse fake empathy and mutilated empathy with the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy, to the latter’s detriment. A cottage industry has grown up of demonstrating the biases and limitations of empathy, and, like any powerful skill, empathy has its strengths and weaknesses. A bold statement of the obvious: empathy can breakdown as emotional contagion, projection, conformity, or understanding getting lost in translation. However, these misfirings of empathy call for training and improving one’s practice of the skill, not giving up on it. That empathy can be parochial and favor the “in group” is properly remedied with expanded empathy and the practice of inclusion. The matter is complex. The practice of including the breakdowns of empathy in empathy’s definition is like invalidating the practice of carpentry because Roman soldiers used hammers and nails in crucifying their victims. A case in point is Alisha Gaines’ Black for a Day (see the detailed review: https://shorturl.at/ozNRU), in its own way an engaging narrative, which, however, presents significant problems. The narrative of Black for a Day consists in describing the cases of several non-fiction narratives of individuals, born Caucasian, who “go under cover,” changing the color of their skin cosmetically and chemically from white to black, in order to “pass” as African American while travelling in the American south (or, in one case, Harlem) in the late 1940s and 1950s (note well the dates!).
According to Black for a Day, these impersonations are supposed to produce empathy between the races and/or in white people for black people, but what they actually produce is “empathic racial impersonation”—that is, fake empathy. This is a subtle and complex point. Black for a Day denounces “empathic racial impersonation,” but what Black for a Day might more usefully be denouncing is fake empathy. Key term: fake empathy (my term, not Gaines’).
These social psychology experiments, “passing” as black, impersonating a black person, provide engaging adventures and misadventures that demonstrate that when one starts out by faking race, solidarity, integrity, relatedness, and empathy as input, then one gets fake race, fake solidarity, fake integrity, fake relatedness, and fake empathy as output. This is not surprising. Fake in; fake out. If one begins with pretense, deception, and inauthenticity as input, then one gets pretence, deception, inauthenticity—and fake empathy—as output. Black for a Day, as indicated, includes a fascinating account of what amounts to social psychology experiments gone bad. White people putting on the equivalent of black face, pretending to be black, is a bold experiment, which, admittedly engaging as a kind of misguided role playing, does not work as intended. As noted, such a mixed result no more invalidates a rigorous and critical empathy than that Roman soldiers invalidate the practice of carpentry by hammering nails into the limbs of the people they were crucifying.
A similar consideration applies to Glenda Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics and the limits of empathy, which tries to force a choice between fighting against the evils of “empire” (racism, imperialism, the pathologies of capitalism, prejudices of all kinds, and so on) and empathy. (See the complete review at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.) But why force a choice between empire and empathy? Isn’t “empire” the systematic negation of empathy? Don’t we need to reduce the evils of empire and expand empathy? Such a choice must be declined and the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy brought to the struggle against global injustice.
(5) Historical empathy gets new relevance. You, dear reader, really gotta get this—history does repeat itself—a US President was elected to two non-consecutive terms and a popular socialist candidate ran for US President from prison after being convicted of sedition (but was not elected) in 1892 and 1920, respectively. This is an invitation to take an alternative, opposing point of view, regardless of what side you are on in 2024. Grover Cleveland was the only US President (so far!) to be elected twice to two non-consecutive terms (1885/1889, 1893/1897). During his first administration, Cleveland supported the Dawes Act of 1887, which basically legalized the stealing of Native American (Indian) land from the tribes. Shortly after assuming office for the 2nd time, Cleveland called out the US Army as strike breakers to operate the railroad during the Pullman railway strike in 1894 under the pretext of delivering the US Mail. As a historical footnote, the reader may know that the railroad baron, George Pullman, built an ideal “city” on the southside of Chicago for his workers in a utopian moment of flush profits when other capitalists were squeezing workers as hard as they could. This good start came to a violent end in 1894 when railroad revenues plunged in the economic panic of 1893 and workers were laid off—but the Pullmanville rents were not reduced. The President of the Railway Union, Eugene Debs, went on in historical fact to run for President from prison in 1920. Debs was sent to prison under the Sedition Act of 1918 for opposing US participation in World War 1. He garnered nearly a million votes for his socialist party while unable to campaign. Heading an oligarchy of monied interests, Cleveland was a model of personal integrity in what was in-effect a fascist dictatorship in which the US Presidency and Congress were dominated by the robber barons of capitalism. A fictionalized account of this period is narrated in Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which tells of the conflict between the trade union labor movement in the USA and a fictional fascist dictatorship that reads a lot like the Cleveland Presidency. One of Marx’s most relevant observations: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In this case, it was indeed Karl, not Groucho, Marx, though, I submit, worthy of Groucho. Still, democracy (in some version somehow) survived. Previous performance is no guarantee of future results.
(4) Empathy disrupts the patriarchy. The innovations of Simon Baron-Cohen into mind blindness, the ability to take the perspective of the Other (the folk definition of empathy), are well-known, even legendary. In a different context, Baron-Cohen’s research on gender has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance. For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much-needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done. Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy. I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q4 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue their contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender. Empathy under capitalism is an equal opportunity debunker—take a walk in the Other’s shoes in order to sell him or her another pair; treat the workers with respect and dignity in order to sustain commitment to the mission and enhance productivity.
(3) The banality of empathy gives way to a thoughtful rigorous and critical empathy. Namwali Serpall’s “The Banality of Empathy” (2019) provides the entry point. Nice title. Serpall is invoking Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1971), about which it is hard to say just a little. I shall try. One of Arendt’s recurring themes is that evil is a consequence of thoughtlessness. “Enlarged thinking” interrupts thoughtlessness by “trying on” and integrating many diverse points of view. According to Arendt, Eichmann was a simpleton, a “Hans Wurst” from the folktale, who did not think and just followed orders. The wanted-dead-or-alive poster for Thoughlessness has Eichmann’s photo on it. The result of thoughtlessness was catastrophe. Indeed. Of course, Eichmann had many “fellow travelers” in genocide.
If one empathizes thoughtlessly, the banality of empathy of Serpall’s title, then one is at risk of empathy misfiring as projection, emotional contagion, conformity, and so on. Just so. A rigorous and critical empathy is required to guard against these risks, and Arendt, no advocate for sloppy anything, much less sloppy empathy, is halfway, but not all-the-way, there with her invocation of Kant’s rigorous and critical method. The above-cited quotation from Arendt and my analysis of terms must count towards a clarification of the nuances of the matter of empathy.
Serpall’s article then raises the question about narrative art “If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?” Though this may have been intended as a rhetorical question, the answer requires an empirical, fact-based inquiry. Some witnessing of suffering does indeed spark good deeds. The standard Samaritan becomes the Good Samaritan when he stops to help the survivor of the robbery thereby creating neighborliness and community; whereas the Levite and Priest succumb to empathic distress and cross the road, thereby expanding indifference and alienation. These events get “narrativized” in the Parable of the same name, which, in turn, inspires some to good deeds, though others are left paralyzed by empathic distress.
(2) In the USA, empathy causes the temperature in politics to cool down. Groups called Braver Angels and the Listening First Coalition are making it a priority to bring the practice empathic listening to hot button political issues and disrupt “false polarization” with empathy—similar to the “empathy circles” (work inspired by Edward Rutsch and thecultureofempathy.com). Such empathy-based conversations are not trying to change participants’ minds about the issues; they are trying to change the participants’ minds about each other. In an account in Aaron Zitner’s WSJ.com article (cited below): “Each party would meet separately at the start and come up with a list of the most common false stereotypes of their group—what they think the other party believes incorrectly about them. Then, they would ask what was true of themselves, instead. Finally, they would ask themselves to acknowledge any kernel of truth to the stereotype. Only then would the two parties meet and discuss how each side sees the other. A central goal was to reduce “false polarization”—the misperception that the people in the other party are more extreme in their views than is true.” If this is not the practice of empathic listening, then I would not know it. As the Wall Street Journal article points out, substantial donor dollars are in play, so this trend has legs. See the shortened URL for Aaron Zitner’s Dec 25, 2023 Wall Street Journal article, “Meet the Americans Trying to Lower the Temperature in Politics”: https://shorturl.at/bBM23.
(1) Empathy “the hard way” results in radical empathy. Empathy “the hard way” means that there is no way of getting to radical empathy except through empathy. For example, one could take a short cut through mind reading, mindfulness, diverse spiritual or religious practices, or chemical interventions such as micro dosing with psilocybin. No doubt all of these and more will be assayed by one thinker or would-be empath or another, and nothing is wrong with that. However, the approach of this work is that the hard work of practicing a rigorous and critical empathy is the path on which radical empathy goes forward. Empathy, whether radical or standard, is at risk of breaking down into empathic distress, misfiring, or failing into the breakdown, or failure of standard empathy with which a would-be radical empathy has to struggle. The short account is that standard empathy encounters a hard case—complex physical and moral trauma, double-binds, tragedy embedded in tragedy (examples are many and not hard to find)—and standard empathy breaks down into empathic distress.
When empathy is practiced by an individual or group that is committed to continuing to empathize in the face of empathic distress, then standard empathy is able to emerge from the refiner’s fire of the breakdown of empathy as radical empathy. This is empathy the hard way. In other words, radical empathy is not a predictable result. As an exercise consider what would empathy “the easy way” look like? What is really needed is a kind of Turing Test for empathy. No, not ChatGPT, though that is a possibility for future research. As a first approximation such a test exists—though it does so in a fictional universe. A masterpiece ahead of its time, Philip K. Dick’s (1928–1982) negative fantasy of the future Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) provides for the Voight-Kampff Empathy test (a fiction within a fiction). Once again, life continues to imitate art. One thinks that nothing like a Philip K. Dick’s Voight-Kampff empathy test ever existed. Think again. Helen Riess, MD, (2018) and her neuroscience colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, have developed a bio-feedback-like set of protocols to train medical doctors and related healthcare professionals in regulating their physiological arousal in contexts relevant to empathy, which context, in medicine, is exactly every encounter with a conscious patient. These protocols and this training are proprietary, intellectual property, and are confidential, so I cannot assess the details. Though I am not sure, it sounds like the trainer puts the little Velcro-cuff on one of the subject’s fingers to measure the galvanic skin response. Galvanic skin response is a blunt instrument and does not distinguish between emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, high spirits, much less subtle states such as envy or indignation, yet it does provide a measure of physiological stimulus and arousal. Useful. Might be worth a try. Never was it truer, if you want to sell something, put the word “neuroscience” on it. That’s empathy “the easy way,” but it’s not empathy. It’s gimmick, but, heck, maybe a gimmick just just what empathy needs in these times of alternative facts and fake everything. However, if one is “suffer[ing] woes which Hope thinks infinte; […] wrongs darker than death or night” and one needs “to defy power, which seems ominipotent,” then empathy “the hard way” is the alternative path – to empathize in the confrontation with empathic distress until empathy creates from its own wreck the empathy it contemplates.
References
Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).
Brenda Carpio. (2019). Migrant Aesthetics. New York: Columbia University Pres. [See separately published review: at https://shorturl.at/absCQ.]
Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.
______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.
______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
Alisha Gaines. (2018). Black for a Day. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [See separately published review: at : https://shorturl.at/ozNRU.]
H. Riess. (2018), The Empathy Effect. Boulder, CO: Sounds True; for details see separately published “Review: The Empathy Effect by Helen Riess”: https://shorturl.at/AFZ36 [checked on 2023/09/12].
Namwali Serpall. (2019). The banality of empathy. The New York Review: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/?lp_txn_id=1496946 [checked on 10/20/2023].
Desmond Tutu. (1997). No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House.
Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.
© Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son
Review: The varieties of empathy in Richard Wright’s (1940) novel Native Son(New York: Harper Perennial 504 pp + end matter)
The varieties of empathy and empathic experiences extend from authentic empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic responsiveness, all the way to fake empathy and mutilated empathy. Wright’s novel, Native Son, provides abundant examples of how empathy breaks down into emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications getting lost in translation. Of course, once empathy breaks down and fails, strictly speaking, it is no longer empathy and calls for a response to “clean up” the misunderstanding out of which a rigorous and critical empathy is restored and reestablished. Nevertheless, the varieties of empathically related phenomena that are constellated makes Wright’s classic work a study in empathy in all its diverse forms.
Native Son is as powerful and timely as it was when Richard Wright first published it in 1940. Though it has aspects of tragedy and traffics in ruin and wreck, in the final analysis, it has as much in common with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as it does with ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.
The novel has not changed since 1940, but the world has – becoming both better and worse. To open up the reader’s historical empathy, a background report will be useful and is provided. This report also provides a chapter in African American history. The engagement with Native Son will be interspersed in this review with historical details that bring to life the power of the story in ways that might not be appreciated without a firm historical grounding. This is not a digression but of the essence, lest we forget how far we have come, and how far we still have to go to expand empathy and attain social justice.
The world has become better in that the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education (1954) that separate, segregated education in grammar and high schools is inherently
unequal. That is worth repeating: Separate but equal is inherently unequal. The world has become better in that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (1965/1965) were passed by a super majority of Congress. These outlawed segregation by law, also called “Jim Crow”; these enabled county and congressional districts in the South (or anywhere) with majority black populations to register to vote and elect black sheriffs and local officials. Why could they not do so previously? There were discriminatory poll taxes, which the impoverished people could not afford to pay; there were written tests (including trick questions) which people who lacked reading skills or merely had a grammar school education were unable to pass; there were other bureaucratic obstacles including the need to present state issued documents that were hard to obtain, putting the would-be voter in a double bind. One hastens to add that the struggle for social and political justice continues, with the US Supreme Court (2023) requiring Alabama and Georgia to redraw their gerrymandered congressional districts to allow for majority black districts. Under backward steps, the so-called “war on drugs” – espoused by Nancy Reagan and implemented by the Clinton administration, resulted in the incarceration (still ongoing) of a generation of young black men for relatively victimless crimes involving using crack cocaine.
Meanwhile, schools of all kinds continue to be under stress because of mass casualty gun violence. Teaching is a tough job, especially elementary and middle schools and it has gotten tougher; the bureaucratic requirements to present politically correct curriculum has pushed out fundamental skills of critical thinking along with skills such as the three R-s – reading, writing and (a)rithmetic. These have been replaced by the need for librarians and administrators to act in the role of surveillance state capitalism (see Zuboff 2018), overseeing whether some text refers to “gay,” “trans,” the name of a sex organ, and so on, and that someone – especially a parent – might be made to feel uncomfortable. To be sure, parents and educators need to be sensitive to the stages of child development and present material that fits the stage at which the growing child is maturing.
While Jim Crow is a historical reference and black empowerment is advancing, at times haltingly, the number of unarmed black people who end up dead after encounters with the local police has astonished everyone – everyone except black people who have known all about it all along. Today the number of black CEOs of major corporations is some 5.9 % out of an overall black population of 13.6% (US Census). That is progress since 1940 when Wright’s work was published, at which time the percentage was essentially zero. Johnson Publications, the publisher of Ebony magazine (among others), would not be founded until 1942. Yet a case can be made that, though many of the social and legal details are different, the need for struggle and protest is as powerful today as it was in 1940. We are not living in a post racial society, notwithstanding fact of having had a black president. All this and more may usefully inform our reading of Native Son.
Now to the narrative. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas (henceforth referred to as “BT”), completes the 8thgrade. He is too poor to continue school, nor is he motivated to do so. He experiences segregation and prejudice wherever he turns, as indeed do all black people. BT says, “Hell, it’s a Jim Crow army. All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the navy, all I can do is wash dishes and scrub floors” (1940: 353). BT is not allowed to become a pilot or a tank driver or a professional. “I wanted to be an aviator once. But they wouldn’t let me go to the school where I was suppose’ to learn it. They built a big school and then drew a line around it and said that nobody could go to it but those who lived within the line. That kept all the colored boys out” (1940: 353). It is true there were a few exceptions – some black people go to college and become doctors, lawyers, or engineers, though how they pulled that off is not for the faint of heart.
However, basically, the form of life under segregation (Jim Crow) does not just lack possibility – the possibility of possibility itself is missing. Possibility is not even defined. What does that mean? For example, as soon as Barak Obama was elected US President, the media went to middle schools and interviewed black ten-year-old children about what they wanted to be when they grew up. They immediately knew they wanted to be President. Now this little different than wanting to be a cowboy or a fireman or a doctor, a child’s fantasy. The point is that prior to Obama’s election the possibility could not even be imagined by black children, excepting perhaps some weird science fiction scenario. That is what is meant by the possibility of possibility. BT lacks the possibility of possibility.
What happens in the narrative after BT serendipitously gets a “good job” as a chauffeur with a wealthy white family, shows that BT still does not “get” – understand or experience – the possibility of possibility. BT is so constantly in survival mode that, in trying to survive, he does the very thing that causes his tragic undoing. It is a well-known stereotype that whenever a black man is lynched or otherwise “taken down” socially, he is initially accused of assaulting or trying sexually to molest a white woman.
Who Is BT as a person and as a possibility at the start of the story? He is bully and a petty criminal. Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X, was eleven years old when Wright began working on Native Son in 1936. Both BT and Malcolm, each in their own way, started out as petty criminals. Malcolm was arrested and went to prison. Malcom was the only person I ever heard of who said that prison made him better – indeed saved his life – because he met a follower of a version of strict Islam that enabled him to turn his life around, channeling his intelligence and leadership skills into black empowerment (though, ultimately, it also eventually led to his undoing in a tragedy of betrayal).
Meanwhile, in Native Son, Mary Dalton is the young adult daughter of the wealthy Henry Dalton, who has given some $5 million dollars to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) while continuing to operate inner city slums overcrowded with blacks who are unable to rent or buy in other neighborhoods due to red lining and restrictive covenants (contracts) that prevent selling to black people. Moral ambiguities and flat-out hypocrisy are front and center. Henry’s wife is blind – she cannot see – and walks about the mansion dressed in white like a ghost. Everyone else in the novel – black and white – can see well enough – are visually unimpaired – but have blind-spots and unconscious biases sufficient to sink the Titanic. They do. Full speed ahead into the field of ice bergs!
Mary is an undergraduate at the local university near their mansion on Drexel Blvd. As a part of her late adolescent rebellion, she goes for the kind of boyfriends most calculated to shock her parents. She likes those “bad boys.” In this case, that would be the left wing radical and card carrying communist, Jan. On background, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti – Sacco and Vanzetti – were executed in the electric chair in 1927 for being anarchists, amid anti-Italian and anti-immigrant hysteria, not for the robbery and murder of which they were convicted and did not commit.
Wright was authoring at a time (circa 1936) when the Great Depression was still very much an economic reality. The Mayor was a machine boss, who would respond to crime waves by rounding up Communists and Negros. The Governor would call out the National Guard to put down workers who tried to form a union and go out on strike. The blacklisting of workers, both white and black (but mostly white because the blacks did not have jobs), who attempted to form unions was common, which meant they could not find work. Corporations stockpiled tear gas, vomit gas, ammunition and machine guns for armed strike breakers to use against railroad, steel, and manufacturing workers who dared to go out on strike. The National Labor Relations Board was not even validated by the US Supreme Court until 1937 in NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, 301 U.S. 1 (1937). The forty-hour work week did not become law until the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first enacted in 1938 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This was a different world from 2023 and being a “Communist” meant something different than it does today, when, in the wake of the success of the trade union movement, much of what the original movement sought to accomplish (such as the 40 hour work week, sick leave, paid overtime, etc.) is part of standard legal labor law practice, rendering The Party irrelevant. Nevertheless, Mary and her boyfriend, Jan, a committed Communist, saw a common cause between the oppressed workers and the oppressed black people, and in this they were accurate enough, but naïve and idealistic, even utopian, in what it was going to take to make a difference.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions – and fake empathy. The privileged daughter, Mary, of the wealthy real estate tycoon (Mr Dalton), wants something from her new chauffeur. Remember, BT has just got a new, good paying job as the chauffeur. Mary wants him (BT) to ignore orders from her father, BT’s employer, and drive her around town with her boyfriend instead of to the University. Mary uses him (BT) as she would any extension of her own self-interest. For Mary, BT is an extension of her narcissism. BT later reports on his first encounter with Mary:
“She acted and talked in a way that made me [BT] hate her [Mary]. She made me feel like a dog. I was so mad I wanted to cry [. . . .] Mr Max, we’re all split up. What you say is kind ain’t kind at all. I didn’t know nothing about that woman. All I knew was that they kill us for women like that. We live apart. And then she comes and acts like that to me” (1940: 35).
The “acted like that” is the fake empathy – it seems kind enough on the surface in that the language does not have any devaluing words; yet there is a subtext – a soft violence, a quiet aggression, a conversational implicature that wrappers the relationship in BT’s subordination. “Acted like that” may also have a seductive aspect to it in that “being nice” in a situation where “no contact” is the norm may easily be misinterpreted as romantic flirting. The latter is not explicit in the text, but one thing is clear: BT and Mary Dalton really are the moth and the flame. Naivete and innocence are abundant on all sides. The moth has an automatic, hypnotic-like attraction to the flame. Little does the moth know what awaits. Does the flame have empathy for the moth? No, the flame is just the flame, towards which the moth has a luminously-based incentive that is its incineration. On background, the US Supreme Court finally ruled in Loving v Virginia in 1967 that anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks (among others), were unconstitutional.
BT has survived on the street among white people by saying “Yessum; it’s all right with me” (1940: 64) and doing as he is told, and (in effect) justifying it by saying he was following orders. Recall, this is 1938 and that statement will come to have a different meaning in 1963 as Hannah Arendt reports for The New Yorker magazine on the trial of one Adolph Eichmann, who said something similar regarding the Holocaust. “I was just following orders.” There is nothing wrong with a chauffeur following orders, yet, in this case, “following orders” from Mary because she is white is an integrity outage in relation to his employment agreement with Mr Dalton to drive Mary to school. BT’s relationship to his word is as “fast and loose” as a rabbit randomly zig-zagging to try to survive by escaping a predatory fox.
Mary tells him “After all, I’m on your side” (1940: 64), and BT was not even aware of the possibility that changing side was imaginable – that there was a gate in the wall between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, employed and unemployed – mostly white and black. BT is getting $25 dollars a week and a pound of pork chops costs 5 cents ($.05), so that is a good wage. BT is in touch with his own self-interest, which is to keep his job so he can help himself and his mother and siblings. Yet something is off:
“Now, what did that mean? She was on his side. What side was he on? Did she mean that she liked colored people? Well, he [BT] had heard that about her whole family. Was she really crazy? How much did her folks know of how she acted? But if she were really crazy, why did Mr Dalton let him drive her out? [….]
“She was an odd girl, all right. He [BT] felt something in her over and above the fear she inspired in him. She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she. And he had never felt that before in a white person. But why? Was this some kind of a game? The guarded feeling of freedom he had while listening to her was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do” (1940: 64, 65).
If someone tells you something that is too good to be true, it probably is. The ancient Greeks besieging Troy give up, sail off, and leave behind a giant horse as a gift to the gods. Casandra throws a spear at it, and it makes a hollow sound – thwomp! “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!” No one believes her. Things do not work out well for the Trojans. “After all, I’m on your side.” The blind Mrs Dalton, walking around the mansion in her ghostly white gown, is the ineffective prophet, representing the blindness of all the players.
“Fake empathy” is defined here as a form of empathic responsiveness in which the person(s) claiming to be empathic towards the Other believe their own BS (bunkum, baloney, balderdash), endorse their own malarky, and, in effect, are sincerely self-deceived about the conflict of interest in which they are engaged. In another context, “fake empathy” could mean being intentionally deceptive as when a used car salesman knows the auto is defective but represents it as being in excellent shape. In most cases, the problematic sales person believes his or her own lies and could pass a lie detector test, which, of course, does not detect lies, but merely physiological arousal due to the stress of trying to deceive.
Mary wants BT to hide the facts from her father (that she is not gong to night school but out on the town with her “bad boy” community friend Jan). This puts BT at risk of losing his job. Mary acts in such a way as to claim to be on BT’s side, which is accurate enough in that she endorses racial integration and rights for workers, while seemingly remaining uninformed about the monopoly rents collected from black people by her father’s South Side Real Estate Corporation. Yet how could she not know? Another blind spot. More deception and self-deception.
If a further example is needed, Mary’s fake empathy continues as an expression of naivete and projection:
“You know, Bigger [BT], I’ve long wanted to go into these houses,” she said, pointing to the tall, dark apartment buildings looming to either side of them, “and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro house. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human . . . . There are twelve million of them . . . ” (1940: 69–70; italics and ellipsis in the original)
In so far as Mary genuinely cares about her black neighbors, this is a first step, born of good, caring intentions. However, Mary’s privilege, naivete, and arrogance (this list is not complete) are obstacles to her empathy. Her empathy misfires as projection. Mary speaks to BT in the third person about the group of which he himself is a part. The condescension is so thick that BT’s street knife would not cut through it had he even thought to try. Mary says, “Yet they [black people] must live like we live,” and that is definitely not the case. BT lives with his mother and two younger siblings in a single room. The opening scene of the novel involves a battle with a large rat in the small single room. Thus, the building is rat infested. Mary lives in a mansion with multiple servants, including BT. Mary tries to take a walk in BT’s shoes, shifting points of view, but it does not work. She is unable to take off her own shoes, so to speak – she can only imagine a glamorous life of travel – and her empathic imagination is insufficient to have a vicarious experience of the grinding, dehumanizing, poverty of her black neighbors, which poverty lives in her blind spot.
In contrast to fake empathy, a rigorous and critical empathy examines its own blind spots, projections, and conflicts of interests. It knows that it can be inaccurate or misfire. By cleaning up its conflicts of interests, projections, emotional contagions, and/or messages lost in translation, empathy becomes critical and rigorous. Unfortunately, Mary does not live to have the opportunity to work through her fake empathy to a rigorous and critical one, and BT experiences this dawning realization as he awaits execution for killing her.
The reader may say, I want instant empathy. Like instant coffee, just add water and stir. Wouldn’t it be nice? Nor is anyone saying such a thing as “instant empathy” is impossible. It may work well enough in a pinch; but like instant coffee, the quality may not be on a par with that required by a more demanding or discriminating appreciation and taste.
Jan’s case is similar to Mary’s though more nuanced. Jan wants something from BT as does Mary, but Jan’s agenda is less individual and, as befits a Communist, guided by an analysis of class. Yet he is equally naïve and utopian. Driving along Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, which offers a panoramic view of the tall buildings in the central city from the South Side, Jan remarks:
“We’ll own all that some day, Bigger,” Jan said with a wave of his hand. “After the revolution it’ll be ours. But we’ll have to fight for it. What a world to win, Bigger! And when that day comes, things’ll be different. There’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor” (1940: 68).
Jan’s innocence can be measured in that he is not even a very good Communist – his economic analysis is badly flawed. Jan talks as if the Communist revolution will change ownership from the capitalist to the communists whereas any Communist will tell you that the revolution will bring about the abolition of private property. Yet even if he is not a good Communist, Jan is a good human being. His righteous indignation is functioning. Learning that BT’s father was killed in a riot (read “massacre”) targeting black people in the South, Jan says to BT:
“Listen, Bigger, that’s what we want to stop. That’s what we Communists are fighting. We want to stop people from treating others that way. I’m a member of the Party. Mary sympathizes. Don’t you think if we got together we could stop things like that?” [….] You’ve heard about the Scottsboro boys?” (1940: 75; quotations and italics in the original)
On back ground, in 1931 eight black young adults and one juvenile, The Scottsboro Boys, were falsely accused of raping two women. After examination by a medical doctor, no evidence of rape was found. None. The testimony of the women themselves was coerced in that they were involved in sketchy activities that might have opened them up to criminal charges. The young men were tried by an all-white male jury for rape and sentenced to death for it (except for the juvenile, who was sentenced to life in prison). The NAACP and the Communist Party provided legal assistance to the young men and stopped the State from executing them; but they had to endure long and unjust years in prison. The novel calls out the newspaper headline in bold type in referring to BT:
“AUTHORITIES HINT SEX CRIME. Those words excluded him [BT] utterly from the world. To hint that he had committed a sex crime was to pronounce the death sentence; it meant wiping out of his life even before he was capture; it meant death before death came, for the white men who read those words would at once kill him in their hearts” (1940: 243).
BT’s life unfolds in three phases. Phase 1 lasts until, BT puts a pillow over the face of an intoxicated Mary Dalston, in trying to keep Mary from crying out and giving away that he (a black man) is alone with a white woman, even more “incriminating,” in her bedroom. At best he will lose his job – before being lynched for “rape.” The latter is here defined as the white man’s projected fantasy of the black man’s sexual attraction to and on the part of the white woman, which fantasy must be eliminated by lynching the innocent black man. (See the appendix on the varieties of prejudice below.)
What actually happens when BT is left alone with Mary Dalton, who is completely drunk? Mary is sloppy drunk, and can barely stand. BT tries to help her to her bedroom – by supporting her up the stairs. Practically, he has to carry her. Mary’s blind mother, Mrs Dalton, an insomniac, is wandering about the mansion like a ghost. The reader can see trouble coming – suppose they are discovered together in the dark in or near the bedroom? BT tries to explain to his girlfriend Betsy what happened:
“I didn’t mean to kill her. I just pulled the pillow over her face and she died. Her ma came into the room and the girl was trying to say something and her ma had her hands stretched out, like this, see? [The mother, Mrs Dalton, is blind and could not see BT.] I was scared she was goin’ to touch me. I just sort of pushed the pillow hard over the girl’s face to keep her from yelling. He ma didn’t touch me; I got out of the way. But when she left I went to the bed and the girl … She … She was dead” (1940: 227; italics in the original).
This decisive event happens early on in the story. The reader can see it coming. Mary is drunk. BT is uncertain what to do. Mr Dalton did not clarify to the new chauffeur (who is an extension of the auto) that the “boss” is Mr Dalton, who seems to have a blind spot about his angelic daughter’s rebellious streak. The unconscious fantasy, the unconscious bias, is that a black man alone with a white woman, much less an intoxicated one, is the equivalent of statutory rape. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense move the action forward. Every action that BT takes to avoid the false accusation advances the action in the direction of an even more tragic outcome. BT ends up smothering Mary in order to avoid being discovered with her and being falsely accused of rape (which, of course, will get one lynched). In BT’s conversation with his attorney, Mr Max, BT muses:
“They would say he had raped her and there would be no way to prove that he had not. That fact had not assumed important in his eyes until now. He stood up, his jaws tightening. Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her [but, of course, not literally]. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a well and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape very time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too was rape.” (1940: 227 – 228)
BT’s lawyer (Mr Max) tells the judge at BT’s trial:
“…[T]hat night a white girl was present in a bed and a Negro was standing over he, fascinated with fear, hating her; a blind woman walked into the room and that Negro [BT] killed that girl to keep from being discovered in a position which he knew we claimed warrants the death penalty” (1940: 400).
The being present together in the bedroom of the black chauffeur and the drunken white college age daughter is in 1940 already a capital crime for all intents and purposes. Here” rape” becomes a cipher for all the boundary violations perpetrated by survivors of perpetrations of survivors of perpetrations, and so on, in a seemingly endless cycle back to the Atlantic slave trade (which does not come up in the novel). Two wrongs do not make a right, and yet it is BT’s ownership of the crime that gives him agency, even if that agency is mutilated by the crime that calls it forth.
In Phase 2, BT lives into the devaluing expectations that white people have of him – he becomes a kind of Frankenstein – not just a monster but one created by white society, which monster seeks to strike back for the perceived injustice but goes about it in all the wrong ways that indirectly validate the stereotypes that live in white fantasy. James Baldwin has criticized Wright for writing a protest novel in which black people are depicted as dangerous – sexually and aggressively – in a way that maps to white racist stereotypes. And there is truth to it, yet at every step, Wright’s exaggerated “black badness” calls forth the unexaggerated social and legal injustices of discrimination in the North and Jim Crow in the South. Once again, two wrongs do not make a right. Two wrong make a bad situation worse – and at least twice the wrong. Let he who is without guilt cast the first stone; and, in this case, shame does not stop the stones from flying. Once the stones start flying, no one is spared. Wright makes it clear that BT is caught in the double bind of his own untutored judgment and the incoming pervasive slow violence (and fast aggression) of white society’s segregationist limitations.
In Phase 2, BT descends into hell in a particular sense. It is a kind of mutilated journey of the hero (think of Joseph Campbell’s mythologizing (1990)) on the way to a rebirth of agency, however, with one key difference. BT had not yet been born as a responsible agent, so, instead of “rebirth,” it would be better to say “birth,” born for the first time ever. The definition of hell includes an abundance of pain and suffering, to be sure, but the real hell is that no one hears it – not even God. This is BT’s description:
“[…[T]here were screams and curses and yells of suffering and nobody hears them, for the walls were thick and darkness was everywhere” (1940: 361).
This is BT’s experience of hell as he is locked up in Cook County Jail awaiting his fate. There is no evidence that Wright ever read Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus(or vice versa) or Mephistopheles’ description of hell contained in it. Wright was writing just as World War 2 was starting; Mann, perennially and a few years afterwards as Europe was a smoking ruin that still stank of the crematoriums of the Nazi concentration camps. Note well the above-cited quote is Wright not Mann, and it was written seven years before Mann penned his own description of hell. In a fine literary gesture, in {Mann’s) Mephistopheles’ description of Hell, words are used indirectly to describe the indescribable. In Hell –
“Every compassion, every grace, every sparing, every last trace of consideration for the incredulous, imploring objection ‘that you verily cannot do so unto a soul’: it is done, it happens, and indeed without being called to any reckoning in words; in soundless cellar, far down beneath God’s listening […]” (Mann 1947: 245).
The key aspect of hell – what makes a hell into Hell – is not the fire and ice – though, to be sure, that is not to be dismissed – but the hellish thing is that no one is listening, not even God, especially not God. BT’s fate indeed, though a spark of what might be called radical hope (Lear 2008) emerges when BT meets Mr Max. Mr Max is a “Clarence Darrow for the defense” type lawyer, who is retained for BT by the Communist Party. They are trying to find a common cause between exploited works and the black victims and survivors of racial prejudice, poverty, and social injustice.
In phase three, BT discovers his agency in taking ownership of the quasi-accidental killing of Mary. But this is a very qualified (re)birth in that agency is shot through-and-through with moral trauma. BT is asked to make a choice he should not have to make; that, strictly speaking, he cannot make; and that, in any case, he inevitably makes whether he takes action or not, since doing nothing is also an action. BT enters Mary’s room as a survivor of systematic racism and Jim Crow. He tries to survive the encounter with Mary’s blind mother. He takes an action to prevent being discovered alone with a drunken white woman, and in doing so he unwittingly smothers her with a pillow to prevent her from talking drunken nonsense. BT enters the room a survivor, and leaves it as a perpetrator. That is moral trauma (also called moral injury” (Shay 2014)).
In phase three, BT becomes a kind of Frankenstein and chooses the dark side (in the Star War’s sense – already the language is impossible). Recall that in the original Mary Shelley story, Victor Frankenstein rejects the creature that he assembled out of spare body parts and animated using electricity (electricity being a not-well-understood phenomenon at the time (1808) to which quasi-magical powers were attributed). Dr Frankenstein’s creature is lonely and wants a mate, in effect, a girl friend; but the “mad scientist” cannot countenance creating another such physically hideous creature, thereby, giving birth to an entire race of miscreants. At that point the creature has a kind of Richard III moment – “since I cannot prove a lover / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain / and hate [. . . ]” Though it changes the meaning of the sentence to stop it mid-phrase, “hate” is the active ingredient here. He becomes a monster, exacting his revenges by murdering members of Victor Frankenstein’s family. Likewise with BT.
Though all the details are different, BT’s fate follows a parallel trajectory at this point with hatred simultaneously providing the dehumanizing and humanizing element. Hate is also the principle that animates BT’s emergence into agency, albeit a mutilated one, since it occurs on death row.
Until BT committed the first murder, he was little different than the biblical Cain before he slew Abel. Human history begins at the point at which that murder, born of envy, occurs. The murder creates agency. Likewise with BT:
But, after he murdered, he [BT] accepted the crime. And that’s the important thing. It was the first full act of his life; it was the most meaningful, exciting and stirring thing that had ever happened to him. He accepted it because it made him free, gave him the possibility of choice, of action, the opportunity to act and to feel that his actions carried weight [. . . .] It was an act of creation! (1940: 396, 400)
In the beginning was the word – murder. Murder results in one thing for sure – more murder. “The surest way to make certain that there will be more such murders is to kill this boy [BT]” (1940: 391).
Now one may well say, there’s gotta be a better way to get one’s agency, and that would be an accurate statement.
An argument can be made that Mr. Max’s rejection of sympathy in favor of empathy serves the reader well. But does it serve BT well? In terms of saving BT’s life, it would be better to question his agency, to make a play for sympathy, and to point to poverty, cognitive limitations, and a limited IQ. Insult BT, but save his life? Max asks:
“Is love possible to the life of a man I’ve described to this Court?” (1940: 401)
The ability to love, to experience empathy for an Other, has been negated, annulled, killed, by the systematic racism of the entire community – this is soul murder. The short definition of soul murder (a distinction arguably implicit in Wright) is that it is the systematic lack of empathy that destroys the possibility of love, that destroys the very possibility of possibility.
Max’s Jeremiad raises the text to the level of an early articulation of the key theses of the 1619 project (see Hannah-Jones 2019). Max argues to the court that BT is in so many double binds, that his agency is compromised, his empathy is mutilated, by soul murder. (For a sustained treatment of soul murder see Shengold 1989.)
“But in conquering they [the early American settlers] used others, used their lives. Like a miner using a pick or a carpenter using a saw, they bent the will of others to their own. Lives to them were tools and weapons to be wielded against a hostile land and climate.”
Given that BT was convicted by an all-white jury and the Governor, to whom an appeal for clemency was to be made, was a known racist, one might say Max was like Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry undertaking a full frontal assault on the Confederate Fort Wagner – it was a massacre:
“I do not say this in terms of moral condemnation. I do not say it to rouse pity in your for the black men who were slaves for two and one-half centuries [. . . .] It was the imperial dream of a feudal age that made men enslave others” (1940: 389)
Once again, Mr Max eloquently anticipates the 1619 project (Hannah-Jones 2019):
“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country [….] Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life [….] What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst” (1940: 391).
“Men once oppressed our forefathers to the extent that they viewed other men as material out of which to build a nation; we in turn have oppressed others to such a degree that they, fumblingly as yet, try to construct meaningful lives out of us!” (1940: 398).
“The hate and fear which we have inspired in him [BT], woven by our civilization into the very structure of his consciousness, into his blood and bones, into the hourly functioning of his personality, have become the justification of his existence” (1940: 400).
This is again an early version and invocation of the ideas that would become the 1619 project. One result of systematic oppression, not just the loss of possibility, but the loss of the possibility of possibility. If one cannot get a job, then that is the loss of possibility; but if one needs and cannot get a work permit, then that is the loss of the possibility of possibility.
Max does not ask for sympathy for BT. Sympathy results in guilt, and people hate those who make them feel guilty, enacting aggression against them. Max asks for empathy, without, however, using the word, which, if granted, would result in community, in belonging, in relatedness. As Dostoyevsky pointed out, people will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 390) and sympathy does precisely that. Max address the court:
“If I should say that he [BT] is a victim of injustice, then I would be asking by implication for sympathy; and if one insists upon looking at this boy as a victim of injustice, he will be swamped by a feeling of guilt so strong as to be indistinguishable from hate.”
[Max continues] “Of all things, men to not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them feel guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but failing that […] they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt (1940: 389–390)
BT’s act of murder becomes a cause célèbre in the narrative. The NAACP and the Communist Party get BT a powerful attorney, Mr Max, who resembles the historical Clarence Darrow, taking on unpopular causes.
On background, the reader recognizes historical aspects of the Leopold/Loeb (1924) trial in which two wealthy, privileged University of Chicago students engage in a “thrill killing” of 14-year-old Bobby Franks for no good reason other than the killing itself. The perpetrators had near-delusional fantasies of über-man cognitive superiority and committing the perfect crime. Things do not go well. Leopold drops his reading glasses at the location where the victim’s body is dumped, connecting him to the crime scene. The dumbest mistake possible – and just possibly a “Freudian” slip. So much for cognitive superiority. Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, engages in a 12-hour presentation at the sentencing hearing, in which, with a penetrating critique of capital punishment, Darrow successfully saves the 18- and 19-year-old murderers from the death penalty (Stone 1971). Darrow’s arguments are still used to today to defend teenage offenders. On background, Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936. Leopold was paroled in 1958.
Less well known is the case of Robert Nixon, who in May 1938 was arrested for murdering a woman with a brick in the course of robbing her apartment (1940: 504; 455 line 17). Nixon was poor and black – was not defended by Clarence Darrow, and was executed in August 1939.
Mr Max talks to BT like a Mensch, like a fellow human being, asking about what he (BT) thought had happened. Max asks a lot of questions, trying to get a sense of what BT had to survive and what motivated him to do what he did.
“Bigger [BT] knew that Max was trying to make him feel that he accepted the way he looked at things and it made him as self-conscious as when Jan had taken his hand and shaken it that night in the car. It made him live again in that hard and sharp consciousness of his color and feel the shame and fear that went with it, and at the same time it made him hate himself for feeling it. He trusted Max” (1940: 346–347)
BT gets in touch with his feelings. Max asks him if he raped Mary. The answer:
“Naw. But everybody’ll say I did. What’s the use? I’m black. They say black men do that. So it don’t matter if I did or if I didn’t” [ . . . .] Mr Max, when folks says things like that about you, you whipped before you born. What’s the use? Yeah; I reckon I was feeling that way [hating Mary] when I was in the room with her. They say we do things like that and they say it to kill us. They draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line. They don’t care if there’s no bread over on your side. They don’t care if you die. And they say things like that about you and when you try to come from behind your line they kill you” (1940: 349, 351).
BT is coming from a life of no possibility – no personal space, no (limited) education, no career, no respect from the community, no self-respect – and living into an imminent future of capital punishment, the electric chair: “Over and over he [BT] had tried to create a world to live in, and over and over he had failed” (1940: 345).
“He [BT] breathed softly, wondering about the cool breath of peace that hovered in his body. It was as though he was trying to listen to the beat of his own heart. All around him was darkness and there were no sounds. He could not remember when he had felt as relaxed as this before. He has not thought of it or felt it while Max was speaking to him; it was not until after Max had gone that he discovered that he had spoken to Max as he had never spoken to anyone in his life; not even to himself. And this talking had eased from his shoulders a heavy burden. [….] Max had not compelled him to talk; he had talked of his own accord […] by a curiosity about his own feelings. Max had only sat and listened, had only asked questions” (1940: 359 – 360).
Max gives BT a good listening – gives him empathy – and BT feels “better” – the “heavy burden” is lifted from his shoulders.. His hatred gets dialed down, though not completely extinguished. His inner conflict and hatred are lessened, even as he knows he is not going to get out alive from his self-made predicament:
Max validates BT’s perspective of “no possibility” in a description that also validates how whites are also entangled in systematic racism that lives in unconscious bias, albeit with less harmful effects on whites than blacks:
“And I know that almost every white face you’ve met in your life had it in for you, even when that white face didn’t know it. Every white man considered it his duty to make a black man keep his distance. He doesn’t know why most of the time, but he acts that way” (1940: 346).
In acknowledging how hopeless is the situation, something shifts in BT.
So far BT gets empathic receptivity – another person, Max, is able to take his point of view and have a vicarious experience of how he (BT) feels. In conversation with Max, BT comes to appreciate a new possibility – an empathic possibility. The Other – in this case Max – brings forth the BT’s own humanness, mutilated though it is, by taking the Other’s perspective.
“He [BT] stood up in the middle of the cell floor and tried to see himself in relation to other men, and thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him. With this new sense of the value of himself gained from Max’s talk, a sense fleeting and obscure, he tried to feel that if Max had been able to see the man in him beneath those wild and cruel acts of his, acts of fear and hate and murder and flight and despair, then he too would have, if he were they, just as now he was hating them and they were hating him. For the first time in his life he felt ground beneath his feet [. . .]” (1940: 361).
BT experiences the emerging ability to “see himself in relation to other men [persons].” Being related to others requires the distinction “self-Other,” open up the possibility of the Other taking a point of view on oneself. This is what Max did for BT in seeing “the man in him [BT] beneath those wild and cruel acts of fear and hate.” If Max can be related to BT, it demonstrates to BT that he can do that for himself and for and with Others, too.
“If he [BT] reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through those stone walls and felt other hands connected with other heart – if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? Not that he wanted those hearts to turn their warmth to him; he was not wanting that much. But just to know that they were there and warm! [. . . .] And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity’ there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all this life” (1940: 362).
What makes the hands come alive in this image of electrical connection and the shock of the human is precisely “the response of recognition,” which brings strength, energy, and vitality to the human heart. This is the empathic moment for BT, which, however, arrives late in the day as he awaits almost certain execution for his crimes.
Thus, the accusation of early critics (and James Baldwin) against Wright of didacticism and protest literature. Perhaps in our own time, but before the racist jury, judge, mayor, and governor, Max makes the best of a bad situation. The result?
BT gets his vitality and aliveness from the Other, in this case Max. Max is able to “see the man in him” and BT, in turn, is able to see that Max sees the man in him (BT), and that grounds him (BT). The Other brings forth empathy for the one, who, in this example, is trying to see himself in relation to other men. A new possibility opens up – the possibility of possibility – relatedness, connectedness – empathy.
Appendix: A Short “Ted Talk” on the Varieties of Prejudice
One may say, prejudice is prejudice and all prejudices are alike, and there would be truth to saying that. Yet when one looks at the dynamics of prejudice, one cannot simply substitute the underlying dynamics of racism against black people for antisemitism or sexism or for homophobia. A short “Ted Talk” on prejudice will again inform our historical empathy.
The fantasy of black hyper masculinity is repressed as a source of anxiety challenging the white male’s (imagined) inadequate sexual potency. It then gets reversed and projected onto the devalued other, who comes at the white man as white woman’s desire for the stereotyped hyper sexed black man. Elisabeth Young-Breuhl (1996: 367) writes in The Anatomy of Prejudices:
The white male’s mythological contractions of black male sexuality – the images of Negro phallic power, animal lust, and rapaciousness – signal the jealousy and resentment over the black’s defilement pleasure, and they also reflect the white male’s anxiety that white women really desire the black’s aggressive sexuality.
In contrast to the hysterical fantasy of the over-dramatized black male, the Jewish person is made the target of an obsessional paranoid over-intellectualization – the totally fictional worldwide conspiracy of the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Lies, damn lies, and total nonsense. The nonsense continues: In the case of homophobia, one stays with the dynamic of difference for one has to project that, in a certain sense, the boy finds other boys attractive, in that special sexual way, and must defend against being a “fag” by perpetrating acts of aggression. Nor should the sexism and misogyny be overlooked, for BT kills two women – Mary and Bessie – in the one case quasi-accidently and in the other in a cowardly fear of betrayal. In the case of the prejudices of racism (in the narrow sense against blacks) and antisemitism the devalued, despised Other becomes the target of projections one of own inner black and jew in every imaginable positive and negative sense. The differences collapse – inwardly I am the despised Other and get rid of the negative value by externalizing it. In sexism, the dynamic changes, and the anatomical difference between the sexes is such that the difference is impossible to deny, so the Other must be denied, deleted, “killed,” in order to reestablish integrity of the self. In the prejudices stereotype, the Other – the woman in this case – is hated for being inferior cognitively, physically, and so, even as the male harbors an unconscious fantasy of superiority, the power to create life, womb envy.
References
Joseph Campbell. (1990). The Hero’s Journey. Novato, CA: The New World Library.
Nicole Hannah-Jones. (2019). The 1619 Project. New York: One World (NYT Magazine).
Jonathan Lear. (2008). Radical Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Thomas Mann. (1947). Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Tr. H.T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Leonard Shengold. (1989). Soul Murder Revisited: Thoughts About Therapy, Hate, Love, and Memory. Hartford: Yale University Press.
Irving Stone (1971). Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Signet.
Richard Wright. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper Perenniel, 1998.
Elisabeth Young-Breuhl. (1996). The Anatomy of Prejudices. Harvard UP
Shoshona Zuboff. (2018). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile Books.
Photo image credit: Canada Lee as Bigger Thomas in the original Broadway production of Native Son (1941), photographed by Carl Van Vechten.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Empathy is hard in the patriarchy
So far, the two-ton elephant in the room is “Maybe men and women really do have different brains – or a combination of brains and early experiences that produce different results from the same input.” Note this applies either in or outside a patriarchal context, though the action items diverge depending on which. Note also that if their neurological givens are not divergent, then the variable of the biooegicay given falls out of the equation, though that does not eliminate the variables of experiences of exploitation and privilege. In short, the evidence of gender research is compelling masterpiece of studied ambiguity.
One researcher who has proposed that men’s and women’s brains are different – nurturing versus systematicity – is Simon Baron-Cohen (2003). As relating to empathy, a fine debunking of Baron-Cohen is provided by Robyn Blum (2017) in her article “Gender and Empathy” (2017).[1]
Common sense suggests that woman is the more nurturing gender, given her role in giving birth and keeping the home fires burning in agricultural, hunting, and traditional indigenous cultures as the men are out hunting food and systematically doing battle with saber-toothed tigers and hostile neighbors. [2] As noted, Simone de Beauvoir asserted, biology is not destiny. Woman is not a mere womb; man is not mere testosterone. Robyn Bluhm’s article probes the research on the evidential basis of this nurturing role and inquires: does it extend to empathy and how far?
Early gender-empathy studies were vulnerable to self-report biases and gender stereotyping that pervasively depicted females in a biased way as the more empathic gender, according to Bluhm. These early studies simply do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Enter Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) and his innovative research, renewing the debate about empathy as a mindedness module subtending empathy and shifting the debate in the direction of neural science as opposed to social roles and their self-fulfilling stereotypes.
Bluhm points out in detail that, as Baron-Cohen’s work gained exposure and traction in the academic market place of ideas, the presentation of his ideas, and the results reported shifted in small but significant ways. At first, Baron-Cohen highlighted measures that were supposed to assess both cognitive and affective empathy, but later the affective dimension fell out of the equation (and the research) and only cognitive empathy was engaged as the target of the research (Bluhm 2017: 381).
Though Baron-Cohen’s initial research described the “male brain” as having “spatial skills,” his later publications, once he became a celebrity academic (once again, my term, not Bluhm’s), redescribe the male brain as “hardwired for systematizing”; likewise, the “female-type” brain, initially credited with being better at “linguistic skills,” was redescribed as “hardwired for empathy.” The language shifts from being about “social skills,” and Baron-Cohen speaks of “empathy” rather than “social skills,” so that the two distinctions are virtually synonymous (Bluhm 2017: 384).
As the honest broker, Bluhm notes that, as with the early research in gender differences, Baron-Cohen’s research has been influential but controversial. Men and women have different routes to accessing and activating their empathy; they respond to different pressures to conform to (or push back against) what the community defines as conforming to gender-appropriate behavior; and men and women even have different incentives for empathic performance.
For example, “…[M]en’s scores on an empathy task equaled women’s when a monetary reward for good performance was offered” (Bluhm 2017: 384). Monetary rewards up; empathy up? Though Bluhm does not say so, the author came away with the distinct impression of a much needed debunking of the neurohype—what we would now call “alternative facts”—a job well done.
Bluhm’s work is especially pertinent in constraining celebrity, executive consultants (once again, my term), running with the neuro-spin, and publishing in the Harvard Business Review, who assert that brain science shows one needs more women executives on corporate boards to expand empathy.
I hasten to add that we do indeed need more women executives, but that is not something demonstrated by brain science, at least as of this date (Q1 2023). We need more women executives because it is demonstrated by statistics (just one of many sources of reasons other than brain science) that to devalue the contributions to innovation, service, and productivity of slightly more than half the population is a highly problematic business practice—foolish, inefficient, and wasteful. The challenge is that the practices that make one good at business—beating the competition, engaging technology problems, solving legal disputes—do not necessarily expand one’s empathy, regardless of gender.
In an expression of insightful and thunderous understatement, Bluhm concludes: “With the exception of studies that rely on participants’ self-reports or on other’s reports of their behavior [which are invalid for other reasons], no consistent gender difference in empathy have been observed. This raises the possibility that gender differences in empathy are in the eye of the beholder, and that the beholder is influenced by gender stereotypes…” (Bluhm 2017: 386). Just so.
Still, Blum does not address the feminist case from the perspective of radical empathy. Though the evidence is anecdotal, not systematic, one can easily imagine women, especially care-takers, laying down the challenge: “We have empathy. We practice empathy everyday in distinguishing the wet cry of an unchanged diaper from the hungry cry of growing infant. Let men bring their empathy game up a couple of levels to match our commitment.” Ultimately, standard empathic receptivity and understanding may be good enough, but where the gendered empathy breaks down is at the point of taking that walk in the Other’s shoes. Men don’t get pregnant, endure morning sickness, months of gestation, significant physical transformations, and give birth to new human beings. That is perhaps the defining paradigm of radical empathy or its breakdown between the sexes, and, as with any experience that one is unable ever to have, one is thrown back on the fictional resources of the imagination.
This is an important point about the call for radical empathy in any context. Radical empathy renews the commitment of standard empathy to be empathic with extreme situations, in the face of empathic distress, in the face of making decisions that no one should have to make, that no one has the right to make but that one makes anyway. Physical trauma, moral trauma, and soul murder are on the list of challenges to the imagination of the witness and the victim, the violator and the one violated, the perpetrator and the survivor, especially when they are the same person. This is not for the faint of heart. When the privileged and powerful call for radical empathy, they must lead by their example, be the change they want to see, not call for the powerless to be even more empathically vulnerable. The powerful must expand their empathy for the less powerful and advantaged, not the other way around. There is precedent for it, for example, as President Obama powerfully articulated the value of empathy for the marginalized and under-privileged, calling on the powerful and privileged to be more inclusive. Wouldn’t it be nice? This is easier said than done, but it must be both said and done! (See Blankenship 2019.)
Meanwhile, with a certain grim, black humor, Isadora Duncan compared childbirth to the “interrogation” of the Spanish Inquisition, and asserted that the latter was not as bad (cited in de Beauvoir 1949: 477). Hence, the “joke,” since Duncan had not been interrogated by the Inquisition whereas she was a mother. Karen Horney argued that men suffer from “womb envy” (Horney 1967). To envy something, one has to have a sense of what it is and what it could be and do for one, even though one does not have direct and original experience of it firsthand. That does not mean that one’s empathy is a failure, yet one’s empathy is definitely challenged.
The ultimate test of the applicability of radical empathy is as follows: one takes off one’s own shoes and tries on the Other’s. Of course, the Other’s do not fit exactly and they almost never will; but, working within the metaphor, one at least “gets” that it is a human foot and one can learn something about where it pinches or chafes the Other. In radical empathy, the shoe pinches so badly that one has to take it off, or, alternatively, one gets the sense that it is not even a human shoe. One has fins or webbed feet. Perhaps not a very radical example, yet one goes to shake hands, and the other person is an amputee. The radical and empathic “hand shake” consists in acknowledging the Other’s courage in the face of adversity. This is perhaps where one’s tongue gets even more teeth marks in it, yet this is the power of being with the other person – really being with the individual without anything else added – comes into its own.
The lesson that radical empathy is trying to teach one here is that part of the definition of being human is that humans have experiences that other humans never have exactly as the other humans have them, but that privileged access is not exclusive access and a vicarious experience is quite good enough to satisfy the requirements of getting started with empathy. To continue the practice of empathy then requires creating a space of acceptance and tolerance within which the speaker and listener can exchange experiences and attempt to translate experiences into terms comprehensible by the Other, even if imperfectly so.
In the case of childbirth, when men try to “take a walk in the Other’s shoes,” using the imaginative tools of empathic interpretation and fiction, the result is botched, if not butchered, as in the so-called “savage tradition” illustrated by Emil Zola’s La Terre (1887), discussed in detail two paragraphs below. One reaches for incomparable and incommensurable experiences. It is impossible for most people to walk on the moon, trek to the South Pole, or summit Mount Everest. Still, it seems problematic to put childbirth in the same sentence as having endured or survived the Holocaust, a totalitarian state torture chamber, diverse crimes and boundary violations involving the human body, living in a war zone, or apartheid in South Africa or Israel, and so on. Yet once pain reaches a certain threshold, the body in pain unmakes the person, and the person is overwhelmed and isolated, dehumanized (Scarry 1985). One could argue back the comparison mixes a generally common experience, giving birth, which determines significant aspects of the life of half the population, with rare and exceptional ones, extreme exploration or extreme violence. There is a hierarchy of “otherizing” experiences, with presumably the most extreme being the least normal and with childbirth being the most extreme common experience. Might the same thing might be said of an Other’s tooth ache, whose pain is isolating and de-normalizing? Well, no, not quite. The vicarious experience of pain is a basic feature of empathic receptivity, though the generalization of pain to childbirth is a limited part of the process of giving birth, albeit a salient one. Arguably childbirth is a remote, hard-to-describe experience, for which qualitatively adequate words and in the right quantity are hard to find, even for women who directly experience it by giving birth, though, to be sure, mothers have more data to work with as embodied enactors of the process.
Empathy is challenged by radical translation out of remote, hard-to-grasp experience to become radical empathy. Radical empathy is called forth by extreme situations in which radical translation is the bridge between self and Other. Radical empathy deploys the same four minimal essential aspects of standard empathy – receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. The differences from standard empathy map to these dimensions. The listener is aware that this trauma or tragedy is indeed a trauma or tragedy, but, for example, the listener is not on the Titanic, but watching the movie. (Key term: vicarious experience.) The empathic understanding of possibility is radicalized in the sense that possibilities of the experience of pain, suffering, or high spirits exist that the listener’s imagination cannot necessarily grasp in advance.
The debate continues. Notwithstanding the mixed evidence of biology, cultural studies, politics, consider the possibility: men of good will are open to and want to expand their empathy, standard or extreme, for women and their concerns and issues. Suppose men of good will come to their senses. They see the continuation of patriarchy as disgraceful, disadvantaging everyone, its various forms as a function of their own lack of leadership, and like F. W. de Klerk in South Africa in 1992, propose to do their best to “step down,” relinquishing power and privilege in its diverse forms, and in areas where they actually have such, starting, for example, with implementing the US Equal Rights Amendment and related initiatives?
How would one even know if empathy was expanded? The suggestion is that features such as dignity and respect would be expanded, boundaries would be acknowledged and respected. It is not that conflicts would not occur. Of course, conflicts, disagreements, and competition for limited resources would occur; but the disputes would be engaged and compromises reached using such empathic skills as committed active listening, critical thinking, putting oneself in the other’s shoes (after taking off one’s own), and acknowledging differences when they seem un-overcomeable.
Empathy research and reflections are constantly challenged by the protest: “You can’t possibly know what I am going through!” The repetition with which this protest is asserted leaves one suspicious that an intense skeptical demon and resistance to empathy lies behind such an assertion. Yet skepticism is an intellectually healthy skill that belongs in the tool chest of critical thinking. One method of both respecting a healthy skepticism and undercutting it (since infinitely iterated skepticism is a trap that is nearly impossible to refute) is to radicalize the skepticism. In effect, give the skeptic logical rope with which to hang himself. If one can, at the same time, put in its place, steps to expand the practice of a rigorous and critical empathy to dissolves honest misunderstandings, related fallacies, and idols of the academic marketplace, so much the better.
References
Lou Agosta. (2018). A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy. Chicago: Two Pears Press.
Simon Baron-Cohen. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books (MIT Press), 1997.
______________________. (2003). The Essential Difference: Males, Females, and the Truth about Autism. New York: Basic Books.
______________________. (2014). Zero degrees of empathy. RSA [Renaissance Society of America] Video Presentation: https://youtu.be/Aq_nCTGSfWE [checked on 2023-02-26]
Simone de Beauvoir. (1949). The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (tr.). New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
Lisa Blankenship. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Logan UT: Utah State University Press.
Robyn Blum. (2017). Gender and empathy. In (2017). The Routledge Handbook of the philosophy of Empathy. Heidi Maibom (ed.). London/New York: Routledge (Taylor and Francis).
[1] In addition to Blum’s article this Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Empathy (Blum (ed.) 2017) contains several excellent articles by Zahavi, Ickes, Robinson, Shoemaker, and Gallagher (some six out of twenty-seven). However, in other respects, the Handbook is so limited, constrained, and inadequate in its treatment of empathy that in order charitably to review it, I decided to write an entire book (Agosta, (2018), A Critical Review of a Philosophy of Empathy).
[2] In a separate, informal email conversation (dated July 2, 2018), Bluhm calls out Cordelia Fine’s “takedown of The Myth of the Lehman Sisters” in the last chapter of Fine’s book (not otherwise a part of Bluhm’s review): Cordelia Fine, (2017), Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science and Society.New York: W. W. Norton.
IMAGE CREDIT: Picasso, Woman with green hat (1947), photo is cropped, Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria
(c) Lou gosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
My empathy lessons – in the beginning
My empathy lessons started when I was about four years old. My Mom would tell me bedtime stories. Right before bed, she would weave a narrative out of the significant events of a day in the life of an “on the go,” four-year-old boy. She would make a whole out of my experiences by telling me a story about this imaginary boy—his name was “Doodle Bug.”
For example, in a favorite story, Doodle Bug would ride his tricycle, and he would go through the park to visit the Indian Chief. He would make a treaty with the Chief. Then he would ride to the bakery. At the bakery he would sample a selection of cookies and cakes. Always the talented young man, Doodle Bug would “stand on his noodle for apple strudel.”
In the moment, as a four-year-old, this was hilariously funny. I had no idea what apple strudel was, and when I found out a little later, I did not particularly like it. To me, the suspense in the story was palpable. Would the Indian Chief (surely a father figure) be open to a treaty or would hostilities break out as in the cowboy movies that were popular at the time? The rhyme with which the story ended released the suspense in the narrative. It was funny, provoking a laugh, and it brought the story to a satisfying, dramatic close, clearing the way for a soothing transition to sleep.
This was my Mom’s empathic response to a busy, on the go, growing boy. I acknowledge her for it; and my emotional life and future were richer thanks to her. She took my experiences on a given day, wove them into a nuanced narrative, and gave them back to me as a bedtime story. I recognized the experiences as my own. I recognized that she got who I was for her. Brilliant. I was mesmerized. I was spell bound. I was soothed. I was comforted. I was stimulated (but not too much). This was the empathic moment.
Mom was tuning down the day as she was tuning up the empathy for me. She was calming down the day as she was also tuning up my empathy for myself. I was empathically transitioned from a busy day to a state of restfulness and readiness for sleep without the anxieties that can sometimes accompany a child at bedtime.
This was not to say that my childhood was all rainbows and balloons. There were plenty of upsets, too. It is not that I never had anxieties, but, in this case, they were over shadowed by the good stuff. This is a fine example of things going just right for a change; and how empathic responsiveness made a positive difference in one young boy’s life.
Story time—narrative—gives back to the other person his own experience in a way that he can recognize and integrate it. In this case, Mom wove a narrative out of the events of the day, helping her child integrate his experiences. When the other person recognizes his own experience in the story, as I did, then the empathic loop is complete. I got empathy at the end of the day.
Note that, in this and similar situations, a lot of work has to occur prior to the story. The narrator (Mom, in this case) must have access to the events being woven into the story. Her empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, and empathic interpretation were activated and engaged. I hasten to add that the distinction “empathy” was not made explicit. This was just Mom being Mom—a parent doing here job and getting it just right.
Therefore, advice to parents: if you want to expand your empathy with your child, and your child’s empathy for her- or himself, have a bed time story. Bring the day to a close in an orderly way. If you can make up a story, so much the better. But not everyone is a natural born storyteller, as my Mom seems to have been. If you want to read a story, that is good, too. Pick something that you think will resonate with the child, or let the child decide what she or he wants. In the case of my daughter, after awhile, I read her whatever she requested. The genius of the “out there” and wholesome sense of humor of Richard Scarry for children of tender age also deserves honorable mention. The point is to have that time together—that, too, is the empathic moment.
Then when tough times occurred—I do not go into the details since my now grown-up daughter will read this—emerging adults learning how to handle things (and sometimes mishandling things), I went down to dorm and said, “Okay, get your stuff—you are coming home for awhile.” And, low and behold, she listened! She knew I was concerned about her and had her well-being in mind and she listened; and then she got a job for awhile and went back to school a year later. Now flourishing and working on flourishing in ways that were not visible at the time, this is not a fairy tale ending, but is perhaps good enough in this world of helicopter parents, absent parents, and failures to launch.
For those who would like a further inquiry into how empathy is defined – storytelling shows up in many contexts, but when it builds an empathic relationship, storytelling falls under “empathic responsiveness” –
Empathy consists of four parts or dimensions, which, in turn, form the integral whole of authentic relatedness between individuals in community. These four dimensions are receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness:
- Empathic receptivity is the dimension of empathy that consists in being open to the other person’s feelings and experiences. It often presents as a vicarious experience.
- Empathic understanding is the dimension of empathy that engages the other person as possibility in his or her humanity. It often presents as possibilities of accomplishment, fulfillment, flourishing.
- Empathic interpretation is the dimension of empathy that takes a walk “in the other’s shoes,” the part corresponding to the folk definition of empathy. It often presents as shifts in perspective or points of view.
- Empathic responsiveness is that dimension of empathy that provides a gracious and generous listening as the source of a response that offers the other person her or his own experience back in a gesture, statement, story, or narrative. It often presents as a short narrative (“micro narrative”) or story, also called “rhetorical empathy.”
These four dimensions of a rigorous and critical empathy go around, but not exactly in a circle. One does not end up exactly where one started; one makes progress—progress up the winding and twisting hairpin curves of the mountain of human understanding. One goes “round the mountain,” ending up at the same coordinates at which one started, but higher up the mountain. Different perspectives open up as one goes up.
Those in the empathic relationship have advanced upward, coming back to where they started, but at a higher level, forming an upward spiral, round the mountain of empathic understanding of other human beings. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: How empathy works: The four dimensions of empathy
One can start at any point with any one of these dimensions and, as noted, go “round the mountain,” engaging the other three dimensions, forming the integrated whole that we call “empathy.” One has a different perspective on the relationship, one’s own contribution to it, and the other person’s role. One key empathy lesson that drives this work forward and gets repeated at important points is: the four dimensions of empathy are a coherent whole. All four dimensions of empathy (empathic receptivity, empathic understanding, empathic interpretation, and empathic responsiveness) link to one another in a round trip extending from receptivity to understanding, from understanding to interpretation, from interpretation to response, and back. One can start anywhere in the cycle, and go around covering all the bases and end up back with the distinction with which one started, albeit at a “higher” level. You start with empathy and end up with empathy, expanded and (to shift the directional metaphor) “deepened” empathy in relating to the other person and to the community made up of other persons.
References
This post is an except from –
Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pears Press: pp. 38 – 42.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
Summer Reading: The Song of Our Scars by Haider Warraich
I have been catching up on my summer reading: Haider Warraich. (2023). The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain. New York: Basic Books, 309 pp.
Haider Warraich, MD, has provided an account of our relationship with pain and suffering that is a “physician heal thyself” moment and narrative. Warraich’s work is a powerful combination memoire and biological-clinical briefing on the distinction between acute and chronic pain. Now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, the author experienced a life altering back injury while he was in medical school. Suffice to say, the results were an entire encyclopedia of pains, extending from acute to chronic and back, and providing the reader with a compelling narrative of what medical science does not know about pain. Warraich has a way with words and catchy phrases. For example, regarding pain, “The human brain is not just staffing the ticketing booth as the [pain] circus – it is the ringleader” (p. 10). Just so.
Warraich argues: “To course-correct our approach to pain, we need to change the story of chronic pain – pushing back on the voices attempting to convince us all pain is catastrophic and life threatening and needs immediate attention over everything else right now” (p. 253). And yet the good doctor acknowledges that pain puts the person in pain in prison (p. 78). Chronic pain mirrors incarceration (p. 78); and, as for acute pain, the house is on fire and the patient is in it. Summon emergency services!? Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (pp. 232 – 233) is quoted approvingly as additional reading demonstrating that pain presents as requiring urgent attention. Pain resists language, and, when inflicted, for example, in torture, can destroy one’s humanity and integrity and world, requiring long, arduous, and doubtful recovery.
Warraich provides a series of engaging briefings on aspects of pain. The reader gets three basic distinctions differentiating: acute from chronic pain; pain as such versus painful emotions such as fear (e.g., pp. 54, 65), which this reviewer would gloss as “suffering”; and pain in the context of the relationship between mind and body.
Acute pain is exemplified by such experiences as an appendicitis, a broken bone, closing the car door on one’s finger, or dropping a brick on one’s toe. Ouch! In contrast, chronic pain is morning body ache and other intermittent and recurring aches, cramping from irritable bowel syndrome, osteoarthritis, hard-to-describe headaches, or the consequences of multiple back surgeries to the spine. Chronic stress – the boss is a bully, the kids are misbehaving, the spouse is having a midlife crisis,the commute back to the office is unavoidable, the toilet is clogged – results in chronic pain (p. 177). “When people become trapped in the clutches of chronic pain and chronic stress, their lives become engulfed in an eternal, inextinguishable fire – a fire as ferocious as the one that drives the hunger for profit that fuels many modern pharmaceutical giants” (p. 179). Thanks to neuro-plasticity (a key distinction further defined below), chronic pain reorganizes the nervous system. The body expresses the imbalance, the dis-equilibrium, of the mind and its emotions (the latter, admittedly, not distinctions covered in medical school in any detail). Chronic pain stops being a symptom of an injury and it takes on a life of its own, presenting as if the pain were a disease in itself instead of a signal of an underlying or related bodily injury. Chronic pain leads to suffering, a term that Warraich mentions but does not explicitly elaborate. For example, if pain is the dentist hitting an exposed nerve, suffering is being in the waiting room anticipating the dentist hitting the nerve.
According to Warraich, medicine is very good at anesthetizing the mammalian nervous system against such acute pain, but the use of the same anesthetics and analgesics against suffering is a deal with the devil. It might work in the short term; but be sure to read the fine print. The road to hell is paved with such agreements, which, it turns out, is a redescription of the opioid epidemic. In the following, Warraich writes “pain”, but it would be more accurate to say he means “suffering”: “The confluence of advances in medicine and a barrage of pharmaceutical companies marketing directing to doctors and patients birth a movement that deemed suffering unacceptable. As spiritual voids gaped inside those economically left behind and loneliness became a way of life, people in pain [i.e., suffering] kept being sent exclusively to doctors’ offices and pharmacies [for opioids to numb the pain]” (p.147). Loneliness is indeed painful, and poverty is definitely bad for one’s health, but not in the same way as a toothache or appendicitis – loneliness and poverty are chronic and make a person cry real tears of frustration, isolation, neglect, and anger. Yet the suffering is not localized like a toothache or peripheral injury, but seems to pervade the head and chest, calling forward a sense of being burdened by something imponderable and diffuse throughout one’s upper body. In chronic pain and the suffering brought forth by chronic pain, instead of the injured organism telling the brain of the peripheral injury in the limb by means of a pain signal upward to the brain, the brain (or, to be exact, the thoughts in it) are sending the signal in the other direction – downward – telling the organism to hurt. This may be specific, if there is a specific injury able to express the suffering, but more likely the pain points are diffuse and mobile – hard to define lower back pain (e.g., Warraich’s injuries), headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune disorders. In short, acute pain is the organism telling the brain it (the skin or peripheral limb) is hurting; whereas chronic pain is the brain telling the organism it is hurting. However, the message is highly susceptible of distortion. In some ways, chronic pain can become the memory of pain, which may or may not indicate a current injury. Chronic pain can become the fear of pain itself, expanding into pain in the here and now. In short, opioids are effective in treating acute pain but are ineffective and harmful – I would say “a deal with the devil” – in treating chronic pain (p. 174).
The poster child that not all pains are created equal is phantom limb pain. Documented as early as the American Civil War by Silas Weir Mitchell, individuals who had undergone amputation, felt the nonexistent, missing limb to itch or cramp or hurt. The individuals experienced the nonexistent tendons of the missing limb as cramping and even awakening the person from the most profound sleep due to pain (pp. 110 – 111).
Fast forward to modern times and Ron Melzack’s gate control theory of pain marshals such phantom limb pain as compelling evidence that the nervous system contains a map of the body and its pains point, which map has not yet been updated to reflect the absence of the lost limb. In effect, the brain is telling the individual that his limb is hurting using an obsolete map of the body – the memory of pain. Thus, the pain is in one’s head, but not in the sense that the pain is unreal or merely imaginary. The pain is real – as real as the brain that is indeed in one’s head and signaling (“telling”) one that one is in pain.
One question that has not been much asked is whether it is possible to have something similar to phantom limb pain even though the person still has the limb functionally attached to the body. For example, the high school football player who needs the football scholarship to go to college because he is weak academically but actually hates football. He really incurs a painful soft tissue sports injury, which gets elaborated emotionally and psychologically, leaving him on crutches for far-too-long and both physically and symbolically unable to move forward in his life. Thus, due to the inherent delays in neuroplasticity – the update to the map is not instantaneous and one does not have new experiences with a nonexistent limb – pain takes on a life of its own. That is the experience of chronic pain – pain has a life of its own – pain becomes the dis-ease (literally), not the symptom. What then is the treatment, doctor?
Warraich radicalizes the issue of pain that takes on a life of its own before suggesting a solution. After providing a short history of opium and morphine and opioids, culminating “in the most prestigious medical school on earth, from the best teachers and physicians, we [medical students] were unknowingly taught meticulously designed lies” (p. 185), that is, prescribe opioids for chronic pain. The reader wonders, where do we go from here? To be sure opioids have a role in hospice care and the week after surgery, but one thing is for certain, the way forward does not consist in prescribing opioids for chronic pain.
After reviewing numerous approaches to integrated pain management extending from cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to valium, cannabis and Ketamine – and calling out hypnosis (hypnotherapy) as a greatly undervalued approach (no exteranl chemicals are required, but the issue of susceptibility to hypnotic suggestibility is fraught) – Dr Warraich recovers from his own life changing back injury in a truly “physician heal thyself” moment thanks to dedicated PT, physical therapy (p. 238). If this seems stunningly anti-climactic, it is boring enough to have the ring of truth earned in the college of hard knocks, but it is a personal solution (and I do so like a happy ending!), not the resolution of the double bind in which the entire medical profession finds itself (pp. 188 – 189). The way forward for the community as a whole requires a different, though modest, proposal.
Let us allow Dr Warraich to speak for himself: “I have come to believe a good doctor has an almost magical quality to feel what their patients feels – to see how they view the world, understand where they have been and what they’ve have seen all in an instant – as well as the knowledge and expertise to respond ethically to what they see from the other side. This superpower has a name: empathy” (p. 238). Never underestimate the power of a good listening. “’Mental distress may be perhaps the most intractable pain of all,’ she [Cicely Sanders] wrote, and the answer to it was not always more drugs, because for some ‘the greatest need is for a listener’” (p. 159).
Putting pain in the context of the relationship between soul and body, the body in pain expresses the suffering of the soul. While psychiatry and neurology do not even believe in the soul, they do begrudgingly allow that there is such a thing as “mental status,” which, for example, can be compromised by the hormonal imbalance of puberty, existential anxiety, jet lag, alcohol, delirium, or other insults to the organism such as blunt trauma, which, in turn, implies a conscious mind to have such a mental status. Here’s the issue: humans are neurons “all the way down,” but then the neurons start to generate consciousness – consciousness generates meaning – meaning generates language and relatedness, language and relatedness generates community, culture, art, literature, science, and humanity. However, there are numerous details that need to be filled in here, which are still the target of inquiry and ongoing research, and you won’t learn or be allowed to study them in medical school. I hasten to add that if you are experiencing a compromised mental status due to delirium, don’t call a hippie or professor of comparative literature – you need a medical doctor!
Notwithstanding my whole-hearted endorsement of Dr Warraich’s contribution – get multiple copies of this book and give it to your friends to read – this is not a softball review. Three criticisms come to mind.
First, Warraich rightly criticizes Rene Descartes’ (1596 – 1650) abstraction of the mind (including consciousness and consciousness of pain) from the body. Having divided the unity of the human being into two parts, mind (soul) and body, Descartes then needed a way to explain the communication between them. The mind obviously does not direct the body the way the pilot of a boat steers the craft. Absent neuro-pathology, the mind and the body are a near perfect unity. The body is the perfect servant of the mind – it prepares a cup of tea without my having to communicate the desire as if to a separate entity. It just knows and starts boiling the water. Descartes solution was to propose the pineal gland as the seat of the soul in the body. Warraich does Descartes one better by developing an entire narrative about the brain’s posterior insular cortex and anterior insula, identifying a novel kind of neuron, a von Economo neuron (p 63), from which pain emerges as an emotion generated by a physical sensation. An ingenious solution, which, however, is still a category mistake. What is missing – and here it is not Warraich’s issue but a general shortcoming of philosophy of science – is an account of emergent properties such as, for example, how mental states come forth from physical processes and, just as importantly, how mental states cause physical ones (as when one literally worries oneself sick).
Second, as regards the personal parts of the author’s narrative, pick a story and stick to it. The personal narrative starts out that the potentially life changing back injury is described as tissue damage (p. 5) – the painful consequences of which should never be underestimated. But by page 91 this is redescribed as a “broken back.” Literally? The value here is in describing how the patient’s relationship to pain influences his life and how Warriach has to transform his relationship to pain in order to recover his life as a medical doctor and his contribution to healing. Of course, one could have both tissue damage and a broken back. Here highly recommended reading, in comparison to which Warraich is a modest contribution, is Arthur Kleinman’s The Illness Narratives. Stories about how chronic pain transforms one’s life, including (for example) how repeated surgeries result in a “failed back” (which technically is different than a “broken back”). Such narratives are bound to give the reader pause that medical science (or even comparative literature) understands the relation between mind and body.
Finally, regarding the magical quality of empathy, I am a strong advocate of empathy, having published extensively on its applications. Never underestimate the power of empathy, and Warraich properly calls out the “empathy gap” in medicine (p. 244). But Warraich gives empathy a bad name in that he leaves empathy vulnerable to the critique that the above-cited magical power of empathy leads to compassion fatigue, empathic distress, and burn out. It can and does. This requires treatment too. Human beings are a complex species. They can be kind, generous, and empathic; but, as painfully demonstrated by the opioid epidemic, they can also be greedy, grasping, aggressive, territorial, bullying, experts in know-it-all-ism that obstructs listening, and exploiters of politics in the negative sense. The short empathy training is to drive out all these negatives, and empathy naturally and spontaneously comes forth. People (i.e., doctors) want to be empathic and will be so if given half a chance. The challenge is that the healing professions are constantly exposed to pain, suffering, trauma, and patients who can be difficult and unempathic precisely because they are in pain – or because they were difficult people prior to getting sick or hurt. A rigorous and critical empathy knows it can be wrong, breakdown, or misfire, so such an empathy also knows it can be validated. This reviewer believes Warraich’s compelling narrative may usefully have begun where it ends – with empathy and how empathy made a difference in his recovery and his daily life in the world of corporate medicine and at the Veteran’s Administration (VA). The VA has been criticized – “taken heat” – for not addressing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) until it is dismissed and returns as substance abuse, but, based on Warriaich’s reports (p. 248), the VA is doing breakthrough work in integrated pain management, meditation and hypnotherapy, ACT, reduction in prescribing opioids, and they may become a model for other providers. Dr Warraich’s matriculation in the college of hard knocks of chronic back pain gives him standing to elaborate such an empathic approach, and perhaps he will do so in a follow up publication.
Additional Reading
Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons. Chicago: Two Pairs Press.
Arthur Kleinman. (1988). The Illness Narratives. New York: Basic Books.
Elaine Scarry. (1985). The Body in Pain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and the Chicago Empathy Project
Protected: In the beginning was the word – empathy!
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Top Ten Empathy Trends for 2023
Empathy is a practice and priority, not a mere psychological mechanism. Practicing empathy is a way of being in the world, creating a safe space of openness, acceptance and toleration. In the face of a contagion of Omicron, we need a contagion of empathy. Empathy is contagious. This is a condition you actually want to share with someone else, especially someone who seems to need some empathy – all the while being clear to set firm boundaries against bullying, delusional thinking, and compassion fatigue. Keep in mind this list is a top ten “count down,” so if you want to know what is #1, fast forward to the bottom.
Here are my choices and predictions for the top ten trends in empathy for the year 2023.
10 – Empathy for the jurors in the trial of the century. The prediction is that Mr T will stick to his story – “we was robbed” – even after he is indicated, believing there is no such thing as bad publicity. The prospective defendant is innocent until proven guilty and so on. However, it is noteable that a former-NSA analyst was sentenced to nine years in prison in July 2019 for hoarding official documents [https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2019/07/ex-nsa-contractor-serve-9-years-hoarding-classified-information/158564/]. This seems open and shut. Nevertheless, this trend is about the jurors and not the defendant. This promises to be a long, headline-grabbing trial, and the jury will have to be sequestered, cut off from news, and, subjected to a lot of legal jargon. Being without Facebook and Twitter and other
is. While the challenges of finding an unbiased jury are not trivial, all that is needed for a fair trial are twelve people who are willing to set aside their opinions and look at the facts from the point of view of the law as defined for them by the presiding judge. That sounds like creating a space for critical thinking and taking multiple points of view, the latter the folk definition of empathy.
9 – Empathy in time of war becomes Red Team not kindness. All the empathy in the world is not going to help anyone if one country invades another with a list of intellectuals, business people, and politicians to be arrested and killed. That noted, the need for helping, compassion, and good works of all kinds is still on the critical path to building a better world. Yet in time of war or threat of war, the power of empathy consists in putting oneself in the shoes of the opponent, thinking like the opponent, and thereby anticipating and thwarting the opponent’s moves. Putting oneself in the opponent’s shoes requires taking off one’s own shoes first. Never underestimate the power of empathy – never – yet empathy does not work very well with psychopaths, bullies, totalitarian dictators, and the criminally insane. Many of these individuals will take the affective, bottom up empathy and use it against you. Therefore, empathic engagement must be limited to cognitive empathy – use critical thinking to try to figure out what the Other is thinking and feeling in order to intervene in a way that is useful according the standards of a humane community.
8 – Elon “44 billion up in smoke” Musk gets empathy for his employees, customers, and stakeholders. And if you believe prediction, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I would like to sell to you. The empathic truth of this admittedly cynical prediction is that many of the things that make a person good at business make him or her relatively poor empathizers. Business leaders lose contact with what clients and consumers are experiencing as the leaders get entangled in innovating the technologies in new products and services, solving legal issues, reacting to the competition, or implementing the software required to sustain operations. Yet empathy is the ultimate Capitalist Tool. Empathy is on the critical path for serving customers, segmenting markets, positioning products (and substitutes), taking the perspective of the competition [not exactly empathy but close enough?], building teams and being a leader who actually has followers. Saying that the purpose of business is to make money is like saying the purpose of life is to breathe. Definitely do not stop breathing. The purpose of business is to deliver value and satisfaction to customers. Then the revenue shows up. When the ontology of empathy exposes it as the foundation of community, then expanding empathy becomes nearly synonymous with expanding business. For example, building customer communities, building stakeholder communities, team building, are the basis for brand loyalty, employee commitment, and sustained or growing market share. Can revenue be far behind? Sometimes leaders don’t need more data, we need expanded empathy, though ultimately both are on the path to satisfied buyers, employees, and stakeholders. “CEO” no longer means “Chief Executive Officer,” but “Chief Empathy Officer.” This time one can hear the groans—from the executive suite, not the cubicles.:
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6nngUdemxAnCd2B2wfw6Q6 Empathy is one of those things that are hard to delegate. This role shows up like another job responsibility with which the CEO of the organization is tasked—along with everything else that she already has to do. As if she did not already have enough alligators snapping at various parts of her anatomy, one has to be nice about it, too? But of course empathy is not niceness, though it is not about being un-nice. It is about knowing what others are experiencing, because one has a vicarious experience and then processing that further to expand boundaries and exercise leadership.
7 – Etiquette Gurus and celebrity life coaches go back to school to learn empathy. The latest poster child for this trend is Sara Jane Ho, who reportedly broke up with her boyfriend of four years over text, and rationalizes it with a meme about context, in which the context sounded like she was busy making a Netflix show. This is right up there with trend #8, getting fired by a Twitter tweet. The context, according to the author of the article, Maureen O’Connor, was that Ms Ho’s eyes were getting puffy from crying, and she would not “look good” on her Netflix show. Empathy is a high bar and one does not get there every day. If Ms Ho’s resume is to be believed, she is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown, Harvard (attended), and now a Netflix sensation. One speculates that she is a survivor of a Tiger Mom or Bootcamp Dad (or both), and may herself benefit from getting a good listening at the side of a committed mentor. Based on the review of Ms Ho’s project by Maureen O’Connor [ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/02/style/sara-jane-ho-mind-your-matters.html], she (Ms Ho) exemplifies the kind of etiquette which is a disguised application of sadism, hostility, aggression, and one-upmanship. While I do not know the details and maybe I am missing the humor, but so far, all these people are easy to dislike. You go to take off your coat and you can’t because there is a knife in your back. There is nothing wrong – but something is definitely missing – empathy.
6 – Empathy is a practice not a mere psychological mechanism. Empathy is the practice of authentically relating to the other person. The practice of empathy is a way of being – being with and in relation with others. Many of the misunderstandings of empathy – especially in the form of compassion, pity, emotional contagion – can be traced to treating the practice of empathy merely as a psychological mechanism. There is nothing wrong with this as such. However, what gets missed is the relational quality of empathy. Drive out bullying, hostility, aggression, bad language, and empathy naturally comes forth. People want to be empathic if given half a chance.
5 – Empathy expands for the True Believer, but not agreement with the conspiracy or delusion. The criteria for identifying the True Believer is he or she doubles down. When the space does not arrive from Alpha Centauri – or your candidate does not win – the True Believer does not say, “I might have been mistaken and maybe I need to look at my assumptions or inquire into other scenarios.” The True Believer doubles down – “We was robbed!” “We will catch the next space ship!” It does no good – none – to disagree with the True Believer or to argue or reason, because the delusion or conspiracy theory is holding together the True Believer’s personality. To give up the delusion would be to give up the personality, to risk the disintegration of who the person is. What to do about it? Teach critical thinking. Both empathy and critical thinking create a space of acceptance and tolerance in the context of which the power of the delusion starts to shrink. More on this in the next trend.
4 – Empathy and critical thinking form an alliance. It is a bold statement of the obvious that the ongoing breakdown in community standards bodes ill for a cultural and political and public conversation context in which disputants engage in near delusional disagreement on basic quantitative facts such as the rules of etiquette, basic science such as the biology of vaccinations, gender distinction (or not), the basic results of elections, and so on. Though it is not a quick solution, it is hard to think of a better one: teach skills in critical thinking such as assessing facts against sources, evaluating the reliability of sources, reporters, informants, and so on, against prior performance, checking validity and logic of arguments, and engaging enlarged thinking in taking the point of view of the other person, especially if the person (or group) disagrees with one. (See Jonathan Haber, (2020), Critical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.) Taking different points of view, of course, is the basic folk definition of empathy. But do not forget to take off one’s own shoes before trying on the other’s or one will get projection, not empathy.
3 – Translation replaces projection as the underlying model for empathy. “Translation” as in translating between languages or between different artistic media or different signaling systems. In short, psychologism – psychology in the negative sense – is replaced by the linguistic speech act of translating the other person’s experience into one’s own and then giving it back (empathically) to the other. This paradigm of empathy as translation is arguably at the same level of generality as empathy as projection, but remained undeveloped until the rise of hermeneutics along a separate trajectory. The modern innovators of interpersonal empathy such as Carl Rogers (1902–1987) might be read as leap-frogging back to the original sense of entering the other’s world in order to translate it into the first person, subject’s own terms. The translation model of empathy (credited to Johann Herder (1744 – 1803) of whom one rarely hears today) also fits well with what Gordon Allport (1897–1967) and Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) were doing in arraying empathy against racism and prejudice in expanding the boundaries of community by empathically translating between them. An entire possible alternate history of empathy, as yet unwritten, opens up at this point – empathy as translation between persons.
2 – Empathy for the Amazon rain forest grows and reaches a critical mass, but will its critical mass be enough or too late to overtake the “critical mass” of green house gases. The challenge is that global warming does not live like an actual possibility for most people, who cannot imagine such an outcome – for example, just as in December 2019 no one could envision the 2020 global pandemic. Empathy is oxygen for the soul. If the human psyche does not get empathy, it suffocates. Climate changes makes this metaphor actual. If humanity does not drown as the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheaths slide into the oceans, humans will suffocate as the levels of green house gases and heat overwhelm temperate habitats. There is no Planet B.Empathy is a bridge: The bridge between the gridlocked present and a seemingly impossible-to-imagine future is empathy. The empathic moment is an act of imagination. That is the interesting thing about empathy. It may seem like a dream; but the dream lives. It is inclusive. Lots more work needs to be done on this connection. For purposes of this list of predictions, this “shout out” will have to suffice. For specific actionable recommendations, see David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, now streaming on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393
2a – Vaccine deniers get empathy and say: “Oh, I wish I were already experiencing the minor side effects of the latest booster shot instead of systemic organ breakdown!” People get the latest booster against Covid, parents get their children the measles and polio and other shots the children need for school, which gets into people’s arms at an accelerating rate. Vaccine deniers get empathy and say: “Oh, I wish I were already experiencing the minor side effects of the latest booster shot instead of systemic organ breakdown!” Biological science continues to produce small, medium, and large “miracles,” even as basic health care services for citizen’s struggle. People become medical doctors and nurses and enter the healthcare field because they want to make a difference. They experience an empathic calling to intervene to reduce the pain and suffering in the world. Then these same people get caught up in the faceless, unempathic bureaucracy of a healthcare system where capitation means doctors have to see an unworkable number of patients a day – four an hour for eight hours. Using empathy and medical ethics, the doctors push back saying: “I am required by medical ethics to spend as much time with the patient as is needed to get the patient the medical treatment they require – and are entitled to be paid for it.
2b – Men lead from empathy in the struggle against domestic violence (DV). When powerful men such as Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Biden, Milley, clean up their failures of leadership and take action saying “Violence against women anywhere – home or work or anywhere – is unacceptable and here are the resources for intervention,” then a breakthrough will occur. Men will find their voice and speak out even more loudly and provide leadership against domestic violence to those of their own gender who just do not get it.
While women have provided the leadership and will continue to do so, powerful men must step up and provide guidance to their fellows about proper boundaries and respect for them in relationships. This is ongoing. What is new: powerful men step up and speak out and provide leadership among men in establishing respect for boundaries in creating communication, affection, and affinity.
For data- and empathy-based innovations that have occurred in the past year in the fight against domestic violence see No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Some sixty percent of domestic violence (DV) victims are strangled at some point during an abusive relationship (p. 65): Big red flag that the perpetrator is escalating in the direction of homicide/Femicide.
Empathy almost always has its uses when tuned to the specific circumstances. Yet empathy is unhelpful in dealing with sociopaths, psychopaths, and [most] bullies. They take whatever empathy you give them and use it the better to manipulate. Top down, cognitive empathy – yes – to understand whether they are a threat and are going to escalate; but therapeutic empathy – “i get you, bro” – is often counter productive. What is productive? Set limits. Set firm boundaries – and enforce them.
Turns out that only some 15% of the victims in one study had injuries visible enough to photograph for the police report (p. 66). Most strangulation injuries are internal – hence, the title. Good news/bad news: The Fatality Review Board is an idea that is getting attention with law enforcement and the local states attorney function. More progress and action is needed in this area.
(1) People stop saying, “I just don’t get empathy” and commit to the practice of empathy. Empathy is a practice and, like all practices, it can be improved by training. Remove the obstacles to empathy such as cynicism and bullying—and empathy comes forth. Remove the resistances to empathy and empathy naturally and spontaneously expands. Most people are naturally empathic.
The one-minute empathy training is trending: Eliminate the obstacles to empathy and a space of acceptance and toleration spontaneously emerges.
Most people do not sufficiently appreciate this: people are born with a deep and natural capacity for empathy, but they are also born needing to learn manners, respect for boundaries, and toilet training. Put the mess in the designated place or the community suffers from diseases. People also need to learn how to read and do arithmetic and communicate in writing. But there is a genuine sense in which learning to conform and follow all the rules does not expand our empathy or our community. It does not help the cause of expanded empathy that rule-making and the drumbeat of compliance are growing by leaps and bounds.
The work at hand? Remove the blocks to empathy such as dignity violations, devaluing language, gossip, shame, guilt, egocentrism, over-identification, lack of integrity, inauthenticity, hypocrisy, making excuses, finger pointing, jealousy, envy, put downs, being righteous, stress, burnout, compassion fatigue, cynicism, censorship, denial, manipulation, competing to be the biggest victim, insults, injuries to self-esteem, and narcissistic merger—and empathy spontaneously expands, develops, and blossoms. Now that is going to require some work!
Teaching empathy consists in overcoming the obstacles to empathy that people have acquired. When the barriers are overcome, then empathy spontaneously develops, grows, comes forth, and expands. There is no catch, no “gotcha.” That is the one-minute empathy training, pure-and-simple.
References and Notes
“The One-Minute Empathy Training”
May I introduce myself? Here is a short introduction to who i am and my commitment to empathy, including a one-minute empathy training. Total run time: about five minutes. Further data: See also
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project
