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 (see Sally Satel et al 2013 on “mindless neuroscience”). 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].
Sally Sate and Scott O. Lilienfeld. (2013). Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. New York: Basic Books (Perseus).
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
Categories: a rigorous and critical empathy, empathic interpretation, empathic responsiveness, empathy trends
Empathy Lessons 