Empathy’s Challenge – 1/11/2012

January 11th, 2012

Empathy is a weird word for me – not that it sounds weird, just that it seemed to take a long time for me to learn. I suspect this is because it’s a word that contains much more than its meaning. A while ago, I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times by David Brooks, titled “The Limits of Empathy.” In it, Brooks argues that empathy in all its wonder of making us feel for the plight of others, of making us have moral dilemmas and moral pains, doesn’t do much other than that. It doesn’t lead to action – even our hunger awareness lunch here at Holden doesn’t lead most of us to do anything. He writes, “These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.”

Sounds to me like a pretty good jab at us Minnesotans. He seems to be saying, “Get over it, hippies, sometimes you have to make people feel bad.” Or that you can feel bad about the plight of the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the hungry – you can even empathize and truly understand the difficulties those groups experience – but it’s no good on its own.

This is where my mind wanders off to one of empathy’s close relatives – love. The transition, and critique of Brooks’ slight empathy-bashing, can be given much better than me by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter [in his book I Am a Strange Loop], when he claims that empathy is “the most admirable quality of humanity. To ‘be’ someone else in a profound way is not merely to see the world intellectually as they see it and to feel rooted in the places and times that molded them as they grew up; it goes much further than that. It is to adopt their values, to take on their desires, to live their hopes, to feel their yearnings, to share their dreams, to shudder at their dreads, to participate in their life, to merge with their soul.” Not bad from a scientist, right? Now, who does that remind you of? Someone who had a deep desire and commitment to just those things? If you’re having a hard time coming up with the answer, imagine this is a children’s sermon: the answer is Jesus. Here I offer a reading from John: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Problem solved. It’s as simple as that. We’re supposed to love each other, I get that part. And it seems empathy will lead us in that direction, at least in thought. It lets us see the person in everyone – the complex set of past interactions, memories, reactions, etc. that lead them to do what they do today. We can look at a developing country and understand why its leaders might systematically oppress women, ignore education, and corrupt government. We can look at the homeless here in Washington and understand how we all could have, and could still, end up in that situation. We can look at the “one percent” and understand why they might act the way the protesters say they do. With empathy, our childish anger or frustration is soothed to allow us to behave ourselves.

Here, though, is where I agree with Brooks: it doesn’t seem to be enough. I don’t like such a relativistic approach to the world. Is love truly watching girls go uneducated because it’s what’s best for their family at the time? Is it truly seeing someone amass billions of dollars unstopped because “Well, I might do the same if I had the chance?” Or maybe cheering on a beloved presidential candidate in spite of accusations of sexual harassment because “she was probably leading him on?” Is it even watching someone play in a roofalanche zone while we watch, not saying anything because we don’t want to offend? Is a hunger for justice enough to say we love the world? No! I say, but what does love look like, then?

How about a definition from 1 Corinthians? “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” As C.S. Lewis says, “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” In other words, it’s not easy. Which is why we fall into the trap of empathy – we justify our inaction with our feeling. We easily feel for people, but we don’t necessarily do for people; We can have empathy, but we don’t always love. We want to rejoice in the truth, but too easily snub responsibility thinking everything can be the truth. But we’re called to that higher place.

Robert Farrar Capon writes in his book on cooking and theology,Supper of the Lamb, “Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it- out of all proportion and sense.” Jesus became the most vulnerable of loves to say we are loved. To free us from trying to justify ourselves by action or feeling – to free us to love one another just as he loved us. Out of all proportion and sense, we are called to love those who are just plain bad or misguided, to love those both mired in poverty or mired in wealth, to love those closest to us, because that’s the only way we know that will make things right. How we go about loving is different for each of us – that’s where I’ll allow a little relativism. Maybe it looks like flying halfway around the world to teach a village to respect women, or knitting hats for homeless families, or cooking meals for people who can’t afford them, or giving lots of money away – but the birth and subsequent death on the cross tells us we can try something and still be loved at least by God, but hopefully the rest of the world, too.

By,
Chris Tao