Sorry for the light content of late; aside from the pesky Drama Llamas eating the flowers and generally damaging my calm, it’s entered that nice “hot, sticky” (as sticky as New Mexico gets, anyway) phase of summer, we’re tragically frugal and thus never run the central air unless the house would be unlivable without it, and ever since my main rig died, the only halfway comfortable place to write with the laptop has been in a leather recliner with the damn thing actually in my lap. I don’t like peeling myself off the chair, and during the day working like this is like working with a space heater in my lap. At night, of course, by the time it finally cools off everybody is ready to adjourn to the living room with a Tasty Beverage and crash for the night.
Anyway.
Over at Marko’s, a link was posted and briefly snarked at an article proposing “empathy deficit disorder”. Despite the fact that the article was snagged by CNN’s news aggregator from such a bastion of scientific rigor as Oprah.com, I took it seriously enough to leave a comment at Marko’s that was more “flecks of spittle” than anything else. It outraged me from the beginning just by being goddamn stupid, but it took time and reflection to realize just how stupid on how many levels. No wonder I was annoyed.
The biggest problem with the article is that it treats empathy as a single, simple trait, or worse, as a kind of mental trick, like an ability to speed-read or rapidly memorize all the objects on a desk. Not so; empathy is a deeply complex trait that may or may not develop completely in all individuals, and like all very complex traits, goes wrong in such a number of unique different ways that we can tell there are several ways to break it. Unfortunately, it’s also misused very often as a word, mostly because there are many subtle variations that have differences that don’t seem important as first. Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy, is not the same thing as compassion, is not the same thing as pity, is not the same thing as the tendency to absorb emotions from others, is not the same thing as the ability to accurately read the emotions of others- but you’ll sure as hell see the word used as though it were.
We do know both from neuroimaging and from certain kinds of disorders that empathy definitely has a biological component. If you have the right disorder- including, controversially, the autistic-spectrum disorders, in which the exact nature of impairment isn’t always well-understood or even always fully THERE- then certain circuits in your brain that light up for “normal” people in empathizing with others will be apparently inactive in yours. This basic biological wiring alone can “break” in a number of different ways, including ability to recognize the emotions of others, the ability to process your own correctly, and the ability to relate them to yourself in a way that makes them important. This latter is the problem for psychopaths- they have a full intellectual grasp of “right” and “wrong”, and can be extremely proficient at RECOGNIZING the emotions of others and deducing their importance TO that other, but they feel absolutely no internal pressure to act in certain ways because of that information: no remorse to push them away from deliberate harm, and no compassion to push them toward deliberate kindness. The knowledge is there, but of no relevance- and neuroimaging studies have upheld that there’s something screwy going on in there. (For obvious reasons, a lot of this research has been quiet outside of academic circles; psychology as a field is acutely paranoid about avoiding giving criminals an “excuse” for their actions if basis for mental illness has been found to be biological and involuntary.)
To borrow the computer hardware/software analogy again, if your hardware is faulty, you’ll never be able to run anything on it and expect the results to be reliable or even there in the first place. A person with the right brain injury, developmental disorder, or other neurological insult will never be able to empathize normally, though they can compensate. (Or fake it well enough to pass.) However, if you never write and install the program, or if you do it badly, you still won’t get any good results: empathy will be impaired or absent without the right upbringing and socialization. The literature on this subject is vast, sprawling, and filled with the controversies and competing ideas that any new field, or field undergoing a renaissance, is. Psychology is in a new phase; now that the “blank slate” model of development has been slain and the biological psychologists were proven right on a number of matters, the tussle between nature, nurture, and how little we actually know about either is producing as much heat as light.
Given that empathy is a complex trait that involves the interaction between several simpler ones- like compassion and the ability to recognize emotions- and also happens to govern our moral sense, our ability to interact socially with family, friends, and strangers alike, and generally reconcile a world filled with other emotional and intermittently rational creatures, we really shouldn’t be overly surprised that it turns out to be a big complicated pain to accurately pin down and study.
I’ve been harping on how often empathy is confused with other, simpler traits, so let’s start by defining the simple so we can get a handle on the complex. First, the other word I’ve been using the most: compassion. Compassion is the simple emotional response a normal human has toward another creature in a state he can recognize as pain. We feel bad for the hurting one, and want to help if we can. Compassion isn’t an overly sophisticated emotion; many social animals can do it, though they’re much less likely to have any for a stranger than humans are. When my dog recognizes that I’m crying or in physical pain and comes over to lick my face, that’s compassion- he understands that I’m in distress, but nothing else. We tend to make more of compassion than is perhaps warranted by its actual value as a response, possibly out of an atavistic deep fear of what happens in its total absence- psychopathy.
Sympathy is a more abstract version of compassion. We don’t need to SEE another’s suffering, only conceptualize it- and it needn’t only apply to suffering. Wishing someone well and feeling them to be in some sense “kin” is sympathy; when we say “I’m very sorry for your loss”, or “I’m so happy for you!”, that’s sympathy. You feel for someone, for better or for worse. Note that actually understanding the other person’s emotions and their source and motivations is not actually necessary- merely feeling that you do enough to feel along with them. You must, however, feel generally good about the other person in order to be sympathetic to them.
Pity is feeling bad, generally, about something or someone in a bad situation of no fault of their own. Pity is actually a condescending emotion when the object of pity is a person, since it assumes a complete inability on the part of the pitiable person to have changed anything or to take any action to improve things themselves- and thus complete powerlessness. This is also the only concept out of the group that can be almost completely abstract; we say “what a pity” about any bad situation that it seems shouldn’t have happened, or interchangeably with “what a waste”. No living person or animal need even be involved.
Empathy is the ability to not only recognize another individual’s emotions, understand their significance as important to that individual, but also understand their reasons and origins. Basic empathy is applying your own rationales and values to others and empathizing with them when you recognize them as being like you: at the most limited level, feeling empathetic about everyone in your tribe but not necessarily about those fuckers over on the next mountain, which are so different as to not even really be like people.
Empathy on the order that a majority experience it is empathy toward everyone recognizably like you enough that you can maintain full empathy until a jarring enough disconnect with your own internal reality and rationales pops up. At that point, the person gets slotted into a generic “other”. When you meet people that talk about “the Jews” or “the gays” as though they were a Borglike mass with a single terrifying agenda, this is what’s going on: having failed the “like me” empathy check, all people with the identified “not like me” marker become a more or less indistinguishable mass of “other” and identified by a collection of supposed shared traits.
Fully developed empathy involves the admission of ALL rationales for behavior as fully valid; we might not share certain urges (like the urge to molest little boys), but we recognize the basic shared building blocks- sexual desire, desire for something taboo- and can think about the person as fully individuated human anyway.
Where Dr. LaBier of the linked article, who thinks that a lack of empathy is responsible for “modern” ills like war or divorce (and thinking these are modern ills makes him an idiot right out the gate) makes a serious mistake is in confusing empathy with sympathy. Empathy MAY lead to sympathy in that it’s always easier to be sympathetic to someone we think of as like us and always easier to sympathize with someone we think of as like us- but it can destroy sympathy just as easily.
Picture a room with a pretty young woman, crying as though her heart would break. She is clearly miserable, weeping and sobbing and hugging herself as though this is the end of her personal world. At just this picture, unless you’re already making assumptions based on where you know I must be going with this, we feel compassion for the poor girl- who is clearly suffering- and probably sympathy as well.
As we go over to her and start talking in an effort to alleviate her pain a little (in this scenario, we haven’t got anything else pressing to do), as she slowly calms down enough to talk, we start to hear her story. She is going to fail out of school, and her parents have said she can’t come home, either. At the end of the semester, she will have no home and no support to fall back on. We still feel compassion (though we’ve realized we can’t do anything about the problem except listen), and likely still sympathy as well.
As she keeps going, however, it emerges that the reason she is going to fail out of school is that she’s blown off most or all her classes and spent the time on partying instead, and the reason her parents won’t take her in again is because she’s run them many thousands of dollars into debt both on her education (now completely wasted), and on credit cards bills as well. Worse than that, as she keeps going on about the unfairness and heartlessness of her professors and her parents, you realize that she does not believe she’s done anything wrong- or at least, not so wrong that it shouldn’t be readily forgiven. Not only is she responsible for all her own problems after people went out of their way to be kind to her and optimistic about her, but she adamantly refuses to accept a speck of it.
Now we have empathy: we understand how she’s feeling and why, in great detail. And because we do, our sympathy for her has utterly disappeared and been replaced by disgust, anger, or big helpings of both. In order to remain sympathetic to her, we’d either have to actively ignore what we’ve learned and project our own preferable rationales on her- maybe she has a learning disability, maybe her parents were abusive and incompetent and she never learned how to study either- or we’d have to agree with her about pretty young women not needing to be subject to consequences. One would be an active failure of empathy, the other would require moral illiteracy.
Empathy is, in fact, as much a survival skill as it is a tool for making happy communities. Empathy helps us avoid social parasites and predators: in its most fully developed form, it is an extremely sophisticated tool for those critical cheater/cooperator identifications. Without empathy, we can no more recognize the predatory intentions of the smiling psychopath than we can readily forgive our spouses when they lash out at us during their own personal Worst Day Ever. A criminal profiler is every bit as much a professional empathizer as a therapist, but he wants to catch his patients and lock them up rather than help them through their relationship problems. Because they’re dangerous- and he understands them enough to know it.
Empathy is a causative factor for war as much as its lack: the giggling dictator without it may start a campaign of conquest based on his inability to recognize those not enough like him as human, but it takes sophisticated, mature empathy on the part of those who would oppose him: first to recognize his intentions no matter what he said- and second to realize the need to quell the urges of compassion enough that effective countermeasures can be taken. Think Hitler and Churchill- and Chamberlain.
The problem is that most of those who preach the need for more empathy don’t realize that true empathy is as much a sophistication of reasoning abilities as it is a set of successfully installed emotional software. In order to truly understand the motivations of someone who is truly not like you, you need the abstract reasoning skills to start from the bare human bones of how you ARE alike and construct their motivations from there- or even to understand them when they tell you what they’re going to do and why flat-out, without assuming they’re lying and projecting a set of rationales you CAN deal with onto them. Think of the person you know that insists terrorist grievances are really all political and this religious extremism business is mere window dressing: they are having an empathy failure as serious as the guy marching around with a protest sign reading “AIDS FROM GOD, FAGGOTS!”
This is true empathy: standing outside the glass of a room in which a man is about to be executed. You can hear his cries and recognize his terror, his desperation, his pain, his humanity. You think of him as a person who had a mother and father, had a puppy that he loved, was loved in return by a dozen people, laughed, cried, and loved. Your heart aches; watching this is so emotionally affecting that it actually puts you in severe distressed to be watching them. You think of what he did and why- he was acting out tremendous rage and pain and grief, lashing out at the world in an orgy of intolerable emotion. You think about all of this, and then you think: this execution is just. Do it- but end his suffering as soon as possible, please.
Think that’ll ever go into style? I think the world would be a much better place if it did, but for some reason I think Dr. LaBier would be horrified.
