There has been much discussion lately, on these pages and elsewhere, of empathy – that ability to understand and share the feelings of another, or the other. It is supposed to be the higher form of consciousness which allows us to walk in another’s shoes. But like most things, empathy has a few important nuances to it.
The pioneering Black psychologist Kenneth Clark – whose early work helped convince the Supreme Court in Brown vs The Board of Education – noted in his work two kinds of empathy: chauvinistic empathy and empathic reasoning.
Chauvinistic empathy is the most ordinary form today – it is when we extend empathy only to our predisposed in-group, but not to those who are truly other. It is why we can open our hearts, homes, and wallets to those we empathize with. And turn a garden hose on those we don’t.
Empathic reasoning, on the other hand, Clark maintained, is a skill which must be developed using “reasoning and sensitivity to others.” It can be emotionally painful as it means subduing our ego so that not only our feet that walk in those shoes, but our imaginations and minds too. Not our hearts, our feelings, but our minds and imaginations.
Hannah Arendt, one of our most popular philosophers of tyranny lately, maintained that empathy is a matter of thought, not feeling. That “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” By that she meant using literature and history to train one’s empathy muscle to go visiting where we would otherwise dare not tread – don’t want to tread.
The news, or more likely our social media feeds – the frenzy of posts, likes, sharing, smack talking – does not teach us empathy, but rather tribalism. And as we have seen since Oct. 7, 2023, how tribalism crushes empathy – how feelings always trump thought.
The notion of having to train ourselves for empathy is not something most folks want to hear. We feel our feelings are more important – our feelings tell us if it is “safe” to extend empathy to an out group. But Clark and Arendt are pleading for what we might call ‘long form empathy” – an empathy that comes from studying those we find it difficult to relate to or even understand.
Arendt’s “train your imagination to go visiting” is just that: we cannot gain empathy from the news, we must study that which we have no access to, and that has always been through novels, history, music, and theater.
The great Denis Lehane’s novel “Small Mercies,” for example, allows the reader to follow a white single mother in South Boston during bussing in the 1970s. The reader must wince for pages as the protagonist comes to realize that her own and her community’s history of racism has destroyed her daughter and family. At the end of the novel, that stone-cold realization is all she has left.
“White Trash” is a history of white emigration to the United States and explains why some pockets of white immigrants – think Appalachia – arrived in poverty and have remained there for 300 years.
This is not a homework assignment! But empathy is not something we are born with; it is not something liberals are especially good at and conservatives not. Empathy is not a state of mind that supports anger; empathy is the moment when we go, “Ah! Ok. Didn’t know that!”
Our humility is triggered when we experience empathy, we realize in that moment the difference between sympathy and empathy – between feeling and knowing. According to Clark and Arendt the difference is in how much effort we make to understand those our feelings dismiss as enemies; those who make us uncomfortable in our normal tribal skins. To understand the other is not to accept their belief system, but it does mean our own beliefs are open to nuanced change and not fixed forever.
But empathy is in short supply these days, as is understanding, long-form reading and simple quiet thought. Confusion reigns. Why? Mostly because there is always a riot on our social media feeds, some dumpster fire that is far more attention grabbing than the history or novel sitting in front of us which offers quiet enlightenment, but no visceral excitement.
This confused hive-mind knows no ideology, it is America’s head stuck up our social media behinds where the echo chamber does “mesmerize, hypnotize and tells those lies.”
Chauvinistic empathy has taken deep root in America – partly because like America’s waistline, we have gotten used to being flabby, out of shape. Arendt’s “muscle” of imagination is long out of favor and withered. Training our imagination “to go visiting” is also out of step with our 15-minute attention spans. So, we mostly don’t go “visiting,” we instead hang around what is familiar.
Clark’s “empathic reasoning” is the order of the day, but it means we must accept we have enormous “potholes of ignorance” in our minds that need filling – filling with new knowledge.
Otherwise, as I tell my students each fall, that pothole will only grow until it swallows you whole.
Joe Gannon, writer and teacher, lives in Easthampton. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.