Empathy
Description
Michael Zakaras:
"In simple terms, empathy is the ability to understand the feelings and perspectives of others, and to use that understanding to guide one’s actions. We’re probably most familiar with it in our relationships with family, friends and colleagues. Empathy encourages us to look beyond ourselves and to consider those around us, and to take on new perspectives – to understand not just what someone is doing but why they are doing it. “Empathy conjures up active engagement – the willingness of an observer to become part of another’s experience and to share the feeling," says author Jeremy Rifkin. In this way it can help us to see problems with greater clarity, and to design solutions with more humility and inclusiveness. It’s the key ingredient that helps us move from working for people to working with them."
(http://www.kosmosjournal.org/articles/empathy)
Etymology
Alice Gribbin:
"The word “empathy” entered our lexicon in 1909 as a proposed English equivalent of Einfühlung. That original meaning is altogether different from, and in a way the opposite of, empathy as it’s defined today—as the ability to vicariously experience in oneself the feelings and thoughts of another. By the Second World War, empathy’s definition was splintering within psychology. Gradually it lost its close association with art. As the term caught on with the general public after the war, empathy’s meaning cohered as an emotional ability related to sympathy, but stronger: the ability to feel how another feels. This meaning we have inherited. Today psychologists disagree over how many “phenomena” can be considered forms of empathy. Some say there are eight."
(https://alicegribbin.substack.com/p/the-empathy-racket)
On the similarities and differences between sympathy and empathy
From Encyclopedia.com :
"Sympathy is the capacity to apprehend the pain, suffering, or signs of negative emotions in man or animals and to respond to these with appropriate negative feelings. Sympathy is often an immediate, predominantly emotional awareness, but it is no less sympathetic when it is delayed and involves cognitive or reflective elements. The communication of sympathy is not required by the definition. Sympathy may involve “shared” feelings, but not all shared feelings can be communicated. Finally, the concept of sympathy, as used, has implied a fundamental capacity in man to respond to suffering, albeit by no specific neuropsychic structures. The definition, however, is not much altered by using the active form: that sympathy is the apprehending of suffering.
The concept of Einfühlung (Lipps 1903a) was translated by Titchener (1909, p. 21) as “empathy.” Empathy literally means “in suffering or passion,” but in this instance the etymology of the word and its use in aesthetics and in psychology differ. The connotations of empathy are emotionally neutral, lying between sympathy and antipathy but including the joyous emotions. Empathy may be defined as the self-conscious effort to share and accurately comprehend the presumed consciousness of another person, including his thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and muscular tensions, as well as their causes. Empathy may more briefly be defined as the self-conscious awareness of the consciousness of others."
Discussion
On the difference between Empathy and Radical Connection
KRISTEN ZIMMERMAN:
The ... "National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is working to get “Domestic Worker Bills of Rights” passed in every state in an effort to improve their benefits and wages. But instead of demonizing the employers of domestic workers, the Alliance has launched a different approach called “Caring across Generations." This campaign aims to “build bridges” among different groups (including employers) in order to find solutions, instead of “burning them” as was the danger in traditional labor and community organizing. And this is radical connection in action – the ability to confront injustice from a position of shared understanding and responsibility.
Cultivating more empathy among people with different interests and perspectives is certainly one part of this story: as social animals, human beings can mirror the feelings of others without much conscious effort, even if they have radically-different life experiences, values and beliefs. From a social justice perspective this is great news. As Caring across Generations and other campaigns have shown, it means that connections can be built and barriers transcended that might otherwise seem impossible.
But this form of empathy also has its limits. In a recent New Yorker Article, Paul Bloom shows how empathy can become a reflexive, reactive emotion that short-changes the actions and understanding required in the pursuit of social justice. On its own, empathy focuses attention on the story of an individual at the expense of the larger landscape of inequality. Embedding empathy in the individualistic cultures that dominate modern life makes it less likely that people will interrogate the systems, structures and institutions that affect the lives of individuals in different ways. Yet it is this larger landscape that makes it easier for some people to feel and show empathy than others – try it after a twelve-hour day working two shifts at McDonalds, for example. Even worse, these emotions can be manipulated to create support for one group at the expense of another.
That’s why nurturing the courage and conviction to transform these systems is just as important as developing more empathy in ourselves and others. The idea of radical connection captures this combination perfectly. It’s a visceral recognition that we are part of something larger that urges us to act for the whole community’s benefit, and not just for those few individuals with whom we empathize directly.
Sometimes our attraction to empathy may have more to with the fact that it makes us feel good about ourselves. Perhaps it can even screen people from the need to understand the real impact of injustice. But when empathy is experienced as radical connection it can take us to places that challenge our worldviews and our sense of self - places where the pain of separation, oppression and trauma are felt more deeply than any transcendent experience. These places are uncomfortable, but they also act as crucibles for self-growth and for reaching out to others without any sense of paternalism or privilege.
This is a crucial difference between empathy and radical connection, since the latter requires that we be self-critical about our own roles in perpetuating any processes that cause harm to others. If we fail to bear witness to the trauma we feel and the harm we have done; if we fail to galvanize the resources we need to heal ourselves, then we miss the potential for deep transformation. Developing these capacities is essential if empathy is to strengthen our work for social justice.
Many social justice groups use meditation and other personal development practices to cultivate these capacities. For example, the environmental group Forest Ethics attributes their success in building strong relationships with their opponents to their group meditation practice, which helps their staff to advocate for controversial causes without alienating those in government and industry whose support is needed to secure solutions. The group has already achieved success in this way in protecting hundreds of thousands of acres of British Columbian forests. Linked to the core capacity for empathy, these practices allow us to see and feel the humanity of others and to transcend the raw emotions that can block the actions required to promote social justice." (http://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/kristen-zimmerman/forget-empathy-%E2%80%93-it%E2%80%99s-time-for-radical-connection)
The dangers of misguided empathy
Paul Bloom, interviewed by Robert Wright:
"RW: Why don't you give us some examples of the damage empathy can do.
PB: So, I give two examples.
One is: Empathy sets our priorities in a weird way. It is because of empathy that we care more about a little girl stuck in a well than we do about the crisis of climate change or global terrorism—anything statistical and future-oriented. Empathy zooms us in on particular concerns, often very real and significant concerns, but it causes us to blow them out of proportion.
Worse, what it could sometimes do is cause us to address problems in ways that make the world worse. One hypothetical example I give is that if a little girl dies or gets very sick from a vaccine, we'll often shut down the vaccine program—even if a dozen people are saved each year by it—because you could feel the suffering of the girl, of her family, but the statistical abstraction that there are people who would have died but didn't leaves us cold. We can talk about some real-world examples like that.
So one problem with empathy is it misdirects our action.
Another problem with empathy is that it's used as a tool for violence and aggression. For every atrocity, every poorly thought-out war, people use empathy as a way to elicit aggression.
Inevitably, for any discussion, sooner or later, we have to discuss Trump. And Trump may or may not be an empathic man, but he is certainly adroit at using the empathy of others. And in fact, a lot of his attacks on immigration … are actually not sort of nasty claims about immigrants, per se. They are horrible stories of people raped or killed or assaulted by immigrants. And you read these stories, and you feel terrible. And this terribleness, this empathy for these victims naturally translates into aggression.
Sometimes, when people think of empathy, they think about puppies and charity and helping out lost people and everything. I think about going to war. Because whenever you see a war, just or unjust, it's used as a tool. If we ever go to a full-scale war against ISIS, we're going to see more and more videos of people being beheaded. " (https://nonzero.org/post/against-empathy-rational-compassion)
The decline of empathy
Hanna Rosin:
"more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place."
Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!
It's strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that's what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.
Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.
So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)
The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your "enemies," but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That's practically a taboo.
And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.
In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we're not thinking about it. And one thing they've found is that "one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties," says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. "Once they take the side, they're drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer."
(https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/712249664/the-end-of-empathy)