Empathy

The human ability to empathize with other humans, to place oneself in the shoes of another, is a skill that is greatly diminished in modern society. The emphasis on the constant acquisition of material goods so pervasive in today’s consumer lifestyle cheapens human relationships because it trains people to see others as mere stepping stones to some selfish sense of satisfaction. Everyday interactions with other people — everyone from close friends to strangers on the street — are seen only as valuable to the extent that they can produce some benefit.

As a result, most of us have lost practice with empathy, a skill that grants any person the seemingly magical ability to feel what someone else feels and to see what someone else sees. Scientists, in fact, believe that when a person employs her gift of empathy, she is literally reading the mind of her empathic target.

In America, destructive social policies towards indigenous Americans and African slaves have acted as powerful barriers to the development of empathy as a cultural value.  Genocide and enslavement were only possible through a rejection of the basic humanness of the indigenous American and African — and in this process, the oppressor, by denying his capacity for empathy, became less than human as well.  Frederick Douglass, writing about his life as a slave, observed that even the most friendly of slaveowners was forced to repress his essential humanity if he wished to benefit from a system of exploitation and oppression. “Nature had made us friends,” Douglass noted of a kind mistress, but “slavery made us enemies.”

Today, it is modern consumerism that prevents people from empathizing with those who are the burden bearers of society. Those who are fortunate enough not to have a menial job often never think about what it might be like to work behind a cash register year after year, or to answer phones in a call center, or to not have any health insurance or disposal income other than the perpetual debt of credit. And in line with Douglass’s comments on slavery, the miniscule percentage of Americans who end up as giant winners of the current economic system must eventually stop empathizing with their fellow humans so as to justify and remain complacent with their own wealth and privilege.

Color continues to serve as an important way of keeping Americans divided as well. In California, for example, those serving behind counters, cleaning houses, and picking the food that ends up on grocery shelves (among other things) are brown, typically Mexican but also from other Latin American destinations. In other parts of the country, the color of servitude remains black, which makes one wonder how much has fundamentally changed since the first slaves arrived in 1619.

If we as Americans were genuine in our attempts to empathize with oppressed groups in our country, the need for large scale social change would be self-evident. Currently, it takes doomsday catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina to highlight the plight of the most disadvantaged in society, yet the speed at which that disaster was forgotten is an unfortunate indication of how little empathy actually exists.

Similarly, if Americans began to empathize with non-Americans, they might begin to question the high levels of aggression and militarism their government currently maintains against various countries all over the world. To think about what it might be like to live in a war-zone with the threat of bombings, gun-fire, air-raids, and the intrusion of foreign troops in one’s home and businesses — as millions of Iraqis and Afghanis must do everyday — would rattle many people’s perceptions concerning the benign nature of military intervention. To think about what it might be like to actually feel the torturer’s tools on one’s flesh would make that half of Americans who think torture is justified rethink things, perhaps.

And if people of all nations began to empathize on a global level, with the ecological system that is the planet-at-large, they might begin to wonder whether the caustic conditions of modern society have in some way displaced humans from the natural world. In the maze of technology now produced by current economic systems, we have forgotten that we are a part of nature, not above it. How else to explain the indifference to the pillaging of the few remaining resources left on the planet and to the devastation wrecked to the Earth’s ecosystem that is taking place right now from climate change?

Relearning the gift of empathy is an important first step in understanding the tremendous problems that Americans (and the species more generally) must come to grips with over the coming years. It is a step that means leaving the shelter of one’s own experiences so as to enter the minds of others and to entertain different points of view. Empathy is the pathway towards compassion and provides a compass towards deeper truths of human experience.  Through empathy, every person can come to see the false allure of consumerism and the myth that we can be happy by ourselves, alone and separate from the minds and hearts of other people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Alternative Living, Freedom and Spiritualism, Social Alienation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.