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Several people have written to me about my two previous posts about empathy. Let me remind my readers that I hadn't intended to start out my blog discussing this topic. It was The New York Times' fault for publishing such an infuriating piece that asserted that young children were selfish beasts incapable of any human decency, so that the effect of socialization was to render such wretched creatures the wonderful adults we find populating our world. My invocation of empathy was, first of all, an attempt to show that the writer of the Times piece was kidblind, for young kids are incredibly emphathetic, indeed in my experience, often much more so than adults.
But then I stuck out my neck and said that watching children discuss a picture book had led me to discover something: that empathy is not everything, that we need more than empathy to ground an adequate moral theory. My neck went even farther out, but let me stop here, for its extended enough for serious damage to take place.
Look, empathy is really important and it's one of the most important things we can "teach" children. But when we do, we are not teaching them to feel it, but to expand their natural circle of empathy. We all have, I believe, a natural circle of empathy, that is, a set of creatures for whose fate we are naturally empathetic. In the happy households Tolstoy notoriously condemned as essentially boring, empathy extends to all its members from all its members. This is, as Tolstoy also suggested, not often seen, for even in as small a unit as a family, empathy may not be universally extended. Take my own family of origen. For reasons I have not been able to fathom and at great pain to myself, my brother does not include me within his natural ciricle of empathy. Psychologists have invented the term "sibling rivalry" to make this failure of empahty seem natural, or, in any case, a condition. But the fact is that my brother has treated me in ways he would not treat a stranger and probably not even an enemy.
I don't bring him up because he's exceptional, but rather because I fear he's all too normal, that the natural circle of empathy doesn't extend very far. The great seers of religion, and I'm thinking here of Jesus especially, appear to have been able to feel empathy for everyone no matter what they had done, who they had hurt. This is an ideal that we are urged to aspire to by religious figures and institutions: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Nice words. Not very likely to do much.
For the work of extending natural empathy towards people one was previously not naturally empathetic to is one of the great, difficult achievements of education. I wonder what James Agee initially thought when he was assigned to go to Alabama and cover the lives of three tenant families. I doubt that the Harvard educated writer went on his assignment brimming with empathy. It was something about the way the people he encountered were able to forge dignity and a sense of self-worth in the most abject of conditions that hit Agee's emapthic capacity so hard that he churned out 432 pages of moral outrage at the conditions in which they were forced to exist, hoping to get all his readers to experience empathy for these poor folks. Agee came to see the humanity that was both threatened with extinction by the economic and social conditions the tenant farmers faced and yet still asserting itself in their lives as they attempted to maintain their dignity, their self-worth.
You don't have to travel to rural Alabama in order to push yourself to be more empathetic. When you read the paper and start to pass over an article about some area of the world you don't think matters or some issue that doesn't grab you viscerally, don't just give in to your habitual lack of interest in these stories. Dig deeper and see if there isn't some aspect of the story that grabs you, that makes you see the people being written about in an empathetic way.
Or go to a movie that you think you'll hate. Say a movie about the plight of intellectuals in Iran. Not something most Americans put high up on their list of things upon which they ought to be expending more empathy. A Separation, which showed only a year ago, let me see how difficult it must be to be an educated person - which means a Westernized person - in that country. But that's the easy part: for we see ourselves in the Westernized Iranians and naturally extend them empathy. What moved the film beyond the merely expected was the way it was able to extend our empathy to the religious muslim man who we come to see as trying to maintain his dignity in a world that is not his natural one.
So what I'm saying is that I had previously given empathy short schrift in many ways and that was unfortunate since it seems to have alienated some readers. Now, I hope to have shown that I think empathy and particularly the work of extending its natural circle beyond its usual, expected limits is a worthy pursuit.
The question that remains to be considered is whether the imperative to widen the circle of one's natural empathetic circle is sufficient for us to deal with the very real dangers that are facing the human race at the beginning of the 21st century.
Tom's most recent book is A Sneetch Is a Sneetch and Other Philosophical Discoveries: Finding Wisdom in Chidren's Literature. He lectures and gives workshops about introducing young children to philosophical thinking.
