Empathy Without Borders

Jonathan Johnson
Jul 10, 2017 · 14 min read

Microscopic shards of bone litter the ground; their more full-fledged brothers and sisters either excavated or unearthed. Am I stepping on them now? All I see is the verdant landscape, the green grass hugged by the sun-kissed butterflies dancing around. Walking around the fenced in perimeter makes me question whether I am in a secret garden or a mass detention center, with the latter being the previous incarnation of this currently picturesque museum about the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia’s Genocide. To my right is a manicured, gravel path anchored by several benches, while a canal path towards a dike gently curves to the left. Turning the corner, listening to the audiotape explain how this variegated garden used to house untold horrors, I see a fraught, elderly worker, or, at least, I think he is. He beckons me to walk down the canal path, which I heed with a simple wave, “Yes — I plan to, but this experience shouldn’t be rushed.” He adamantly continues waving, with a toothless grin.

Whether curiosity or deference got the best of me, I do not know, but I decided to abandon the audiotape about the genocide and walk down the canal path, puzzled about this rather vigorous employee. Like a butterfly peaking through the grass, my mind started to unwrap the true picture before me, with frenetic and startling moments of clarity and uncertainty: This man is on the “other” side of the fence. His tattered clothes are not an employee’s uniform; he is hobbling there — not gardening; he cannot even gain his bearings, given his right leg is noticeably butchered.

Suddenly, I am thrust into the present, removed from my reflections about audiotapes or picturesque landscapes. Here — on the other side of this tome to memory and torture — is a Cambodian living this legacy. Whether he was old enough to live through the genocide, I cannot be sure, but his story and physicality speaks across the fissures that museums and textbooks often struggle to bridge. After he pantomimes and sycophantically repeats, “Land mine…money,” I give him some cash. Perplexed and still processing the situation, all while the audio recording about a survivor’s story plays in my ears, a young boy wearing a steely grey and faded blue t-shirt with slightly shredded jeans comes running up from out of the thicket. He begs for money also. This time I decide to simply say, “Share.” I take one last glance, before drooping my head toward the ground, hoping the Killing Field’s littered soil will provide me with shelter from the more visceral reality just across the fence.

In a site predicated on tapping into emotional reserves and empathy, and that attempts to make the scale of the Cambodian Genocide and its depravity digestible, my interaction with the sullied young boy and weathered old man forced me to revaluate the purpose and design of the museum. Museums are places of historical memory, manicured to sanction remembrance, while educating us, delighting us, or, at times, harrowing us. In museums about deeply traumatic events, their purpose is even more specific: to tap into human empathy and cognition to bring the scale and horrors of the past into perspective. But the juxtaposition between the eerily peaceful Killing Fields and the impoverished Cambodians across the thin ditch begs a crucial set of questions: What can sites of memory (museums, battlefields, etc.) produce and not produce? And, more importantly, what are the limits of our empathy, if any? Finally, if we have no inherent circumscribed limitations, how can we expand our ability to empathize?

To answer these questions, an exploration of how museums produce empathy and engage visitors without inundating them with grief is necessary. Both moments at the museum — touring the Killing Fields and interacting with the impoverished Cambodians — underscore a theme in a majority of sites of remembrance: sterilization. As I walked through the Killing Fields, signboards littered with information about absent torture devices, wagons, and buildings filled the voids left behind by their original inhabitants. The grass surrounding the mass graves grew unkempt, but as if a human hand strategically made it look approachable, yet wild. The park benches bordering the clearly laid out path through the museum fit the natural motif; they curved organically like trees, complete with hollowed out replica tree trunk tables. They made the formerly scarred landscape more user-friendly, approachable, and serene. More sterile to stop the past from haunting me too eerily in the present.

The ways this museum sterilized the tragic content is tied to the assumption that intellectual processing requires spaces of reflection and distance. Being too close to “reality,” like I was at the fence, limits the ability to ponder, think, and evaluate; instead, instincts and short-term decision making “take over.” When walking through the grounds, I tried to imagine the scenes that must have occurred here: throats slit, bleeding crimson essence, with jingoistic music blaring; exposed, worn bodies morphing into a giant humanoid exoskeleton in thirty foot deep pits; the whips, knives, and palm tree spines covered in a sundry of bodily fluids hanging casually from a rotting wooden porch. However, my brain rescinded the conjured memory. I closed my eyes and started analyzing the sites, letting my brain’s frontal cortex overpower the visceral emotions of the hippocampus. I needed a reprieve, a bench or casual stroll, to remove the taxing labor of empathy. The museum’s sterilized spaces and calming scenes, the benches and tree-laden paths, did the trick, letting me focus on more intellectual, less stressful pursuits.

But, was this the right thing in the long run?

It is crucial for us to ask what we lose by sterilizing an inherently complex, emotional, and messy affair, specifically through this museum’s tactics of designing spaces for reflection, crafting a fact-laden, moralized audio tour, and scientifically anesthetized exhibits.

The museum provided audio and visual commentary in conjunction with the location’s built in story in the gnarled hills and sparkling pond. The audio commentary created a relatively lucid fact based tale of harrowing struggles, taking you through the experience of being dropped off in the pitch black, to being tortured, to finally being disemboweled and desecrated in a thirty-foot ditch. Stories of survivors and guards were sprinkled throughout this general narrative, reminding you that this convenient walking tour was far from that forty years ago; it was a mandate for execution. Given the relatively streamlined story and clearly delineated path through the fields, I pondered how much this method could capture of what I perceived to be the chaos, however methodological its execution, that occurred at this site: the anguish of being pulled out into the dark; the fear swelling up in one’s belly as he or she hears muffled cries outside; the sense of inevitability blanketing the taciturn long houses that housed the prisoners. The audio narrative provided a much gentler, standardized version of that story. On top of that, the story fit into the standard narrative tropes we have become accustom to in storytelling, especially for tragic tales: fear, lost love, and eventual peace. In the desire to make it digestible, however, we might have lost the most crucial component — and reason — for telling these atrocities: creating empathy by recreating and grappling with an inherently jarring, messy experience. Instead, approachable narratives and jaw-dropping statistics took precedence, to create comfortable engagement and empathy that does not deeply unsettle our perspective(s).

Similarly, some of the museum’s more graphic visuals stood housed in translucent, quarantined spaces. The bones of identified victims rested in a gilded central tower and memorial, labeled by their cause of death and age. Children’s bones and unearthed clothing fabric resided in clear glass boxes nearby. Undeniably, part of this is to protect the artifacts, but it is telling that the presentation often mirrors scientific imagery. We need to see the bones and clothes in the glass box to “know” the truth (and feel comfortable with it); the gnarled hills covered in gentle greenery could not have possibly housed — or continue to house — thousands of decayed bodies. We need to see the skulls with scientific evidence of cracked skulls and blunt trauma to cement the narratives we have heard from survivors, academics, and perpetrators. We need the site to embrace the imagery and tropes of scientific authority: clean, comfortable, and analytically dissected.

Imagine if we did not have these pseudo-sterilized images and artifacts? What if this museum simply relied on narratives and the natural landscape? What if the bones were kept in the ground, with you actually stepping on the skulls, femurs, and tattered clothes? What if the story was told chaotically, your path through the grounds unclear and bewildering? Imagine literally walking on the bones of the past while trying to navigate a murky present path. While conjecture, I hypothesize this would be unnerving for most of us, destabilizing and transgressing the boundaries between us and the past, the victims and our contributions to, or complacency in, their suffering, and our moral boundaries in regards to deference for the dead. Nevertheless, it — incontrovertibly — strokes a more ephemeral, unsettling feeling: empathy.

Regardless of a museum’s tactics, there are benefits and costs. Sterilization has its benefits. The streamlined narrative made the mechanics and scale more digestible, while still paying credence to some personal narratives. By following a normative story telling arch, tourists knew how to better engage with the space. The layout and manicured landscape, in partial ways, created liminal spaces for reflection. This gentle rolling field is where mass murder happened? The juxtaposition of these two ideas called for reflection, and then the museum provided you a space to do it. Overall, the sterilized spaces aligned with many of our other experiences and assumptions about how to act and engage with museum spaces, making it easier to take in.

However, as my hypothetical scenarios provoked, we also lose some of the visceral feelings that transgressing these standard tropes of engagement creates. In a different museum honoring and remembering the victims of the Holocaust, an artistic exhibition laid thousands of metal, simplified faces in a cavernous pit, inviting you to walk across the vast field from a small triangular ledge. I remember feeling tepid, even with the unspoken invitation it seemed insulting, against my moral (read: cultural) code. I took the first step. Screeches filled the original silence. My foot recoiled. My stomach dropped. My retraction created another coiling screech and clunk that echoed throughout the chamber. It is a moment I will never forget, because those sounds symbolized many individuals’ complacency towards genocide and violence: we simply keep walking on with our lives, not realizing that this supposedly innocent act is condemning thousands of “generic, unknown, distant” individuals to the slaughter. But the true genius of this memorial’s design laid in its ability to create empathy, to transgress my morally comfortable ways to engage with these spaces. It did not invite me to view it like a scientist inquiring about bone damage or stare at the place where it happened to comprehend the situation. It did not even tell me that I was supposed to walk across it. Instead, it left a small ledge and enabled me to take the leap forward…or not. It did not give me facts or figures. It asked me something to do something significantly harder: to feel discomfort and empathy.

The crucial question is which do we value more: stoking empathy by troubling our culturally produced ways of engaging with memory or making these sites digestible to a mass of individuals by using culturally informed ways of engaging with museums, like sterilization, reflection, and scientific proclivity towards seeing the truth?

I cannot answer this crucial question fully (What is more valuable is heavily dependent on the context.), but I can explore an underlying set of questions that informs it: What are the limits to our empathy versus the limits to our intelligence — and can we inherently train one more than the other? And, if there is an imbalance, why, and can it be changed?Answering these questions will enable us to understand which is more feasible.

Empathy, or emotional intelligence, necessitates an ability to understand another’s situation and experience. As the trite phrases go, “See the world through their eyes” and “Walk in their shoes” (which still embraces the scientific and cultural mandate of needing to analyze the world with our five senses, especially sight). This parallels the general definitions of cultural relativism and competency, albeit these use distancing language to conform to academia’s desire for objectivity: distance yourself from your cultural assumptions to view and appreciate another culture’s assumptions and acts.

But, throughout the tour I found my eyes and feet failing me. I needed to get off my feet to decompress the gravity of what I had heard in the narratives, and my eyes tended to avoid gazing too long, in fear that the bones or trees might come alive to beg for money or torture me with their excruciating dark history. When I could not absorb the sensorial overload of information, I used my camera as a screen to protect me, using photos as a way to collect the data, rather than my heart. The more foreign tactics outside of sterilization shook my foundation, causing me to retreat to more comfortable methods. My empathy felt limited. My intellectual exercises, my strength.

Similar to the breaks we occasionally take during intellectual exercises, I needed to reprieve from the intense emotional work it took to engage with this space. We use many different strategies — what some might call, emotional outlets, though I think emotional work breaks is a more apt term — to do this: art, poetry, ignorance, thinking, socializing, therapy, and more. Recognizing this while I walked through the museum (or more aptly, paused in the museum) made me ponder why we do not train ourselves to handle this kind of emotional weight more often. We do for intellectual, objective exercises, but not the personal, emotional exercises that provide crucial, albeit different types of facts. Most of our institutions of education are littered with the necessity to develop critical thinking skills and intellectual curiosity, but do not emphasize the necessity to develop emotional intelligence and caregiving skills (except when confined to short lessons in elementary school or elective classes in high school). This is the reason that intellectual exercises felt like my strength.

But the Killing Fields did impact me more than similar experiences in other countries, including concentration camps in Germany and heartbreaking museums in America. Given my cursory thoughts, the difference stems from that contrite phrase: I knew those shoes. Overtime, I had become more accustom to emotional work, conducted during small group discussion sessions on heated issues, visiting sites of trauma and memory, and academically studying and feeling these issues through personal interactions and storytelling.

Most importantly, my heart — and world — had expanded from the confines of my proximate vicinity. The Killing Fields connected to emotions across an array of experiences and places: the frustration I felt in Germany when an intellectual tour muted the feelings of loss bubbling up inside me; my Malaysian students’ smiles and laughs that easily could have been one of the harrowed faces of the victims lining the torture facility in Phnom Penh; the time I broke down staring at a pile of discarded Jews’ shoes in the United States Holocaust Museum. Similar to intellectual exercises, being able to draw on multiple data points and similar experiences created richer, deeper insights — deeper emotional investment and awareness. Practice made (more)-perfect.

While engaging in similar spaces that use these originally “uncomfortable” methods helped me to empathize more, the standard everyday exchange work I conduct as an ETA also helps. Everyday, I attempt to understand and check my cultural views, answering seemingly trivia, but important questions like, “Why do Americans keep their shoes on in the house?,” to more controversial dilemmas like, “Am I okay with the corporal punishment present in Malaysian schools? Why do I feel an irk to this?” You can ask any ETA or person who engages cross-culturally: it takes work, especially emotional work. Fortunately, experiencing this helps us expand our empathetic abilities.

However, this type of work remains difficult, while my academic, “objective” work does not — and the impact, more limited. The museum’s mostly standardized tactics did not enable my empathy to extend past the confines of the gated perimeter. But the occasional unexpected moments or tactics, like my moment with the elderly man and young child, did not free my empathy to soar to distance places. My empathy could not travel to Syria, or Darfur, or Rwanda, at least, not in the ways my intellectual curiosity could. I can still reflect and analyze genocide without a second of hesitation, but conjuring more empathy for those suffering in Cambodia and those who suffered in Cambodia remains stifled by the how daunting the project seems. How little I feel prepared. More drastically, while I have logical empathy for other victims of genocide and violence, they certainly do not keep me awake at night out of guilt and emotional fatigue. Yet, they keep my brain up late at night and drain me of my intellectual capacity to figure out how to address genocide.

I hypothesize this is because of our prolific cultural and societal emphasis on the “inherent” value of scientific inquiry over emotional inquiry, of intellectual labor over emotional labor. Throughout American society, we aggrandize analytical fields, like science, law, and business, while diminishing the challenging labor that consumes emotional fields, like nursing, raising families, and art. We pay them less. We are less likely to want to be them. Doesn’t it make sense then that we are not good at — or even care to learn how to — empathize? Fortunately, as my example shows, this is not because we lack the inherent ability (or, potentially, that it is inherently hard to teach); rather, it is because our society does not value it, and thus does not train us. Think of how children can feel moved by the slightest moment, and then surprise us by connecting it to the most eloquent, crystal clear insight, all while letting themselves feel the depths of their emotions. But sadly, while we admire kids for this “naïveté” and “simple world view,” we often hastily begin stamping it out because we continue to operate in a system that prioritizes logic over emotion, even if we have the inherent ability to learn both.

Thus, I think it is crucial to explore what other tactics can increase our emotional intelligence. What makes it easier to imagine this scenario, to recognize the comparable situations happening today, and to emblazon the passionate to fight against these events?

My answer is pretty simple. Engage with discomfort. Listen and explore new places. Question why you feel morally outraged. Hold yourself accountable for gut reactions. Recognize that underlying these emotions is intense logic and repeated unspoken exercises. Understand that emotional work does not detract from analytical work; they are symbiotic. Only when we do all of this, whether at a museum or while laughing with teachers over why Americans are weird for walking with shoes in the house, can we truly start developing the skills necessary for empathy. Only with practice can we not feel the instinctual assault toward “our” practices or the “other-worldly” practices of others. Only with practice can we connect the silly phenomenon with crucial and contentious moral issues (In the case of the shoes, we hypothesized that it is permissible for us to wear our shoes on the floor because the floor is not a social space like in Malaysia; yet, in a similar vein, it is not appropriate to put your “dirty shoes” on the sofa or living room table because it transgresses the same logic that social spaces should not be soiled.). Only with practice can we learn to harness and appreciate our deep, perplexing emotions to inform and expand the logic informing them. And vice versa, only with practice can we use our intellectually honed skill-set to expand and inform our empathy.

The dichotomy between logic and emotion is not as clear as we would like. Our emotions and logic inform each other. However, how we craft these qualities is different. We tend to craft analytical skills through wrote exercises, worksheets, and reading. We tend to craft empathy when we see and engage with the muddiness of these intellectual exercises in the real world. While the methods to develop these skills are different, the depth of insights we get by connecting them means we need to hone both to truly develop empathy and intellect. One cannot truly blossom without the other. We must let our empathy inform our analytical exercises, and let our analytical work inform our empathy. When we do both, we do not scurry away from the intense burden of both our emotional and intellectual labor, while strengthening both skill sets.

Unlike I originally thought, my time absconding to my intellect at the Killing Fields did not detract from my ability to empathize. Rather, my two juxtaposing interactions, studying the past horrors and seeing the present inequity, forced them to engage, to connect. Despite the lack of conscious intent, I embraced the best ways to grow our empathy: engage with difference, question constantly, and allow myself to feel and think at the same time. If harrowing museum’s true goals are to engage with our empathy and intellect, then increase them, they should embrace these methods. Hopefully then, the path towards their overarching mission — eradicating cruelty from humanity— will blossom, leaving the trauma of the past forgotten in the soil and the promise of the future sprouting over the rolling hills.

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