Empathy — The Secret Ingredient for Social Change
Empathy is at the heart of humanist philosophy. By practicing empathy, and letting it influence our actions, Chrys Stevenson believes we can spark a “compassionate revolution”.
By Chrys Stevenson
Scrolling through social media recently, I stopped abruptly at a confronting image — a foot with a deep, uneven, bloody gash. Dr Sally, one of the people I follow on Twitter, had been kayaking. While dragging her boat behind her, she tripped. The kayak slid down the back of her leg, carving a canyon into her heel. This appeared in a gruesome close-photo as a deep river of red ooze, bordered by a ghostly white frill of shredded skin.
My reaction was visceral. As my Mum would have said, “Oooh! I felt that right down in my fanny!”
Yes, there was that unpleasant prickling feeling in my underbelly. But, also, my saliva suddenly tasted metallic, the soft tissue under my chin felt numb with a rising nausea, an electric current danced through my nerve endings and the hairs on my arms stood up in horror. I wasn’t just witnessing Sally’s pain — to some degree I was feeling it. Though I only know Dr Sally from Twitter, at that moment, we were physiologically connected. My heel was safe and intact, yet, in seeing the evidence of her pain, I also felt it.
If I had been with Dr Sally, this empathetic response would have compelled me to rush to her aid. Helen Riess, author of The Empathy Effect (2018), explains:
“When we see someone in pain … pain pathways in our own brains light up, though to a lesser degree. This is the emotional part of empathy — sometimes called emotional resonance… [Your] sophisticated neurological system allows you to observe others hurting and gives you just enough of a taste of the pain to consider helping them out.”
I think most people would agree that empathy is vital to human well-being and survival. So, it’s surprising that the word only entered the English lexicon 100 years ago, as a translation for the German word einfühlung — and it didn’t have the same meaning then, that we attribute to it today. Einfühling means projecting or ascribing human feelings to an inanimate object, and that was the original meaning of empathy. It wasn’t until the late 1940s that the queasy feeling I had when I saw Dr Sally’s grated heel was also described as empathy.
In the 1990s, the study of empathy moved on from psychology and began to get all “sciencey.” Neurologists discovered cells called mirror neurons in the brains of monkeys, birds, and other animals and, later, (it was claimed) humans. These researchers hypothesised that mirror neurons may have evolved to make us feel empathy. As studies progressed, scientists suggested that humans’ mirror neurons are far more strongly evolved than those of other primates. Neurologist, Dr Giacomo Rizzolatti explains:
“We are exquisitely social creatures. Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others.
Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.”
But the hypothesis that empathy originates in our mirror neurons, and that mirror neurons are an evolutionary adaptation, is hotly contested within neurology — they are puzzles that are yet to be resolved.
Recently, concerns have been raised that our capacity for empathy is declining. A 2019 study by the American Psychological Association concluded that, increasingly, people simply can’t be bothered making the mental effort to empathise with others — even if the feeling being shared is not pain or sadness, but joy.
Many humanists who are engaged in lobbying for the legalisation of voluntary assisted dying have been astonished at the apparent lack of empathy from those who oppose it — particularly when so many families have described their loved ones’ assisted deaths as loving, joyous events. Pope Francis recently referred to the growing demand for VAD as “false compassion.” Similarly, Australian Catholic bio-ethicist Dr Megan Best has criticised people seeking an assisted death for their “lack of willingness to endure.”
Earlier this year, an anti-mask activist in the US died of COVID-19. His lack of empathy towards others was articulated at a meeting in late 2019:
“My health has nothing to do with you. As harsh as that sounds, our constitutional, fundamental rights protect that. Nothing else. I’m sorry if that comes off as blunt and that I don’t care. I do care. I care more about freedom than I do for your personal health.”
Whatever causes us to feel empathy, it’s bizarre that this feeling, so familiar to most of us, wasn’t explicitly named until the middle of last century. But, of course, empathy was felt and was identified long before. As early as 8BC, the Greek poet, Homer wrote in The Odyssey that “taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other’s good, and melt at other’s woe.”
A 1964 experiment puts the COVID sceptics and anti-VAD campaigners to shame. Researchers at Northwestern University found that rhesus monkeys would choose to starve themselves rather than pull a chain that delivered food at the cost of administering an electric shock to a companion.
The fact that animals have been shown to have empathy suggests the emotion pre-dates the evolution of homo-sapiens.
Looking to the future, it’s predicted that empathy may become the most vital, and most highly valued, skill of the 21st century. As societies become more highly automated, intelligent machines will take over a great deal of our manual and intellectual labour. But, as yet, machines cannot be trained to think empathetically — we will need humans to fill that gap. Increasingly, employers are seeking workers with “soft skills” like communication, teamwork, creative thinking, and empathy. In 2013, George Anders, senior editor at large of the professional website LinkedIn, noted that in all of the fastest growing occupations in the United States a key requirement was empathy.
Humanism has a role to play here, because empathy is at the very heart of the humanist philosophy. As we move through the 21st century, humanists can carry the torch for empathy, suggest ways in which it can be developed (reading fiction, for example), perhaps even offer courses. Humanists Australia is already developing programs to train secular wellbeing officers or ‘chaplains’ who can bring kindness and empathy to situations of real life need alongside traditional faith-based care providers. Humanist chaplains and celebrants are particularly well placed to empathise with people marking stages in life through ceremony. Humanism has a vital and developing role in training suitable, empathetic practitioners and connecting them to their communities. Beyond this, humanists can show that “feeling in the fanny” you get when you see another person in physical or existential pain, should, wherever possible, be followed through with compassionate action.
Empathy is much more than just a queasy feeling or getting a bit teary at something you see on TV — although those reactions can help us recognise and nurture our connection with others. Empathy is the “secret ingredient” that will help initiate structural change and fuel the compassionate revolution we need to heal the world.
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