Empathy: We’ve Taken a Highly Personalized and Private Response and Turned it into a Social Responsibility
Emily Ladau wrote a probing essay on why Meryl Streep’s speech is an example of ableism because Streep assumed a reporter with a disability needed and wanted her gift of empathy to rescue him from a bully. https://theestablishment.co/im-a-disabled-woman-who-s-not-celebrating-meryl-streep-s-golden-globes-speech-8d67173122e7#.r2nahgha1
Did Streep know the reporter’s perspective well enough to represent it on an international stage? Did Streep ask permission to represent the reporter’s perspective? Did the reporter want or need Streep’s empathy? Was Streep making the mocking of the reporter about her own personal nervous system response instead of the reporter’s? These crucially important questions are treated as irrelevant when one person assumes she can freely speak for another person because she assumes she is benevolently speaking for someone less able, less powerful, less intelligent, less resourceful, etc.
If you are a refugee, a recent immigrant, poor, or disabled, should you pretend your thoughts and emotions are lying dormant inside of you so you can receive the empathy of others exactly how they want you to receive it? Should you strive to make people feel good about helping you in the ways they have decided you need to be helped?
The concept of empathy ignores the scientific fact that it is neurologically impossible to take the perspective of another human being because his or her thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and nervous system is so highly complex and customized. Our popular connotations of empathy were definitely conceptualized to lionize the giver, not the receiver, because the way humans are neurologically wired, it is depersonalizing and often humiliating to be on the receiving end of someone claiming to have altruistically taken on your perspective. In fact, I would say the gifting of so called empathy has become one of the main ways humans reinforce and perpetuate power imbalances.
Interacting with other people as biological equals means I assume I have no way of knowing exactly what another person’s perspective is so I can never presume to know exactly how he or she thinks or feels.
It turns out, biologically speaking, the preservation of human rights and equal rights means exactly the opposite of empathy. Equal rights means nobody has the right to pretend they can fully understand the thoughts and feelings of another person. Equal rights means each person has complete sovereignty over their own perspective. It means nobody can presume to speak for anybody else. Equal rights means nobody can use their feeling about someone else to validate how they interact with that person. My feelings, my emotional cues, are personalized bits of biological information that help me optimize my personal decision making. It doesn’t matter if my emotional responses are are connected to fear, anger, or empathy. I don’t use my feelings to gauge how other people should exist. My feelings exist for me to help ME make decisions about me, not to help me make decisions FOR OTHER people. I need to rely on information that comes directly from other people, not my personal nervous system, to figure out how to interact with them.
If we ever want to achieve equal rights, we must understand we will never ‘help’ others by foisting the empathy that arises our of our personal nervous systems onto other people. Let’s deconstruct the whole framing of being a helper and a help receiver. The construct of empathy frames human interactions as if there always has to be a benevolent more powerful parent and a needy less powerful but deserving child. This dynamic makes sense because it is how we have learned since childhood to frame human relationships. To unlearn how to frame all human relationships within a power imbalanced dynamic, we must understand that each human perspective is 100% neurologically unique and 100% private. For my perspective to be equal to yours, you must never assume anything about my perspective. And you must treat my perspective as private and personal to me, so private that it can only be represented with my clarification and permission.
Diversity can only be dealt with equitably when we understand how differently we each think from one another at the individual level. The most private, personal, and protected aspect of ourselves is how we take in, make sense of, and form conclusions about internal and external information. In other words, the most private, personal, and protected aspect of ourselves is our perspective. For someone else to claim they can know my perspective is to take away my most fundamental human right.
For someone else to claim they can know how my experiences, memory capacity, processing speed, visual acuity, auditory acuity, depth perception, eye-hand coordination, sensory-motor coordination, emotional response patterns, speed, agility, etc. all integrate within my nervous system to allow me to make sense of and manage information is a false claim. Nobody can think my thoughts are feel my emotional responses from the point of view of my personal brain and nervous system.
I can have an empathetic response to you if you experience a painful loss. But my response is personal, it has everything to do with me and my associations with painful loss. My empathy can help me try to be sensitive to your pain, but it does not give me carte blanche to assume I need to channel my empathetic feelings towards you or to tell others to do the same.
If I want to imagine what you are going through, my emotion of empathy cannot perform the cognitive steps necessary to do so. I need to perform multiple cognitive steps involving memory recall, association, generalization, and analogy prediction. None of these cognitive steps have anything to do with my empathy. They are the same kinds of cognitive processes I engage to to work out a math problem. The empathy can serve as an impetus for me to try and understand your situation, but it is not cognitive skill. Emotions are not cognitive skills, only cognitive skills are…Emotions are not responsibilities and we don’t manufacture them at will. Emotions are cues our brain gives itself as feedback to calm down our nervous system or excite it, period. We have turned the word empathy into an all powerful kindness dictator when it is a simple, private, personalized, customized, human response.
Furthermore, the right answers to all of life’s problems don’t exist in a pre-formed lump in the ether, just waiting for the best people to find them and benevolently disseminate them. Each individual human will have a completely unique solution for each problem he or she encounters. If you go to a refugee camp, you will find as many different opinions for how to solve problems as you will in affluent suburbs. People enduring hardships don’t suddenly become lobotomized. Every human being on the planet is equally neurologically complex, unique, and original in how they see and interact with the world around them. Assuming otherwise is to take away the most fundamental of human rights, the right to one’s own perspective.
Assuming one has cornered the market on what empathy is, who has it, and who doesn’t, is the liberal version of assuming to know what God is and who has God on their side. Both are a function of intellectual elitism and righteousness that arise from basic misunderstandings of how a human brain works.
It is no wonder the word empathy has become weaponized. Lacking empathy has become a terrible accusation and the word is most often used to accuse those perceived to be lacking in it. That a lack of empathy is used to shame those who allegedly don’t have enough of it reinforces how little the term has to do with genuine human compassion. Our popular connotation of the term empathy is a term that indicates power seeking when one wants to assert his or her own perspective as the right and proper perspective.
Lack of empathy has also been defined by allegedly empathetic psychologists as a diagnosable symptom in alleged personality and behavioral disorders. Psychologists diagnose a disproportionate number of people with disabilities as having lack of empathy. This assertion means many of the disabled people upon whom the empathy of righteous people is benevolently bestowed cannot even know when it is being bestowed. If you lack empathy, you haven’t a clue what other people have up their sleeves, good or bad. You can’t perceive when someone is trying to be helpful any more than you can perceive when they are sad or happy. This reasoning is absurd, but the absurdity makes sense because the idea of empathy hinges upon absurdly inaccurate interpretations of our human brain.
Empathy arrogantly claims one human being can take on the perspective of another human being, think their thoughts, feel their feelings, and know exactly what they want and need. The assumption that empathy is something that should to be transferred to someone else has created all kinds of problems, ableism being just one of them. To stop trampling on the individual rights and freedoms of others in the name of empathy, we need to stop relying upon sloppy, inaccurate, and over sentimentalized interpretations for how the human brain behaves as an organ.
I would say all empathy is, is a description of a sympathetic response one human has to another. Technically we use the term empathy to indicate a sympathetic response as opposed to an angry or irritated response. But that is where I leave it.
The empathy or sympathy response is a response we cannot help having sometime. When I see a mom crying because her child was taken from her in a custody battle, I will likely cry. I have children and if that happened to me, I would be devastated. If my childless great aunt witnessed the same thing, a wonderful lady who finds children irritating, she would feel bad but not bad enough to cry.
If someone witnessed my aunt being non-plussed in this situation, they might chastise her for not having enough empathy for the mother. We have taken a simple description of a common human emotional response and turned it into a responsibility. We chastise pe0ple we believe don’t have enough empathy or the right kind of it. This situation puts humans in a double bind. It’s like telling someone they need to be angrier, sadder, more irritated, etc. Emotional responses are highly customized, personal, and private, and are not something we create at will. Emotional responses arise out of the information we are managing in any given moment to help us make predictions based on our ability to understand and manage that information. That is a fact of our brain mechanics we can never change.
To reiterate, we have turned empathy from a simple description of a kind of human emotion and turned it into a responsibility, punishable by a psychological disorder, a stern lecture, or public shaming if we don’t exercise it correctly.
Ideally, if everyone had the perfect empathetic response to every single person they came in contact with, we would live in utopia. Psychological theories base their ideas on these notions of ideal behaviors = ideal mental health=ideal society. Of course, the authority in the room in any given context gets to be the judge of what is the perfect empathetic response, so that situation wouldn’t be perfect either.
Because of our different cognitive and experiential make-ups, we cannot hold people accountable to have a specific emotional response to others, empathetic or otherwise. One reason individuals diagnosed with autism are declared to exist in a way that needs to be ‘diagnosed’ is that they have very different responses to situations. Because they organize, interpret, and manage information uniquely, their responses are unique. Instead of accepting this uniqueness as a matter of course, our psychologist have decided to name their responses as a result of personality and behavioral disorders.
My ideas about empathy are driven by how marginalized diverse thinkers are who get diagnosed for not having any of it, not having enough, or not having the right kind.
An emotional response doesn’t do anything or think anything, it simply gives you a piece of internal information with which to help you make subsequent predictions. (Part of our problem in talking about emotions is that we have been taught to assign them super human powers when they are merely biological cues to help us manage information.)
If I was a teacher witnessing a child fighting with a good friend, I would help the child by helping him manage the information of the situation constructively, not by chastising him for having an improper emotional response, or having an emotional response that was lacking. I believe my students’ emotional responses are off limits for me to comment on or try to manipulate; they are private, personal, biological cues and have nothing to do with me.
Making empathy a directive in our society seems logical at first. But it is the same thing as deciding everyone in the country is only allowed to be hungry at 3 different times a day. If they are hungry at off times, they will be lectured or diagnosed with a disorder. It doesn’t make biological sense to mandate emotions or any biological function.
I believe we can work towards constructive human relationships in literally millions of ways. I don’t think mandating empathy should be one of them. We can tackle conflict or assistance related processes with teachable steps anybody, regardless of their personal emotional responses can replicate.
Attempting to acknowledge and support someone else’s perspective as best you can, and only when requested, is always appreciated. Making my emotional responses serve as a benchmark for how I should assume other people are responding, or should respond, often causes painful confusion. Kindness is about me recognizing and allowing for extreme cognitive, emotional, and behavioral diversity and not making my nervous system the most important thing in the room. If I was with the mother who lost her child in a custody battle, I would likely be overcome with my own emotional responses. The last thing the mother needs is to have to deal with my nervous system melt down as well as her own. I never need to make someone else’s pain about me!
