Empathy: The Pain of another

1. Empathy: The Pain of another

2. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759 • How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. • Section 1, Chapter 1

3. Adam Smith—everyone has empathy Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

4. How Empathy Works, according to Adam Smith  {We see our brother put upon the rack and. . . } By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels. For as to be in pain or distress of any kind excites the most excessive sorrow, so to conceive or to imagine that we are in it, excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception. That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. The mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation. 

5. The term empathy itself doesn’t come into use until the late 19th century Today Theodor Lipps is remembered as the father of the first scientific theory of Einfühlung (“feeling into,”) although the term had earlier been coined by Robert Vischer in 1873. Lipps used the notion of Einfühlung  to explain not only how people experience inanimate objects, but also how they understand the mental states of other people. Einfühlung, according to Lipps, entails fusion between the observer and his or her object. For Lipps, the unconscious process of Einfühlung is based on a “natural instinct” and on “inner imitation.” He used the example of watching an acrobat on a tightrope and suggested that perceived movements and affective expressions are “instinctively” and simultaneously mirrored by kinesthetic “strivings” and experience of corresponding feelings in the observer.

6. Why Empathy? • Empathy is largely cited as a universal good, a path to tolerance and an antidote to violence. • Every major religion holds up empathy as a virtue. • Several studies cite literature as a means to cultivate empathy. • Empathy is often placed at the center of children’s and young adult’s literature. • Empathy—or lack of it—is often cited in evaluations/diagnoses of struggling/marginalized students

7. Questions/Queries in Empathy Scholarship • Can/should we empathize with oppressors? • How does technology erode/enhance empathy? • Do we need a body in front of us to empathize? • Do we need to hear a story to empathize? • What is gained through empathy? What is lost? • Can/should we empathize with nonhuman creatures (robots, animals?) • Where does empathy belong (or does it?) in a competitive world?

8. Empathy and Democracy • Once we dispense with hereditary status, we must decide how to treat one another by how trustworthy they seem—how they make us feel. We must also be willing to modulate our responses to • The most popular genre of novel in the revolutionary era was the seduction novel, in which a charming rake seduces and ruins a young woman who listens to her heart, rather than her head. Many scholars read these texts as allegories depicting the anxieties that early Americans had that too much fellow feeling could be dangerous. • But if we cannot empathize with one another—and trust that others empathize with us—we cannot have a functioning system in which each citizen is tasked with thinking of the greater good.

9. Empathy was key to social reform movements.    ‘Mother, I don't need to keep awake, do I?’    ‘No, my darling; sleep, if you want to.’    ‘But, mother, if I do get asleep, you won't let him get me?’    ‘No! so may God help me!’ said his mother, with a paler cheek, and a brighter light in her large dark eyes.   ‘You're sure, an't you, mother?’    ‘Yes, sure!’ said the mother, in a voice that startled herself; for it seemed to her to come from a spirit within, that was no part of her; and the boy dropped his little weary head on her shoulder, and was soon asleep. How the touch of those warm arms, the gentle breathings that came in her neck, seemed to add fire and spirit to her movements!   • . . .  If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, to-morrow morning,—if you had seen the man, and heard that the papers were signed and delivered, and you had only from twelve o'clock till morning to make good your escape,—how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours, with the darling at your bosom,—the little sleepy head on your shoulder,—the small, soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or Life Among the Lowly (London: George Routledge and Sons 1867) 22. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s wildly popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sought to make her readers “feel right.” That is, they needed to feel the pain experienced by enslaved people in order to be moved to action to help them.

10. “My own Two children are exactly the same age.” “Imagine what those two little girls went through," Murphy said. "And imagine millions of other little boys and girls like them who had in their mind this place called America, a place that would welcome them, who would rescue them from the disaster that had become their lives, and imagine that dream that was literally hours away for these two little girls, extinguishing for millions others like them all around this planet."

11. REAding has been celebrated as a means of cultivating Empathy “Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom. Although literary fiction tends to be more realistic than popular fiction, the characters disrupt reader expectations, undermining prejudices and stereotypes. They support and teach us values about social behavior, such as the importance of understanding those who are different from ourselves.” –Scientific American Oct. 4, 2013

12. SO Empathy IS A UNIVERSAL GOOD WE ALL AGREE ON? RIGHT? NOT SO FAST . . . • Empathy for one’s own group seems almost hard-wired. Such empathy often invokes an antipathy from those outside the group. • Does empathy reside in the body or the mind? • If empathy is an aspect of biology, should we privilege it? Should we even bother teaching it?

13. “The Empathy Gene” • Simon Baron Cohen’s 2011 The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty attributes evil acts to a lack of empathy. He then goes on to argue that empathy is an inborn trait, traceable through genetics. Some people have it, and some people don’t. And those that don’t, according to Baron Cohen, are much more likely to be, or at least to do, “evil.”

14. THE CASE AGAINT EMPATHY • Empathy for one’s own group seems almost hard-wired. Such empathy often invokes an antipathy from those outside the group. “My beef is with empathy in particular, with its role in decision making. Empathy has certain design features that do make it positive in certain restricted circumstances. If you and I are the only people on earth and you’re in pain and I can help you and make your pain go away, and I feel empathy toward you and so I make your life better, empathy has done something good. But the real world is nowhere near as simple. Empathy’s design failings have to do with the fact that it acts like a spotlight. It zooms you in. But spotlights only illuminate where you point them at, and for that reason empathy is biased. I’m likely to feel empathy toward you, a handsome white guy, but somebody who is repulsive or frightening I don’t feel empathy for. I actually feel a lot less empathy for people who aren’t in my culture, who don’t share my skin color, who don’t share my language. This is a terrible fact of human nature, and it operates at a subconscious level, but we know that it happens. There’s dozens, probably hundreds, of laboratory experiments looking at empathy and they find that empathy is as biased as can be.” –Paul Bloom, Vox.com, August 20, 2018

15. Empathy for our own: Demonizing the other • How does this bias function in • Flight? • All American Boys? • Kindred? • March? • Stuck in Neutral? • How do the characters respond? What do we make of their responses? • Empathy’s bias towards the familiar can make it less possible to actually engage and understand the pain of others (especially if “our” group has a hand in that pain. . . . )

16. WHAT HAPPENS IN THAT SPOTLIGHT? • Each of the books chosen for this unit ask us to think about what happens in the spotlight of empathy. • When does empathy become possible? • What has to happen for empathy to be transformative? • What are the risks of allowing oneself to feel empathy? • Does empathy carry a moral obligation? • What happens when one feels oneself outside of empathy?

17. WHAT QUESTIONS THESE TEXTS RAISE ABOUT EMPATHy • The golden rule is do onto others as you would have others have do onto you. But what if the others want something different than you would? • Can we really feel someone else’s pain? What happens when we do? What is gained? What is lost?

18. How to navigate Being Denied Empathy: Being the Enemy in someone else’s story • It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.---W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk, 1903.

19. Is Empathy inescapable? Can it thwart power? • It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.'’ • James Baldwin