Too Much Empathy? Rely on Identification as Path to Social Redemption?
Are we empathizing with others too much, not identifying with others enough? Empathizing is imagining, not feeling. Identifying is truly feeling another's feeling. Empathizing is conscious action. Identification doesn't need consciousness. But we often hear about over-identification having unhealthy consequences, from
Western civilization has hit some hard times of anger, fear, and violence. We've erected media bubbles then try to engage in call out culture when that bubble bursts. The United States government has shut down. Brexit is divorcing from the European Union. Asylum seekers get turned back at borders with little, if any consideration, allowed to die in deserts or on the sea. Leaders aren't trusted by the people, mainly because they don't listen to the everyday people buried under student loans and all other types of bills, while the 1% glories in their tax cuts. Illiberal democracies have flourished, while the marginalized and their allies fight to just be treated as human beings in all their identities. Also, don't forget that people get stopped, frisked, and sometimes shot in the streets and their back yards just for the color of their skin by law enforcement (and often because of calls to the cops by people without melanin).
The list could go on, but I'm just a straight white cis-male guy. I don't have these experiences, but I can hear about them from other people, whether through
I often have a hard time listening to the accounts. Though I've lived in Chicago, I haven't viewed the Laquan McDonald. Do I need to? I believe it has happened. I've seen a lot of blood and gore on television and in the movies. I have listened to the NPR/Chicago Tribune podcast 16 Shots, which covers the case of Jason Van Dyke, the police man who shot McDonald, and goes into some detail about what actually happened that night.
I don't avoid the video because I don't want the bother or that I don't think it has value as an artifact history or anything like that. Instead, I find it easy to feel sad and shame at the knowledge that the event has occured. I can imagine the horror of what happened that night by
Strange to say, but I can identify with the misfortunes of others through the fear of losing or not having the fortune that I have. I can't say that I fully understand or have visceral comprehension of the lived experience of this Other that I am not. Nonetheless, my imagination can make my pale experience intense enough to know that people who go through these experiences, survive and don't survive, have it worse by so many more magnitudes that they deserve more to allay and relieve these experiences. I would love to do more to assist in delivering, but I'm honestly working on healing my fractured heel and building a financial power base to do so.
Through the gratefulness of my own fortunate fate and the possibility of losing my condition, I can identify with the misfortune of others that comes through no action of their own.
Pundits, politicians, and people on social media profess that we need more civility and more empathy. I don't think civility and/or empathy will do enough to improve society or civilization. Civility might have a concrete action base to it. Empathy, on the other hand, remains too abstract, too much of a thought experiment. Empathy requires not just conscious thought, but also rest, food, reduced stress, and even practice. In our consumerist, career-driven, power-hungry society, and that's just to survive for some people, putting in the effort to develop empathy can cause difficulty. Even just all the exposure to
I can see how some people of privilege might not have energy to develop empathy. Frankly, I also get why a lot of people without privilege will resort to calling out others and anger after facing nonstop pressure and aggression.
But we can seek and push for identification, in connecting with each other in our common humanity. I honestly don't expect the lower rungs and marginalized parts of society to do so because they shouldn't have to face their every day marginalized reality. Identifying with those other than them will only show them how shitty they've got it.
Identification for the privileged, however, can prove so much more visceral and concrete than empathy. Us in the higher rungs of society need to open ourselves and expose our emotional core to the world and the pain in it. It will hurt, I guarantee it, but we have the power to address that pain if we band together and concentrate our efforts. The thing is, we have an inbuilt instinct to identify in this way, if we just show the will to open ourselves and look at reality. It will help us feel more connected. We may not have as much happiness, but we will have more sense of meaning, which can give us more.
In stories, killers who have redeemed themselves or soldiers often try to stop the innocent from killing. Historical records and studies have demonstrated that people have a hard time killing. Fascist parties, organizations, ethnic groups, and nationalistic countries have to go to great lengths to dehumanize other groups and enemies for their members to kill with vigor. Cops have to be trained for trigger happiness while also falling back on internalized racism for dehumanization to do it even easier. Someone has had to make an academic discipline and training practice called Killology to figure out how to teach soldiers and police to kill even better. This same man has identified video games as teaching children to kill by using his very same techniques.
I believe people lose a part of themselves when they kill and require dehumanization and need all this training to kill because they identify with their victim and have to de-identify from their victim to intentionally kill. Studies have shown that killing in the name of revenge or white hot anger proves easier and has less of an affect on someone.
For other motivations, though, all these issues with identification arise. Looking into another person's eyes or even just seeing another human being close up, so much like yourself, you see yourself in the other person. The two of you have a common humanity. It just so happens that through some trick of history, you have the goal to kill the other person. You aim to snuff out their existence, to put them into nothingness that we can't conceive of, that strikes fear into ourselves. Killing that other person, we extinguish ourselves. To do so again, we have to further cut off our capacity for identification with others.
Then we have random examples in history of people who don't need to act with charity, who have everything they need, could continue living a good life, but then abandon that life for one of selflessness:
The list goes on and on. Over the last ten years, I've tried understanding George Ripley's motivations for the path he took until he became disillusioned and cynical. It took a reading up on the life of St Francis and a little more thinking to get it. Today's inspiration on reading up on St Francis came about from his prayer that I used as a mantra to encourage more mindfulness:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
I don't consider myself a religious person much these days, but this prayer sticks with me. Today, I saw a common thread with at least three of the great men I listed: The Buddha, St Francis, and George Ripley. Both the Buddha and St Francis had a common experience. Through internal character and encounter(s) with poverty: they had their privilege challenged by surprise identification with the misfortune of another. Buddha and St Francis connected, they could feel the suffering that the other person experienced and saw the injustice that came from their own privilege and wealth. These two individuals drastically changed the course of their lives, took vows of poverty, and influenced history, possibly inspiring others after them to feel such identification and seek to alleviate misfortune in the world.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.
George Ripley didn't have the same level of success. How many of my readers have heard of this man before and know anything about him? After having a pamphlet war with one of this mentors about this very topic in different words then exprienced the downturn of the neighborhood where he ministered during the Panic of 1837, Ripley tried to inspire his ministry and even his religious organization to become more active in alleviating the material conditions of the people suffering the economic downturn, many of whom were immigrants to Boston. Ripley's ministry and religious organization rebuffed Ripley so much that Ripley eventually quit his position and started the utopian community, Brook Farm, nearby to Boston. Sadly, Brook Farm failed and Ripley lost a lot of faith in humanity, pretty much just settling into becoming a writer about literature. Nonetheless, the level at which identification with the pain of others in Ripley pushed him to action provides me, at least, with some inspiration to act.
I don't know what or when that action will be. I've felt that inspiration for awhile now, even though I spent most of my time trying to understand that inspiration and try to make rational sense of it. Seeing it as visceral identification with other people just makes a lot of sense to me and more concrete than empathy, which is a tool of imagination and conscious action. Identification, however, can strike us without warning and a truly felt emotion, not lead us to feel something we think we should feel. We need to open ourselves to the shock and the emotion, considering society, our families, and many of our upbringings have led us to see that closing off as healthy and rational.
I think empathy, sympathy, and compassion all have their part in exercising our ability to identify with others. In the end, though, I believe that it will take wide open, concrete, emotional identification to lead us to a better place and time, out of this Dark Age destroying civilization.
(I understand that we need to be cautious about over-identification. Once my table clears, I'll have to look more into that side of things.)
Who's with me on this ride?
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