Empathy

A Human Trait

Imagine for a moment that you are the leader of a powerful nation in the 21^st century. And let’s suppose you are conducting an undeclared war against another, much less powerful nation, claiming without citing any actual evidence that boats from this nation are carrying illegal drugs. Then let’s suppose that survivors from one of these hypothetical destroyed boats are still alive floating in the water, and your minion sends your military forces back, against all agreed-on international codes of warfare, to make sure those survivors are dead.

Let us further suppose that you have a kind of secret police whose purported task is to round up ad deport people who are in your country illegally, but that you deploy them in a large city that has very few such illegal aliens and encourage them to terrorize the population, arresting and detaining your own nation’s citizens and even shooting them willy-nilly, killing them indiscriminately and, when these murders are caught on camera, you deny that they occurred or claim against all evidence that the murders were acts of self-defense.

An then let’s suppose you post a racist video on your social media account that depicts your predecessors in office, who are members of another race than yours, as apes, and then chide those who object to it as engaging in “fake outrage,” and, when the outrage continues anyway, blame the video on a “staffer” (but don’t fire the staffer).

To what defect in yourself do you attribute these outrageous acts?

If you were in fact self-aware enough, you might admit that the defect here is an almost complete lack of empathy in your psychological makeup. But of course it’s unlikely that you’ll recognize this or, if you did, that you’d consider it a defect. Being who you were, you would probably have people around you who would say things like “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Or “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” That is, of course, if there’s anything left after you’ve gotten what you want.

And even if the most respected religious leader in your world hypothetically pointed out how far your acts and statements were from spiritual truth, emphasizing things like “courageous compassion” and “active empathy,” while urging believers—which you claim to be—to go beyond mere passive feelings until you can “feel the weight of another’s pain,” the odds are that neither you nor your minions will note any such comments. That is because the chief quality you are lacking if you have committed any of the above evils is the ability to see through someone else’s eyes.

Empathy is defined by psychologists as the ability to understand someone else’s emotions, and to be able to place yourself in that person’s position. It’s often confused with sympathy, but there is a significant difference. If you have sympathy, it means you can understand someone else’s position, but through the lens of your own feelings and position. Empathy, on the other hand, goes deeper. Empathy requires you to transcend your own feelings and put yourself in the other person’s shoes, to truly see the world from the other’s internal perspective. This is a natural capacity of humans as humans—one that allows us to forge “healthy mutual relationships—an essential part of mental health,” according to psychologist Douglas LaBier, who in 2010 defined and described a condition he calls “Empathy Development Disorder.”

Empathy is not strictly a human capability. Those of us who are very close to our dogs, for example, will notice how our dogs sense how we are feeling and respond accordingly. Our old collie Atticus used to recognize any time my wife was feeling blue and would keep her company with his head in her lap. This is not anthropomorphizing animals: scientists know that our fellow mammals, for the past 180 million years of evolution, have had the capability of empathy essentially “hard wired” in their brains. LeBier notes that our brains contain what are called “mirror Neurons”:

Functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) shows that regions of the brain involving both emotions and physical sensations light up in someone who observes or becomes aware of another person’s pain or distress.

And empathy has been shown to be a key trait in our Darwinian survival: Mammalian mothers who nursed and fed their offspring, who comforted them in their anxieties an defended them from predators, left more living offspring and therefore “won” the evolution game of “survival of the fittest”—their offspring survived and so they proved the fittest. Mammals, and ultimately humans, survived and became the dominant species they are also by their ability to cooperate and to act as an effective pack, or pride or herd, or community. Being in tune with others’ emotions and desires assures this kind of success. Only beings with empathy can do this.

So if empathy is characteristic of our species and necessary for our survival as humans, how is it we find people almost completely lacking in empathy?

A more recent article from Samantha Jones (2023) enumerates several tendencies of people with Empathy Deficit Disorder: such people

· Tend to focus on their own needs and neglect other people’s emotions, even those of close friends and family.

· Struggle to build and maintain emotional connections.

· Can be overly judgmental of others and underestimate what others are going through.

· Don’t usually show appreciation or gratitude.

· Struggle to understand people from a different cultural, political, or religious background

Jones notes that such “EDD” behaviors might be the result of being on the autism spectrum. Or more seriously may be symptoms of a bipolar disorder. And of course it’s common (I’d venture to say most common) in antisocial and narcissistic personality types. In particular, the last of the above tendencies is a particularly widespread racist trait. In a 2021 article, Dr. Elizabeth A. Segal, a professor in the Social Work department at Arizona State University, asserts that “A review of numerous studies concluded that the racial bias in neural responses is a culturally acquired prejudice”—I other words such people are not born without empathy but their racism may no longer even recognize that related Empathy Deficiency Disorder is a learned behavior, and therefore can be unlearned, with therapy.

But to unlearn such attitudes, particularly if they result from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is an extremely difficulty process involving a whole lot of therapy. One would have to really want to change. Someone like the person you imagined yourself to be in the beginning of this Substack may not even see any purpose that might be served by reconnecting with his inborn empathy, if it does not immediately contribute to his perceived Highest Good: money and power. What’s more puzzling is how millions of humans ignored their own mammalian empathy, the product of millions of years of evolution, in the belief that a better leader would be one who saw no value in knowing anything about his fellow humans and saw no reason to relate to them but saw his own self-interest as the only goal. Is it possible to reeducate an entire electorate? Or is our time of ”winning” the evolutionary game about to expire, as a result of our having thrown away our empathic advantage. Time will tell, but will we still be here to see it?