My empathy crisis

I’ve been thinking so much about the ongoing conflict in Gaza. It continues to weigh heavy on my heart, but I’ve been mostly silent about it online. It’s not like everything I feel or think has to find its way to my Instagram account – it’s just that a few months ago, I felt quite differently. It was important for me to advocate online in whatever capacity I could.

It’s been 180 days as of today.

I remember that some time in the first few weeks of October as I watched what was happening in horror, I kept telling myself that it would be over soon. It wouldn’t be possible for this kind of destruction to carry on for long.

I’d say these things from a place of ignorance –– I obviously had no idea what kind of solution might cause it to stop, and still don’t –– but I knew for sure that it HAD to stop.

It’s like when you hear about a horrific car crash in the news, and you cling to the morbid hope that the victims met with a swift end. That they didn’t suffer. You do this to make the news you’re reading more palatable.

But the truth is often far more bleak. Like I said, 180 days.

I find myself unable to decide what I want to say anymore. My outrage used to feel fiery (by my standards), and now it’s lingering smoke. I don’t have any good explanation for it. I’m reading, learning, and somehow being LESS able to clarify my thoughts, or even have thoughts.

It’s not because I think obscene violence is justified. Or because I think the mass slaughter of civilians is complicated. Did I just fizzle out? Have I grown complacent or indifferent? Indifference is the most insidious enemy.

I’ve been feeling like I’m having a bit of an empathy crisis, so this essay is about empathy, and my recent learnings about it. I’m about to have a very unfinished conversation.

What is empathy?

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Trying to feel their feelings and think their thoughts. Seeing yourself in them. That’s how I understand it.

Empathy allows us to connect with others through a sense of shared humanity. This (hopefully) compels us to act justly. Seeing a reflection of yourself in another person – their capacity for love, pain, and fear – motivates you to treat them with kindness, respect, and dignity.

This explains why empathy is the center of many social justice movements. We argue for the ethical treatment of animals, for example, by highlighting their intelligence and complex emotional lives –– qualities we recognize in ourselves.

But should genuine concern hinge on this self-centered exercise? It’s starting to feel a little simplistic to me. Empathy almost feels self-absorbed. Do I need to put MYSELF in someone’s shoes to care for them? Is there a reason I may not care as much if it’s just plain old them? In their shoes?

Do I need to rely on a sense of likeness to care about others?

Do I have to look at people the way I look at a mirror and see myself in them, and THEN be motivated to treat them a certain way? Isn’t that just validating my own feelings instead of genuinely engaging with their unique reality?

I’ve been finding it harder to actually, truly empathize with people that are so different from me because I can’t find any common ground. The shared humanity that I love to talk about is seeming more and more abstract.

Us vs them

This section is for people like me, at kindergarten-level philosophy.

We belong to groups. Big groups, little groups. Your family, race, religion, marital status, friendships, where you live, whether you’re millennial – all of those are groups you belong to. They’re the people you feel close to and have things in common with.

Psychologists of the day were trying to come up with a sick name for this phenomenon so they called them in-groups. Conversely, everyone that’s not in our group, i.e. outside our group is called out-group.

This us-and-them social sorting system is normal and powerful. It has a huge impact on how we experience empathy. On one hand it’s good because it fosters a sense of belonging, solidarity, and shared identity with the in-group.

But on the not good side, it can lead to a phenomenon called othering. Othering puts a spotlight on the differences between the in-group and the out-group. People that aren’t like you are threatening, inferior, or too different to care about.

The concept of in-groups and out-groups isn’t inherently negative – it’s a regular part of social organization. But recognizing its influence allows us to become more aware of our biases.

A feminist philosopher named Simone de Beauvoir said that we define ourselves by who we are not. She wrote a book that explores how men have historically defined themselves as the “Self” and women as the “Other,” which made it a lot easier to oppress women and deny them the same rights afforded to men.

Simone’s main point was that empathy can be limited by our sense of in-group and out-group. We readily empathize with those similar to us, but struggle to do so with the “Other.”

This is obviously a problem because ethical behavior requires us to consider the humanity of everyone, not just those in our comfort zone. Or our in-group.

Radical otherness

Another philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas then came up with the idea that maybe empathy isn’t the only route to ethical behavior.

The world is full of people fundamentally different from us, the “others” who fall outside our in-groups. What about them? Should their lack of ‘sameness’ exclude them from ethical treatment?

What do you do when you struggle to empathize with someone that just seems so far away or fundamentally different from you? To answer these questions, Emmanuel came up with a concept called radical otherness.

This means our ethical responsibility arises from encountering someone fundamentally different from ourselves. The Other with a capital O. It’s not about shared experiences or understanding their perspective, but about recognizing their dignity despite the gulf that separates you.

I found it interesting that Levinas put a lot of emphasis on a person’s face when it came to recognizing the Other. He says that encountering someone’s face, a symbol of their unique humanity, creates an ethical responsibility. Their otherness becomes a call to action – to recognize their value and offer them respect, even if you can’t climb into their shoes and feel their experience.

I’d like to imagine that we actually do live in a world where a person’s face inspires some kind of ethical responsibility. Like in the movies, when someone is going to shoot a person but then they lock eyes with them and then shakily put the gun down.

But that’s just the movies. We do not live in that world. That world does not exist.

People look straight at each other’s faces and do all sorts of horrible things to them anyway.

And Emmanuel Levinas knew this.

He was born in Europe somewhere in the early 1900s, and if you paid attention in class, you’ll know that the first half of the 1900s was not a nice time for many people in the world.

Levinas was a young man when the Nazi tide swept through Europe, and although he escaped to France and eventually fought in the French army, most of his family died in concentration camps.

Traditional ethics, built on reason or shared humanity, seemed inadequate to Emmanuel. Shared humanity was not enough for people to act right. Empathy, with its reliance on commonality, failed to prevent the dehumanization of so many people back then.

And today, it’s the same.

So does acknowledging the radical otherness of people help? Emmanuel says that seeing someone (and I mean straight up looking into their face) who is super different from you is – in itself – a call to action.

I’m wondering what that action ought to be.

Does “othering” help or harm?

I picked these two philosophers for two reasons:

1. They kinda talk about the same thing, and
2. Apparently they had beef back in the day and argued a TON about different stuff and Simone called Emmanuel a sexist pig and he got offended and then eventually they fell in love and got married.

No they didn’t!!! I already said this isn’t a movie, grow the heck up.

(Actually the fighting bit is accurate. If you want a blow-by-blow update, this article explains everything.)

Okay back to it. Here’s where Simone and Emmanuel didn’t agree:

• Simone highlights the dangers of in-group dominance. When one group holds excessive power over another, “othering” mechanisms are used to justify that power imbalance. Dismantling these mechanisms, she argues, is essential for a more just society. Makes sense, Simone.

• Levinas’ ideas were a LOT more abstract. He doesn’t talk about dismantling social structures, but focuses on the individual encounter. The ‘face’ of the Other becomes a symbol of their unique humanity, demanding our ethical response regardless of our ability to fully understand them.

I personally find Emmanuel’s philosophy a little too confusing to grasp, but I am, as evolutionary biologists say, a noob. So what do I know?

The paradox of empathy in a faceless world

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy and its use in a modern context.

Every marketing report seems to suggest that my generation and onwards are the most socially responsible, we’re the champions of justice. We care more, we do more, we fight the fight – BUT – I’ve noticed that Levinas’s emphasis on the “face” seems strangely absent in our everyday interactions.

Technology facilitates a life lived at arm’s length.  Most people I know can go about their entire day without needing to look at another person.

You can work remotely, order your food online if you’re too lazy to cook and select the option of having the delivery person leave the food at your door. If you want to cook, you can have groceries delivered, you can buy whatever you need online, learn everything you wanna learn in a virtual classroom, and never have to look at another face again.

This isolation, ironically, coincides with a rise in loneliness, self-absorption, and social anxiety. I’m not saying it causes it, but does it? I don’t know, can someone Google that please.

The question I’m asking is: Can we truly cultivate empathy for the Other if we don’t behold their face (not literally unless you wanna get punched)

Can both be true: Can we be looking at fewer faces yet still have greater empathy? Should I not be taking these theories so literally? I don’t know. Can someone Google that also, please?

In many ways, our generation does care more than others, sorta. But I’m also aware of how it’s easier to reserve our strongest emotions for distant tragedies, while the needy/different/suffering people around us can soon become inconvenient or annoying. They’re background noise. They don’t ‘serve us’. They kill our vibes. They’re bad.

When we look into the actual face of The Other, and not just people on a screen, we’re often confronted with uncomfortable and inconvenient truths about them. We may not agree with their choices, their beliefs, or their worldview.

We may not like the person that looks back at us. So what then?

The world has been pretty overwhelming, but our ethical responsibility doesn’t hinge on solving global crises. There’s a lot of value in the quiet, consistent commitment to being a decent human being to the faces you actually see around you.

This decent-human-being daily practice can bridge the gap between the micro-ethics of everyday kindness and the macro-responsibility to care for the wider human experience.

Back to my original discomfort

I’m not trying to excuse my feeling of diminishing empathy for people far away by saying ‘Oh we should care for the people around us first.’ I hope that’s understood.

Now that I’ve critiqued the limitations of empathy and acknowledged the challenges of radical otherness in our disembodied world, I’m wondering where this leaves me as far as genuine ethical action is concerned. Where I am now, what I’m doing here, and where I ought to go

I’m gonna have to keep examining my own biases and engage with the uncomfortable truths I find along the way. Like maybe my empathy-muscle isn’t damaged, it’s just lazy. It wants things easy.

Which is why the path forward, as always, is messy and uncertain.