Our weird world of empathy

And the old world of spanghew

The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world

— Plato

Empathy is one of those words like compassion, kindness, or patience. Important, meaningful words, that have a long, long history. Valued and taught by good parents to their offspring. Deeply entwined in the teachings of religions, philosophers, and all wise men and women in all cultures since time immemorial. Right?

Nope.

Empathy was not even an English word until the early 20th century. The Plato quote above? It floats around the internet, but it’s not a thing Plato ever said. The word’s meaning has already made a few twists and turns in its brief history. It didn’t mean what we think it means now until around WWII. Interestingly, it was an art term in an earlier incarnation, something about feeling like you have the qualities of a tall tree when you look at a picture of a tall tree. Jesus never thought to give a sermon on empathy. Buddhists, the notorious connoisseurs of the internal workings of the mind, somehow overlooked empathy. It was not until 1909 when psychologist Edward Titchener introduced it as an English version of a fuzzy German word sometimes translated as “feeling into”.

I have a theory why, despite the fact that English has a giant vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words—including Spanghew, which is a totally essential word for throwing a frog with a stick—empathy was overlooked for thousands of years as a thing that needed its own word. My dubious theory starts with Caravaggio and rotten fruit. I am slightly oversimplifying the history, but what we will pretend is that, up until the rotten fruit, art was generally depicting some sort of ideal. The ideal body, a virtuous hero, a mythological journey, or a flattering portrait of some important person. It was something to aspire to, not to feel for. Fruit was a symbol of abundance and was depicted in paintings in an ideal way. Caravaggio, in my retelling of history, painted rotten fruit because he had the Buddhist adjacent insight that the ideal fruit was fruit the way it actually is. The truth of the fruit. Rotting, wormy truth.

If art before Caravaggio fruit was a viewer, on earth, looking into the world of the gods, then art after Caravaggio fruit was a viewer peering into the world of earth, from the distant, invulnerable perspective of the heavens.

Long story short, this led to empathy being a thing.

It may sound like I skipped some steps, but really only one. Once art became at least in part about showing the world what we are, not what an ideal would be, the only ingredient missing was the technology to absolutely drown the world in art. Film, Photography, mass media, internet etc. Only then does the word empathy appear masquerading as some longstanding human trait or skill or something.

Still lost? Only when we are able (forced?) to look at so many distraught people, sad puppies, or anyone in a situation outside are immediate surroundings, (we could do it every waking second if we wanted) does it become possible to ignore it. I could spend all day looking at pictures of the holocaust, and feel absolutely terrible, or I could just, like, not do that!

If you live in a hunter-gatherer tribe currently being slaughtered by the neighboring one, you can look away, sure, but you are in it, like it or not, if you want to live, being sad for the lonely children of another tribe who’s parents could die in this fight might not help you much. Even in Caravaggio’s time, There were some paintings around, there was some art, some theater, a guy telling some stories, but this was an exceptional experience, not an unavoidable incessant march of images finely tuned to make you feel stuff.

There is a big difference we take for granted between things we see in our surroundings, and things in the world we peer into through images and video, stories, books. Our feelings towards people in our immediate surroundings are finely tuned by our evolutionary history. We can’t help but feel many nuanced things about the nuances of everyone else. Our survival depends on it, because not only can other people be vulnerable to danger, we are likely to be vulnerable to that danger too, and maybe even to them. Maybe they are the danger. So we balance our warm feelings towards others with necessary instincts to protect ourselves, and it’s not optional, it just happens.

When we look at an image of a person, or imagine them in our minds eye, it is from a place of absolute safety from them, and anything in their surroundings, and their situation. In order to feel what we would automatically feel if we were in their space, we have to imagine ourselves in their shoes. And that is something we don’t have to do if we don’t want.

Hence the need to valorize a thing called “empathy”.

Scrolling through the #empathy on Twitter, I noticed a few different strains of posts, which are interesting. One is just people posting vague positive warm feely things. Empathy may be one word in a long list of positive emotions and such.

The most straightforward use of empathy specifically is just to get people to take action after looking at an image or video of people in difficult circumstances. If you are raising money for hungry kids in a remote place, you ask potential donors to put themselves in the shoes of the people in the pictures, and then point them towards what action to take.

There is another strain that is for people in leadership positions, doctors, psychologists, or anyone who’s work involves responsibility for a large number of people they might not have personal connections with. This is an interesting twist, because it suggests that empathy helps fill in a gap that the modern world creates. If you are a tribal leader, you probably don’t need to practice imaging what the rest of the tribe cares about. You know these people, you are related to a lot of them, and you all depend on each other to stay alive. There is no private island to escape to with your fortune if you take a big risk and the shit hits the fan. To a CEO of a large company the employees become abstractions. The people who work at the corporate headquarters that she interacts with are a small fraction of the total workforce. For doctors, they are making decisions all day long that can be maximally impactful to their patients, but not so much to them. They can go home safely to their gated community, regardless of what the outcomes are for these strangers that keep showing up unannounced in the ER with their problems. So empathy is encouraged.

Whether you think empathy is good or bad, it’s history points to a jarring realization that the world we now live in is so different than the world of Plato, Jesus, or Caravaggio, that a word we pretend, maybe with good reason, is a sacred inheritance from ancient wisdom was actually less important to our ancestors than flinging frogs with sticks.