Roots of Empathy. Mary Gordon

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       What Is Empathy?

      IN ONE GRADE 4 CLASS, nine-year-old Sylvie was wearing running shoes that did up with a Velcro strap. Some of the other children taunted her, saying she wore “baby shoes” and “geeky shoes.” She was the target of a double-barrelled criticism—her shoes were not only cheap and unfashionable, they were immature. This is the kind of humiliation that would shrivel the spirit of any nine-year-old. But then something happened. When the class headed outside for recess, Sylvie’s best friend June swapped one shoe with her. The empathic insight and quick thinking of that child gives us hope. Her actions said, “I’m your friend and I’m proud to wear your shoes and be just like you.” She turned a mean, exclusionary attack into something playful, without saying a word. Every other child in the class got the message: “This is my friend, make fun of her and you are making fun of me. Keep it up and you may find yourself outnumbered by kids who care.”

      In his paper “Truth and Ethics in School Reform,” the philosopher Thomas McCollough writes, “Moral imagination is the capacity to empathize with others, i.e., not just to feel for oneself, but to feel with and for others. This is something that education ought to cultivate and that citizens ought to bring to politics.”¹ Empathy is frequently defined as the ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. I would add and to respond appropriately to the feelings and perspectives of others. Expressed this way, it sounds simple enough. Perhaps it is only when we reflect on what happens when empathy is absent that we begin to grasp the profound, complex and fundamental role it plays in the healthy functioning of human relations.

      When we think of the Holocaust or South Africa under apartheid we are horrified at the scale of cruelty perpetrated on an entire race of people. We might try to distance ours elves from the injustice by focusing on the fact it was long ago or far away and couldn’t happen here, couldn’t happen now. But think it through. Were the people who participated in these affronts to human rights, or stood by and watched them happen, fundamentally different from us? And if they weren’t, what force was at work that drew them into a situation that we find unconscionable? In both cases, a tremendous amount of propaganda, indoctrination and intimidation went into convincing the dominant population that Jews, that black South Africans, were alien, threatening or something less than human. But we know that while a great many people were either active or passive participants, many others resisted the propaganda and actively involved themselves in helping victims and struggling for change. It is crucial to understand what accounts for the difference in these two kinds of responses. The difference lies in our capacity for empathy, our ability to identify with the feelings and perspectives of others. If we cannot see the other person as human like us, we will not be able to identify with him. If we cannot put ourselves in his place, we will not recognize his experiences and feel what he feels. This failure of empathy at best leads to complicity and apathy; at worst, it leads to cruelty and violence. We could learn a lot from the nine-year-old girl with the Velcro shoe. She stood up to injustice and confronted cruelty and unfairness where she found it.

      On a less historical, global scale, the same forces are at work in the bullying that plagues our schools and communities. The victim is singled out on a number of grounds—perhaps because she is smaller, weaker, has poor social skills and few friends, or is a new immigrant, talks differently, has a different skin colour. Whatever the factors, they are used to marginalize the victim, to define her as different and inferior to the dominant group. She then becomes not only the victim of the bully, but also—to a lesser, but still hurtful, degree—the victim of the onlookers. There search on bullying confirms that a strong characteristic of the bully is a lack of empathy. In the case of onlookers, fear of or admiration for the bully outweighs their ability to feel or act on empathy for the victim. The consequences for everyone are severe: a toxic environment is created in which the bullying behaviour is not challenged, and children are not given the skills and confidence to stand up to the bully, to stand up for themselves and to stand up in defence of the victim. When we do not actively work to turn this around, we are failing to give our children the tools to form healthy, respectful relationships. We are failing to show them that bullying is destructive and we are failing to give them a sense of their role as members of a civil society.

      An extreme outcome of this failure can be seen in the case of Reena Virk, the fourteen-year-old British Columbia schoolgirl who died following a brutal beating by her peers. There were eight teens, seven of them girls, directly involved in the beating. Other boys and girls watched it happen and only one witness made any attempt to intervene. No one reported the attack until Reena had been missing for four days. One of the girls involved has recently been convicted of second-degree murder in Reena’s death following a third trial. At the trial, evidence was given that Reena was kicked in the head, that attempts were made to set her hair on fire and that she was held under water until she stopped moving. Among the lessons we have to learn from this tragedy is that physical bullying has been “degendered”—it can no longer be seen as the purview of the male throwing his weight around. Just as critical is the fact that most of these young people were fourteen years old. It is obvious that, if we are going to change the conditions that allow such things to happen, we have to work with ch ildren from a much earlier age.

      Nature is on our side in creating strong, empathic societies. We are born with the capacity for empathy. An ability to recognize emotions transcends race, culture, nationality, social class and age. Researchers have shown photographs of human faces to people of various ages around the world. Without hesitation, the people can point out which photo shows someone who is afraid, someone who is happy, someone who is worried, someone who is sad. Our feelings, and our expression of them, are universal.² Show a tribal chieftain in Mali a photo of a little Japanese girl who is frightened, and he will immediately be able to recognize how she is feeling—despite the differences in race, clothing and culture. The emotions, and their expression, are the same. Clearly, our emotions and the need to have them understood by others are so basic that the visible signals of how we are feeling have become essential СКАЧАТЬ