Boler- the risk of empathy- in Feeling power

 THE RISK OF EMPATHY

P. 155- Educators, philosophers of emotion and politicians have not abandoned this project of cultivating democracy through particular emotions, of which empathy is the most popular.. Across the political and disciplinary spectrum, conservatives and liberals alike advocate variations of empathy as a solution to society’s “ills.

Empathy is taught in legal and medical education under the rubric of ‘narrative ethics’; there is now a journal entitled Literature and Medicine. Cognitive scientists claim empathy as a genetic attribute, and speculate on a neurological map of ethics (May et al. 1996). Empathy has been popularized recently through the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, further publicized through Oprah, Time magazine and National Public Radio. Empathy, a primary component of “emotional intelligence quotient,” is a product of genetic inheritance combined with self-control, Aristotelian fashion. This emotional literacy, essentially a behavioural modification program, is now taught in hundreds of public schools throughout the United States.2 Finally, in the last fifteen years of Western “multiculturalism,” empathy is promoted as a bridge between differences, the affective reason for engaging in democratic dialogue with the other.

But who and what, I wonder, benefits from the production of empathy?

156- While empathy may inspire action in particular lived contexts—it is largely empathy that motivates us to run to aid a woman screaming next door—I am not convinced that empathy leads to anything close to justice, to any shift in existing power relations. In fact, through modes of easy identification and flattened historical sensibility, the “passive empathy” represented by Nussbaum’s faith in “poetic justice” may simply translate to reading practices that do not radically challenge the reader’s world view

Nussbaum admits that no matter how powerful a vision of social justice is gained by the empathetic reader, our habituated numbness is likely to prevent any action. “People are often too weak and confused and isolated,” she says, “to carry out radical political changes” (1996:57). One can only hope then that empathy is not the only viable route to inspiring change. As another colleague succinctly stated, these ‘others’ whose lives we imagine don’t want empathy, they want justice

P. 156- I invoke a “semiotics of empathy,” which emphasizes the power and social hierarchies which complicate the relationship between reader/listener and text/speaker.

P. 157- Empathy is distinct from sympathy on the common sense that I can empathize only if I too have experienced what you are suffering. Throughout the discussion that follows, a key question remains: What role does identification with the other play in definitions of altruistic emotions? Can we know the other’s experience? Briefly I suggest that in the definitions above, pity does not require identification; sympathy employs a generalized identification as in “that could be me” or “I have experienced something that bears a family resemblance to your suffering”; and empathy implies a full identification

P. 160- Passive empathy produces no action towards justice but situates the powerful Western eye/I as the judging subject, never called upon to cast her gaze at her own reflection

P. 161-162- What does it mean to experience a pleasurable read and be spared the emotions of rage, blame and guilt? In what ways is passive empathy related to the dehumanization strategies used to justify and represent war?

162-Passive empathy absolves the reader through the denial of power relations

 163- To summarize my queries, I can entirely agree with Nussbaum’s description that literature promotes “identification and emotional reaction” which “cut through those self-protective stratagems, requiring us to see…things that may be very difficult to confront—and they make this process palatable by giving us pleasure in the very act of confrontation” (1995:6). This palatable permission of pleasure motivates no consequent reflection or action, either about the production of meaning, or about one’s complicit responsibility within historical and social conditions. Let off the hook, we are free to move on to the next consumption.

P. 158- I further distinguish “passive empathy” to refer to those instances where our concern is directed to a fairly distant other, whom we cannot directly help. Some philosophers have it that in such cases the sufficient expression of concern is to wish the other well. I shall argue that passive empathy is not a sufficient educational practice. At stake is not only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront

By imagining my own similar vulnerabilities I claim “I know what you are feeling because I fear that could happen to me.” The agent of empathy, then, is a fear for oneself. This signals the first risk of empathy: Aristotle’s pity is more a story and projection of myself than an understanding of you. I can hear the defensive cries: But how can we ever really know the other save through a projection of the self ? While I share this question, our inability to answer it adequately is not a defense of passive pity. More to the point is to ask, What is gained and/or lost by advocating as a cure for social injustice an empathetic identification that is more about me than you?

P. 163- ALTHOUGH USED TO give the illusion of universalized experience, empathy cannot produce one kind of universal relation between reader and text. Empathy is produced within networks of power relations represented by reader and text, mediated by language, narratives, genres and metaphors. The missing paradigm in theories of emotion across disciplines is an account that shifts emotions from being seen as the property or idiosyncrasy of the individual, towards a collectivist account.15 Who benefits from the production of empathy in what circumstances? Who should feel empathy for whom? If no change can be measured as a result of the production of empathy, what has been gained other than a “good brotherly feeling” on the part on the universal reader? As one small contribution to this project I propose “testimonial reading” as an alternative to passive empathy

P. 164- Empathy offers a connection and communication we don’t want to lose. It’s possible to identify the sense in which we’ve all been hurt, but to do so without a reductive denial of specificities.