Do You Have Empathy? Are You Sure?

[makoyi]

A staff person at the school I work at had lunch duty the other day, monitoring the students as they ate their lunch in the cafeteria, and she came by to gossip about her lunch shift.  Apparently, she'd noticed a magnet (Gifted and Talented) kid sitting alone apart from a group of non-magnet kids.  She decided to promote inter-class cooperation and good social skills and went to suggest this kid should slide down the couple of vacant seats between him and the small group of non-magnet kids and be friendly.  The magnet kid reportedly replied that he “doesn't mix with normal classes”.  According to this staff member, she immediately responded with a well-tempered remark about that not being very polite when what she'd really wanted to say was something about how that kid was such a snob and doesn't he realize how offensive that was to the normals of the world and that if he wants to get anywhere in the world, he'd better get off his high horse... 

Now take a moment and think about your personal response to the situation.  Go on; I’ll wait.

 

 

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Want to hear mine?  It was:  Woah!  What the heck was she thinking?!  She’s practically bullying this kid herself!

Why?  Well part of it is definitely because my own childhood includes such delightful memories as actually moving down and sitting with the group of girls next to me which ended with one of them smuggling scissors in to lunch to threaten to cut my hair off.  But mostly its that this person, this supposed normal offended on behalf of the world and so perfectly certain that everyone agrees she's right to be offended that she'll run off to gossip about it the moment she's free, has just demonstrated a complete lack of empathy.  She doesn't see it and you might not either, but this lady came up to a kid minding their own business, accused them of being a snob, and didn't once stop to think “Gee, why would he say something like that?”  Nope.  She assumes she already knows.  Even though she considers herself normal and therefore has never been that kid, only ever the kid at the next table.  And she didn't even try to put herself in this kid's shoes which is what most people mean when they say 'empathy' (though as an anthropologist, I'd personally call that egocentrism).

To make matters worse, this lunch monitor... is a special ed teacher.  She works with kids with learning problems, with dyslexia, with all kinds of problems that make them not normal in various ways.  And she works with autistic kids.  Autistic kids that huge portions of normal folk are apparently convinced are incapable of empathy.  And it’s those kids that I thought about when I heard her story.  Because that belief about autistics and empathy comes out of the mouths of people exactly like her, psychiatrists and specialists, journalists and parent activists who are gosh darn hypocrites for exactly what happened here.

How, you may ask?  Well first, we need to think about our terms, about what we're actually saying.  Especially when we're going to categorically deny someone else the benefit of doubt and assume bad intentions, possibly refuse them a basic tenet of humanity if you’re so inclined to see empathy in that way, the definitions are important. 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another...”  The problem with this definition is that it can describe two very different things.  One is the ability to put oneself in another person's shoes. Done right, it leads to treating others the way you would want to be treated.  But if you think that's the most respectful, righteous way you can act as a citizen of the world, you need to get out more. Get out of your little box, out of your hometown, out of your country.  The rest of the world isn't like you.  They may not want to be treated like you would want to be treated.

But if that's what you want to define the word as, go ahead.  Most people will agree with you, largely because most people orbit in a social world made up almost entirely of like-minded people.  But that's not all that empathy, that thing that some would argue actually makes us human, is.  There's still a definition of empathy that's related to compassion.  Because compassion isn't treating someone different than you how you'd like to be treated – no, that's called selfishness.  That part of empathy that's linked to compassion is being able to see the world as another person sees it. 

And that kind of empathy isn't easy.  Anthropologists spend years in higher education learning to do it and there's a heck of a lot of hard work that goes into it.  There's huge morality debates within the community of scholars about what to do when this kind of empathy leads you to the conclusion that the person you're empathizing with is morally reprehensible, that their world view is wrong, or abusive, or selfish.  Some people may never be able to master this type of empathy.  Not everyone can step out of their own head enough to understand how another person sees things.  Most people won't ever be able to do it on the spot for someone they don't know that much about.  Luckily for those people, they may never have to, provided they're normal (or at least not far off whatever passes for normal where they happen to live).  But what if they're not normal? 

What about those people who can't, because they're not like everyone else, practice compassion just by treating others as they would like to be treated? 

It's wrong to accuse them of being incapable of empathy.  That autistic kid who gets made fun of because he tries to talk with you by sharing interesting facts about bugs?  He was just talking to you the way he'd like someone to talk to him.  But that's not good enough, for his classmates, for his parents, for his therapist, is it?  Nope.  He's got to learn to talk to you about things the matter (to you).  You're asking him to become an anthropologist.  To, without any training, learn to see the world the way you see it and act accordingly.  And those classmates, family, doctors, some of them can be pretty tough on him when he makes mistakes.  They can point to those mistakes and say they're evidence that he's incapable of empathy.

Guess what?  Anthropologists learn things by making mistakes.  They get laughed at for tying the weaving into knots and unraveling a foot of newly spun yarn.  They get told their teachers' 4 year old daughters can do this and isn't it funny how a grown woman can't.  But then, they get shown how to do it again.  And again, if necessary.  And if they wear out the spinner's patience and the weaver's, they get passed off to the menfolk to try something that poor foreign hands may be better suited to.  Until the next day.  Why do they have patience?  Because they know we're not like them and they don't expect us to be.  And if they get so fed up with our inability to do basic things even their toddlers can manage that they shout and send us away, we go away... and when we come back, we tell a little story about where we're from, about something very different, maybe about how we don't weave things because we can buy things already woven.  Sometimes that reminds them we weren't raised to this and that in fact it did take their own daughters more than a few tries in as many days to master this.  And if it doesn't, maybe I'll mention that we don't weave beautiful patterns into rugs, but we do sew bits of cloth together in patterns and designs to make very pretty quilts and maybe they've got some mending I can sit and work on while they knit and weave because I'm certain they'll find my stitching of the highest quality.

That's what I love about fieldwork.  It's a social situation where people expect your difference and are (more or less) prepared to be sympathetic, to be patient with you, as you learn.  (Don't get me wrong, there are inevitably awkward situations in fieldwork, but my point is that there's both an assumption of difference and the chance for dialog for sorting through that cultural mis-communication).  But you, with the autistic kid (and you, diagnosing the autistic kid and counseling his parents), you don't have a whole lot of patience for mistakes, do you?  Because this stuff shouldn't have to be learned seeing as how you didn't have to learn it.  Well too bad.  He's not like you.  He does have to learn it, just like the little girl who immigrated from Bangledesh had to learn not to wiggle her head instead of nodding, not to stand so close, not to talk so fast.

Let's return for a moment to the kid and the lunch monitor.  She assumed one off the cuff remark meant that the whole staff should think of this kid as a snob.  Well let me put it this way:  Harry Potter's teacher has gone over to him at lunch and 'suggested' he go sit with Dudley and Piers.  Harry, remembering not only all the times Dudley and Piers have chased him and stolen his things and beat him up, but also all the times his aunt and uncle have told him that freaks shouldn't be a burden on normal people, replies that he isn't friends with normal people.  Yep, it sounds bad, especially if your gut reaction is to lump yourself in with the 'normal people' (as most people do), but Harry's isolation is a defense and shouting at him for being stuck up is exactly the wrong thing to do, especially if you then go and gossip about it to all the other teachers, making them dislike Harry.  Because now they're more willing to accept a little light bullying from Dudley for getting back his own and teaching that awful boy he'll have to mix with normals and like it.  Which in turn encourages Dudley and his friends to think that bullying is okay and increase the behavior.

So is this kid Harry Potter?  It’s unlikely.  But he could be and you would never know, because you didn't ask.  Kids respond to hostile environments by withdrawing and/or becoming combative.  This kid did both.  Maybe what he said was because he's prejudiced, but maybe it wasn't.  All you had to do was reply “Have they been mean to you?”  If the answer was no, it would be a simple matter to reply “Then why are you being mean to them?”  Open a dialogue.  Give him the opportunity to talk about what he means and what he's feeling because ultimately, words are just words and they're open to interpretation and therefore to misunderstanding. 

So I ask again, do you have empathy?  Are you sure?  Can you look at a disagreement, any situation where immediate decisions and values don’t seem to mesh, and consider it from alternative points of view?  Can you weigh those points of view objectively, as potentially equal to your own, to find out where that person is coming from… or do you jump right from “doesn’t fit my own view” to “wrong”?  Someday, maybe we’ll get used to interacting with people who aren’t like us.  We’ll learn how to better communicate constructively and collaboratively without the benefit of safe assumptions of shared context.  We’ll get used to no longer being able to communicate entire complicated opinions in a dozen words or less, and likewise we’ll understand that we can’t necessarily ascribe the same debates we would have encoded into those dozen words into the same words as used by others.  But we’re not there yet.