The Art of Empathy (48 page)

Waters was there in 1994, right outside Rwanda, helping to set up refugee camps in neighboring Tanzania, where Rwandans were fleeing for their very lives. But the situation wasn't so simple and emotionally accessible as a little white baby falling into a well. There was extreme violence among people of color, decades of simmering tribal inequities with brutality from both sides, squabbling among African countries, political assassinations, and multiple international relief organizations tripping over one another while UN policy makers argued about the precise definition of the word
genocide.
The media stayed away in droves, and hundreds of thousands of people died because we who might have helped or donated couldn't access the situation emotionally or empathically. These massive rescue and aid organizations don't operate on emotions alone—they actually operate on detailed strategy and extensive infrastructure. Yet if the right emotional frames aren't in place, they can't operate well at all.

In March 2012, in a professionally produced thirty-minute video, an American group attempted to address this very problem by simplifying the search for an African warlord so that people could access the situation emotionally. In the viral
Kony2012
video, an adorable little white boy is shown reacting in horror as his father sits him down and tells him about the exploits of the violent Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony. I watched the first three minutes of this film just as it started to go viral (by May 14, 2013, the YouTube version had been seen by more than 97.5 million people), but I skipped through the rest, because the emotional manipulation was
so ham-handed that all of my red flags went up. I was really offended that the little boy was used as an empathy generator, but I was pretty much alone in that feeling—for about a day. Soon, actual relief workers in Uganda and neighboring countries started asking pointed questions about who was behind this film, why military action (and vigilantism) was being urged, and why the film didn't state that Kony hadn't been in Uganda since 2006 and was thought to have fewer than a hundred followers left.

Numerous professional relief workers were astonished that so much focus was placed on a Ugandan who wasn't actually in Uganda, when neighboring South Sudan was in a full-blown refugee crisis and nearby Somalia was in a fullscale famine. No one suggested that Kony
wasn't
a violent man—Kony needs to be brought to justice—but everyone was left wondering what this oversimplified and emotionally manipulative video was truly intended to do. The filmmaking was very emotionally compelling (for many people), but in terms of its impact on the actual troubles of real people in Africa, it was a failure.

Yet it may be a worthwhile film in other ways, because it has so openly exposed the emotionally manipulative structure of a successful social justice appeal, and it has made many people much more aware of how activists and social justice groups intentionally manipulate emotions and empathy. Right now, that awareness lives in suspicion, in jokes, and in a kind of reactive rejection of these sorts of appeals. I'll be interested to see how this plays out and how other, more grounded social justice organizations will respond to the
Kony2012
debacle. I hope it will help more people realize that they don't need to be manipulated in order to help and that they should check with responsible organizations before they leap into hyperactivated, emotionally manipulated responses. Empathically speaking, it's important to clearly identify the emotional stimuli that are being used in these appeals and to question their intended purpose. You have the right to know. Social justice work is necessary and valuable, but emotion manipulation is a coin of that realm, and as we've all learned in our own lives, there's such a thing as too much emotion.

THE DARK SIDE OF EMPATHY

I'm currently observing a number of activist groups—or to be more precise, I'm observing a number of my highly empathic activist friends on my Facebook feed. Every day, ten or more of my friends will post about their most pressing social justice concerns, and they all attempt to evoke specific emotions (usually without realizing it) in their Facebook friends and followers.
“How can they
say
that?” “Can you believe the gall of this guy?” “Oh no! My local chapter just found out that . . . ,” “I don't usually post these appeals, but . . .,” “Oh how droll; I've just been called ‘oppressive.'” “You guys, we've got to act right now!” And so on. If you're on Facebook, you may have your own collection of friends like these.

Empathically speaking, I'm fascinated by all of these activist emotion displays and emotion-evoking attempts and by the emotional responses that occur in the comments sections. My Facebook feed is active with activists! Of course, I also have friends who post art, music, and funny pictures of animals, so there's a balance (unless it's election time—then all bets are off!). However, I also have people on my feed who belong to groups that are strongly opposed to one another—skeptics versus New Agers, religious people versus atheists, autism activists from opposing camps, and so forth. The people from these warring camps can't see each other, but I can see them in my feed, griping about each other and creating emotionally manipulative stories that call out, second-guess, chastise, expose, or demonize people from the opposing group. I call these groups, collectively,
conflict cultures,
because they form and coalesce around their antagonism to differences in approach, beliefs, and identity.

We've all seen this behavior, but if you strip away the words, the issues, and the specific activist stances, there's mesmerizing empathic activity going on. No matter which group you look at or what their particular crusade is, group members are being urged to increase their empathy for each other at the exact same time that they're being urged to decrease (or even extinguish) their empathy for their opponents. In this three-party
⁶⁰
version of empathy, you have self, other, and the intentionally
othered
other who (you will be told repeatedly) does not deserve your empathy. In conflict cultures, you'll find intense appeals for undying empathy for the in-group being encouraged at the same moment that reduced empathy or even antipathy for the out-group is being enforced.
We
become important and more internally cohesive because
they
are wrong. It's so simple—it's valencing for entire groups! It's also deeply seductive.

Don't get me wrong (don't
other
me!)—there are plenty of people (like Joseph Kony) who deserve to be clearly identified as dangerous and brought to justice, so I'm not suggesting that we track down Kony and hug him a lot. But let's be equally clear about what these dramatic us-versus-them narratives are asking us to do: We're being urged to choose
for
one group and to view ourselves as intrinsically righteous. And we're being urged to choose
against
another group and (depending on which conflict culture we're in) to view them as intrinsically wrong, deluded, dangerous, or even evil. We're being urged, cajoled, compelled, and even commanded to reduce or extinguish our empathy for an entire class of people so that social justice can flourish. What? I'm sorry, but empaths say,
What?

Sadly (but not surprisingly), this empathy-extinguishing behavior has pretty terrible side effects. As I've observed numerous conflict cultures, I've been both fascinated and sickened to watch in-group members turn on each other, especially when one of their own challenges the othering process or asks for balance. One day, when one of the activist groups on my feed was savaging its own members, I posted a note on my Facebook author's page
⁶¹
about it. I wrote about biologist Edward O. Wilson's challenging book
The Social Conquest of Earth,
which explores the unusual conditions that gave rise to our highly empathic species. Wilson points out that these contentious intergroup behaviors are a part of what has made us wildly successful in one sense, yet wildly dysfunctional in another. This is an excerpt:

Experiments conducted over many years by social psychologists have revealed how swiftly and decisively people divide into groups and then discriminate in favor of the one to which they belong. Even when the experimenters created the groups arbitrarily, prejudice quickly established itself. Whether groups played for pennies or were divided by their preference for some abstract painter over another, the participants always ranked the out-group below the in-group. They judged their “opponents” to be less likable, less fair, less trustworthy, less competent. The prejudices asserted themselves even when the subjects were told that the in-groups and out-groups had been chosen arbitrarily.

The tendency to form groups, and then to favor in-group members, has the earmarks of instinct. That may not be intuitive: some could argue that in-group bias is conditioned, not instinctual, that we affiliate with family members and play with neighboring children because we're taught to. But the ease with which we fall into those affiliations points to the likelihood that we are already inclined that way—what psychologists call “prepared learning,” or the inborn propensity to learn something swiftly and decisively. And indeed, cognitive psychologists have found that newborn infants are most
sensitive to the first sounds they hear, to their mother's face, and to the sounds of their native language. Later they look preferentially at persons who previously spoke their native language within their hearing. Similarly, preschool children tend to select native-language speakers as friends.

The elementary drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership easily translates at a higher level into tribalism. People are prone to ethnocentrism. It is an uncomfortable fact that even when given a guilt-free choice, individuals prefer the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion. They trust them more, relax with them better in business and social events, and prefer them more often than not as marriage partners. They are quicker to anger at evidence that an out-group is behaving unfairly or receiving undeserved rewards. And they grow hostile to any out-group encroaching upon the territory or resources of their in-group.

When in experiments black and white Americans were flashed pictures of the other race, their amygdalas, the brain's center of fear and anger, were activated so quickly and subtly that the centers of the brain were unaware of the response. The subject, in effect, could not help himself. When, on the other hand, appropriate contexts were added—say, the approaching African-American was a doctor and the white his patient—two other sites of the brain integrated with the higher learning centers, the cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral preferential cortex, lit up, silencing input through the amygdala. Thus different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness, as well as to mediate this hardwired propensity.

When the amygdala rules the action, however, there is little or no guilt in the pleasure experienced from watching violent sporting events and war films in which the story unwinds to a satisfying destruction of the enemy. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life
in extremis.

This excerpt really struck me. Groupishness seems to be our fallback position, and it's a tendency that won't go away. In studies of the hormone oxytocin,
⁶²
which is being heavily promoted as the
love hormone
by some people, you find this very behavior: when people are under the influence of oxytocin, their groupishness and concern for their in-group intensifies, but often, their
aggression against out-group members intensifies right alongside it. If you think about it, oxytocin may be more of a
mama bear
type of love hormone: there's deep groupish love in the oxytocin realm, but there's also deep danger.

Yet as we've all seen, we
can
calm and ground ourselves and activate our empathy across lines of difference. We
can
activate our Empathic Accuracy, identify the Emotion Contagion that's occurring, and use our Emotion Regulation skills to reduce our innate tendency toward toxic groupishness. We can intentionally activate our empathic skills and engage our intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. We can perform Perspective Taking across lines of difference—it can be done. We can live more intelligently with one another. Our capacity for empathy for the other, and especially for the
othered
other, is the magical ingredient for intergroup (and interpersonal) harmony.

But there's still this deep, powerful, instinctual part of us that loves its us-versus-them dramas, its monsters, its enemies, and its evil madmen. This instinctual lust for dramatic good-versus-evil narratives is just as powerful as the deep yearnings that the swashbucklers of love I wrote about in
Chapter 7
have for their impossibly tragic and heroic relationships. And these powerful, instinctual, and unconscious processes are not something you can just argue people out of (believe me, I've tried, and I have the bruises to show for it). These aggressive and destructive forms of love and empathy are an intrinsic part of what it is to be human.

So here's my thought: Let's intentionally and heroically work to develop empathy for ourselves and our loved ones, for people who are like us and people who aren't, for people who deserve empathy and people who don't. Then, to support the dramatic, groupish, swashbuckling, aggressive, warloving, bullying, and enemy-addicted parts of our brains in nontoxic ways, we can have a daily round of tug of war, steal the flag, or pin the tail on the outcast. Yes!

I'm joking, but I'm not. As you look back at
Chapter 9
, on how empathy develops in children, you'll recall the powerful emotional and empathic learning processes that occur during storytelling. In stories, we learn how to feel, how to empathize, how to approach huge emotions like terror and grief, how to interact in love and during conflict, and how to become social and moral beings. Yet this learning doesn't end in childhood, because no matter how old you get, stories continue to provide you with basic emotional and empathic training. Stories (especially emotionally manipulative activist appeals and dramatic us-versus-them narratives) help you understand who
you are, who the other is, who the in-group is, who the out-group is, who the monsters are, and exactly how you're supposed to feel about all of it. You live in a social world that's made of stories, and no matter how old you are, these stories teach you how to be a member of your gender, your family, your in-groups, your workplace, your community, your nation, and humanity itself.