Empathy vs Intolerance
It is of course oversimplification to assert the world seems filled with two kinds of people: those with empathy towards others and those distinguished by their general intolerance to others of a different ilk. Still, this is one of the major differences I have noted about people. Just about everyone has empathy, but often their empathy has a limited leaning----like for themselves or their family, or those most like themselves, or their team, or their own religious flock, or their own country etc. I dismiss this egotistic empathy as unremarkable empathy. It is little more than some sort of "I like me because I know and understand me, I like my family because we are genetically bound, I like my religion because I inherited it, I like my country because I am patriotic, etc. Blah, blah, blah.
Where does enlightened empathy, the ability to appreciate diversity, come from? Is it primarily an inherited trait? An acquired trait? Do some cultures have more empathy than others? I know some of it is acquired, but then where does the credit belong? To environmental circumstances? to the teaching of others? to the examples others set? to parental preaching? to career choices? to political philosophies? to religious dogmas? To the extent some of the factors which foster empathy are weak or missing in someone's life, where does that leave the blame game? For example, if your lack of empathy is because you were raised in the wrong environment just how much of the blame can be dropped at your doorstep for lack of empathy?
Each of us starts with certain cards in our hand, both genetic and environmental. With each of us on our own unique road of life, we interact socially in ways which foster empathy or foster intolerance. For me personjally, it seems empathy began with Mother Nature and pets. Dogs are excellent pets for kids and adolescents. Dogs are a companion certainly different from ourselves, an early chance to appreciate diversity. A pet is often the first exposure to unconditional love. Others judge you, a pet accepts you. A pet can be trusted, their affections are not here today and gone tomorrow and you are the 'king'. Dogs like to walk in the woods, be out in nature. So if you have a dog and there are woods nearby, then as a child you spend a lot of time walking the dog in nature settings. Nature itself has had a profound effect on me. It may sound a bit silly, but a nature setting gives me a clarity of thought, a connection with evolutionary history, a calmness unattainable anywhere else, and a quietness which penetrates to your innermost soul. In some way, being immersed in a nature setting enables one to see the big picture, to open doors for thoughts in new directions, and to be awed by the vastness and age of our planet.
It is probably hard to develop empathy if you yourself get little empathy from others. The more admirable sort of empathy is not genuine concern and unconditional love from parents. If pretty much the only place love and concern for you comes from is your parents, you are not likely to develop empathy for others different from yourself or your parents. Some of this modern day 'circle the wagons' family value stuff is pretty much an empathy-for-others assassin. It teaches kids not to trust, appreciate, tolerate, or respect diverse others. Ghetto kids often have little or no empathy with others. They adopt a tit for tat emotional state: "No one gives a shit about me, never has, and I don't give a shit for them either". These are not the kind of kids as teenagers you want to come up against. Nothing in, nothing out, everybody pays. More a case of pay back, and any way they can make you unhappy by their own acts brings them pleasure. Kids raised in sheltered highly controlled environments are least likely to develop tolerance for diversity in others. Rigidity is definitely a learned mentality. We all know people who go through life with braces on their brains, cocooned in a shell of rigid beliefs and inflexible cultural/religious/political/ sexual values. Sometimes it feels like an original thought would fracture their brain, or smiling fracture their face.
To the extent you get some empathy from others, for at least some of your own peculiar and 'different' acts of behavior and thinking, you will begin to develop empathy for differing groups of people. Empathy breeds empathy, just as violence breeds violence. It need be remembered that diversity is the key to God's created evolutionary process. No diversity, no evolutionary progress. In this respect alone, diversity is 'sacred'. It is all well and good for myself or anyone else to credit God with the evolutionary process but, to me, the ultimate most unanswerable question is always "How can something come from nothing"? If God created, where did God come from? In the last analysis we reason out matters the best we can, but accept the best we can do is to admit our conceptual limitations. At any rate, diversity is good because it is the basis of evolution. If one cannot tolerate diversity, one cannot tolerate evolution. And, of course, many do not really tolerate evolution. They are selfishly stuck, with themselves assigned an elevated sense of importance, protected by God HImself from the pitfalls of life, waiting on deck for their Heavenly flight. Okay, maybe so, beliefs are just that, beliefs.
Of course beliefs are only true to the extent reality supports the evidence leading to the beliefs.
Empathy is basically an emotion, a feeling towards others---including others diverse from yourself. Empathy is an emotion which pays high dividends. One cannot be at peace with themselves or Nature without a whole lot of empathy. The less anyone's ability to tolerate diversity, whether it be religious, cultural, ethnic, national, political, sexual, personality, skills, or economic diversity---whatever----the less toleration and appreciation for such diversity, the less contented a person can be. To be filled with all kinds of prejudice and intolerance for all sorts of human diversities is to become a disgruntled, angry, 'holier than thou' ball of apoplectic self destruction. Not only can't everyone be like me, but I am hard pressed to answer why the hell they even should be. Not only does change drive God's evolutionary process, but change drives self development. For the first 25 years of my life I didn't change much. Like many others I had a certain little rut in life carved out, a rut within which I felt relatively comfortable. But being in any kind of rut does not generate contentment. Most everything I believed in during my formative years was handed down to me by my inherited religion, culture, place of birth, parenting, and abilities. I was, more or less, what I was raised to be. All of this is fine and to be expected. The formative years are exactly that, guided development by your environment. BUT, if your development ends there, with essentially little change of any significance, then your own productive years are a waste to the evolutionary process. What pray tell, have you contributed to change if you yourself never change? Of course I suppose one could insist no change is needed, that all your essentially inherited beliefs and good fortunes are sufficient and their truths etched in stone. Maybe even most go this route. Time changes, they do not.
Empathy may well be the most evolutionary significant human emotion. Empathy breeds tolerance, tolerance breeds justice, and justice breeds peace. The natural enemies of empathy are often religion, ethnicity, patriotism, culture, capitalism, autocracy, distribution of wealth extremes, scarcity of natural resources, overpopulation, sexual preferences, unequal educational support, lifestyles, and I suppose if I gave it more thought more could be listed. The rewards for empathy are both immediate and long term, both personal and social. How to generate empathy on any wide scale basis is elusive. It certainly can't be done simply by decree. You can legally make injustice against the law, like with slavery, women the right to vote, children the right to an education, women the right to all jobs available to men, gays the same rights as non gays, the ugly the same job opportunities as the attractive, health care available to all, etc. BUT without the empathy to enforce such laws the injustices, to a larger or smaller degree, will remain.
I have thought about the category in which empathy is most difficult for most people. I think it might be for the ugly, those with different sexual preferences, and those with different religious beliefs. In these cases the problem is simply an emotional revulsion to the person at hand. Like the case with almost every youngster, when I was young there were ugly kids in school who everybody avoided. I mean really everybody. If you spoke to them for any reason others would tease you, claim he/she is your boyfriend or girlfriend or even your friend if it was the same sex. While oblivious to it at the time, as I suspect most young people are, as I got older my awareness of the the tragedy became fine tuned. I really don't know how these kids ever survived. Imagine each day going to school and no one speaks to you. Even teachers would be leery of calling on the real ugly for fear everyone would snicker or laugh. It has been 50 years, I never had any communication with these kids at the time, and yet in some cases I can still remember their names. I wonder what happens to these people? They certainly would never show up at any reunion. I wonder what percentage of them ever married? Or were able to gain meaningful well paid jobs? I wonder what percentage of such people commit suicide? Or maybe they somehow learn to live off in their own world. When I wander around a large city I get the feeling these physically unattractive souls live there where they can find some sort of anonymity among the crowd. And of course I never speak to them. Like what is there to say for starts? I guess there is such a thing as private empathy without any public empathy. When organized religion singles out a group for either revulsion or restrictions, like with gays or women, any correction is difficult. If the 'CHURCH' can be wrong in it's dogma on any issue, the question obviously becomes one of where else is the CHURCH wrong? It's the old domino theory. For example, if the POPE were to say something is right which was wrong last week, then does the POPE really speak, on God's behalf, to his flock? It is one thing for mere humans to make mistakes but quite another to claim GOD is giving wrong information to His human Pope. Some religions change with time easier than others. Religions may be the last, but even religions have to change with evolutionary Time. At some point defending the earth as being flat just is too much of an embarrassment.
OK, we know what empathy is and even the need for empathy, but how does one gain empathy? You really can't teach empathy, at least not in the sense you teach most things. Perhaps by example you can. Hardly any minority can achieve empathy from the majority until a good number of the majority reach out to them with a genuine desire for them to attain justice where justice is being denied them. With time, logic and reason can prevail over emotion and indifference, but it takes a lot of brave individuals on both sides. We tend to think of evolution as a change in physical differences, but evolution advances with emotions too. And that includes the emotion of empathy.
All this may be well and good, but still, what moves anyone, on a personal level, to have more empathy with others? Most of us are a minority in certain situations for reasons which just are (an inherited trait or religion or culture etc). Every time someone befriends us and makes us feel at home in such an uncomfortable situation, we are learning empathy. If no one ever does this we are not learning empathy. There is an element of tit for tat here. The likelihood of the roles being reversed here increase if one receives empathy for one's own particular nuances. Developed empathy is probably most difficult when one gets walled off from those in need of empathy. When I grew up my mother wanted to isolate and protect me from 'undesirable' kids. My father never did. My father would just tell me "You know right from wrong. If you want to be a friend to other kids just do the right thing and if they don't know better, they will learn from you". My father would ride me over to play with kids in Crotonville (the wrong side of the tracks) and my mother would have a fit. Summer times, in late high school and college, my dad would arrange for me to work on a grounds crew with some of the rougher elements of society. My mother didn't think much of that idea either. In retrospect my father was right---I learned empathy instead of fear (followed by disdain) for the less fortunate. Some people believe military service is a good experience for the same reason. Maybe that was true in older times when people were drafted and wars were waged for more legitimate reasons, but this is all changed now and the military is just more instilled rigidity, blind obedience, and blind patriotism. It would be better to require certain kinds of community service in the worst of neighborhoods. If more people could understand better the obstacles faced by the poor, the different, those with limited physical or mental talents, etc. then empathy would not be in such short demand.
It really is frustrating to see so many basically good people display such lack of empathy for the less fortunate. It is sad to realize how politically popular it is to spend so little per student to educate kids in poor areas, to leave millions of fellow citizens without health insurance, to oppose minimum wage levels rising at the inflation rate, to raise a 'voluntary' army which ends up pretty much comprised of those in need of a job, with no specialized skill, with no degrees, with emotional problems, etc. Military service, for the most part, is a choice of last resort. Then you send them over to wander around in some jungle-ized world until they step on a mine or get hit by sniper fire. One thing is notably certain---soldiers in such environments do not come back with increased empathy for others. What they learn is that violence is the solution to any problem---might makes right. The rest of their emotional state is often a hodgepodge of conflicting irrational impulses. If you want to amass lack of empathy in one place, just assemble former soldiers from just about any existing army, and you have it. In many cases their experiences are not much different from the gang members in our urban Drug War ravaged ghettoes. Different leaders, different places, same mentality: "Do what you are told and kill to win".
Empathy seems an emotion that matures with time. It is hard to pass judgment on people's empathy. Every path traveled is different, every genetic makeup is different, and the experiences thrust in every person's face are a combination luck, type of career, and personality. It is not much different from trying to judge one's sexual behavior. Absence of temptation hardly makes anyone superior in their sexual behavior. The difference is that sex, as an end point, fails to bring contentment. The attainment of empathy for diversity does bring contentment to one's life.
Empathy diverts your help to those most in need. Empathy makes following the Golden Rule easier. Empathy enables one to see a bigger and more honest picture of life. Empathy helps enable one to find the strength to do right when other factors urge you to do wrong. Empathy breeds empathy. All other things being equal, friendship via empathy is stronger and lasts longer than otherwise. It is also true that phony empathy breeds phony empathy. Insincerity is basically phony empathy. With insincerity a person pretends empathy as a means to gain favors with someone else. The wealthy and powerful know all about insincerity.
It is safe to say that lack of empathy on a mass scale enables the shameless massacres across history including Hitler's massacre of Jews, slavery and lynching in America, millions of Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam War, Soviet massacres at home and in occupied territories, Jewish massacres of Palestinians, Rwandan Hutus massacring Rwandan _____, etc. There are few nations whose history is not filled with acts of mass lack of empathy. Few sects of organized religion have escaped atrocities on others for lack of empathy. Of course with religious lack of empathy it is always assumed God doesn't like the targets either. I have always wondered why clergy of this or that sort get paid to be empathetic. Empathy doesn't seem like something for which one should be paid. Religion, for too many people, is some sort of putting money in a collection plate so someone can be paid to be kind and good and full of empathy for others. That's just weird to me. Maybe not much different from paying off the mob for protection of your business welfare. I guess we pay the clergy to protect our path to Heaven. To me, most paid religious figures are quite useless, fiddling away time on rituals, social events, rote prayers, collecting money for the poor, of which only a trifling amount ever gets to the poor. Some of those most filled with empathy are the front line religious workers like nuns and reformers in all religions. Strangely, to be effective, they often have to ignore dogma from their own church leaders. It did not escape my notice, that when teaching in college, if I suggested to a student that they take a difficult personal circumstance or problem to their clergy, their response was invariably one of incredulousness. Like I said, most clergy are relatively useless.
Empathy generates gratitude for one's own unearned blessings, which are many. Fair is fair; that is to say your own unearned good fortune dictates empathy with those less fortunate. If someone else's religion, sexual behavior, ethnicity, recreational drug of choice, personality, standard of living, or whatever is emotionally repulsive (not to your liking) it does not justify anger and the subsequent need to punish them. After all, there but for CHANCE or "the grace of God' goes you. I think most people have instances when, for whatever reason over whatever matter, they break through a circumstance via empathy instead of judgment and disdain. At that moment they really understand the connection between empathy and right. They are proud of themselves and feel good about it. Clearly, the more often one does this sort of thing, the more contented their life will be. Anyone can be 'nice' to their own kind. There are no gold stars for that sort of thing. As a former Professor I tended to have large classes. The only place you could get to really know a student was in the office or in lab. I always made it a point to descend on the different, the least attractive, those with the biggest chip on their shoulder and offer empathy. That attention, of short duration and simplistic, was rarely not appreciated, and it also set an example for others---it is ok to be friendly to these people. The drawback is that it generates office visits by an inordinate share of such individuals, and the problems on their mind are often non academic and overwhelming, often beyond my ability to solve. YET, it boosted their spirits, it gave them hope, and it made me feel like I was doing the right thing. A lot of the most important things you ever do in life are not of the materialistic kind, not the kind of things which bring you power or titles or increased salary. BUT, it does bring to your life a certain degree of contentment unachievable outside empathy. Lincoln, for as long as I can remember, has always been my mentor. Three Lincoln quotes come to mind: "I may not have made as great a President (teacher in my case) as some other man, but I believe I have kept these discordant elements (students in my case) together as well as anyone could." "Die when I may I want it said of me by those who know me best, that I have always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow". "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it."
Over the years I evolved to the point where I can identify in a positive and supportive way with human diversity. Others do count, especially the less fortunate or the uniquely different. When one feels this way about diversity it is easy to make friends with all kinds of 'characters', to be comfortable around all sorts of people, to politically align myself with those policies which help level the playing field and bring the most contentment to the greatest number of people, to adopt the Golden Rule as my religion, to feel at one with God's evolutionary process. I don't feel I have any special connection with God, just feel especially grateful that by chance I have been able to be a part of such a process. Empathy is like the icing on the cake for human existence. It may not come easy, but the rewards are substantial.
