EMPATHY

“I wish I was different,” she said.“Different how?” he asked.“Different enough to not wish I was different,” he said. Empathy no virtue but a squatter, – moved in uninvited, rearranged the furniture of your mind, and flooded the place with other people’s grief. I feel things that aren’t mine like I’ve stolen them but can’t give them back. I apologise to spiders, mourn characters in adverts, and once, as a child, cried over a broken mug because it was part of a set. I thought empathy was common, a presumed feature of humanity, and unlike most human features such as belly buttons and feet hair, empathy was a good one. I, naively perhaps, operated under the belief that people acted with kindness because they felt something, not because they were mimicking a moral mime act. But apparently, a lot of people don’t feel empathy at all, they simply perform it because society holds a gun to their head as they’re told to be “normal”. I’ve gone down something of a rabbit hole here, reading as much as I can on it, whilst also disagreeing with almost every word. I’m gonna skip over Hobbes, because I haven’t the energy to explain why he’s wrong. Plus if this were a horror movie, he comes across as the second to die, only because John Locke goes first, pausing to insist that “peace and love” is a sufficient argument, just long enough for Hobbes to push him forward and make a run for it. But I quite like David Hume, looking like a man who was always halfway through a sigh, suggested that morality stems from sentiment, not reason alone. In other words, we don’t help old ladies cross the street because we’ve calculated the moral worth, we do it because it feels right. Adam Smith, better known today for capitalism than for his moral philosophy, gave us the Impartial Spectator: an imagined audience we consult when deciding how to act. He’d help an old lady cross the road, not because he’d done the moral calculus, but because he’d learned to see himself through other people’s eyes – and couldn’t quite ignore them. Immanuel Kant insisted that only actions done from duty, rather than feeling, possessed moral worth. Helping an old lady because you wanted to, would, in his view, cheapen the act, and so he’d do it reluctantly, out of obligation, and without warmth. Also he was proudly sexist, and racist, all traits not really adding value for money to his morality lectures. “Why are you crying?” she asked.“Because I have water in my eyes” he said.“Why have you got water in your eyes?” she asked.“Because I’m crying” he said. I’m aware I’m drastically simplifying the work of many thinkers here, but the more I examine this subject, the more my faith in humanity erodes. It seems that a great many people behave decently not out of understanding, but out of conditioning, like dogs trained not to pee on carpets, not because they understand hygiene, but because they fear the slipper. Empathy, then, might be more akin to theatre than instinct, internalised performances echoing what society expects, not what the soul necessarily emits. Take, for instance, a door. In most instances, if someone walks ahead of you through one, they’ll hold it open, not always, but mostly. It’s part of the social contract, like pretending to care how someone’s weekend was. But replace the door with a junction, and the person with a car, and suddenly that mask slips fast. Now boxed in behind metal and glass, their humanity is left in the glove compartment. That simple gesture of letting another car out? Vanished. Because behind the wheel, there is no audience, no theatre, just raw, unfiltered selfishness on four wheels, with all the cooperative rationality of a wheel on a shopping trolley. The Enlightenment, in all its powdered glory, exposed this. Social norms, not sentiment alone, shaped ethics. People followed moral rules the way some people follow cooking instructions, not because they understand them, but because they fear the consequences of improvisation. So here I sit, still draped in the foolish comfort of my own deluded decency, wondering if I’m the madman for feeling when so many simply rehearse. Like the last romantic in a brothel reading poetry aloud, hoping the moaning is from pathos, not the plumbing. But maybe that’s the point, maybe the performance is all we’ve got. Perhaps empathy is like a mirror, not everyone has one, but they’ll pretend they do just to stop the conversation turning awkward, and if you can fake empathy well enough, does it matter whether you feel it? As Hume might have said, with one brow raised and a whisky in hand, perhaps not… :: REFERENCES :: David Hume Selected – Works Collection Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments Alix Cohen – Thinking about the Emotions