Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Is Empathy Overrated?

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of empathy. (I wrote a more extensive critique in my book The Last Psychoanalyst.) When the psycho world and the therapy culture gloms on to a concept you can be reasonably assured that something is wrong with it.

Therapists and other culture warriors have touted empathy as the ultimate moral virtue. Here is their reasoning: since psychopaths do not feel empathy, the more empathy you feel the less likely you are to be a psychopath. Thus, more empathy means less crime and a kinder, gentler world. But, also a more feminine world.

Better yet, if we feel more empathy we will happily want to intervene around the world, wherever we see human suffering. Wasn’t it empathy that caused Angela Merkel to open Germany’s doors to a million refugees?

One suspects that political thinkers are promoting empathy because they want to use it to facilitate the passage of a liberal legislative agenda. Who could fail to feel the pain of those suffering for lack of health insurance? Any empathetic human being would therefore favor Obamacare. Right?

On the side of the theoretical spectrum, Prof. Paul Bloom has suggested that empathy can also make us into sadists. When we see someone suffering and feel his pain we are likely to want to take vengeance on whoever it was that caused the pain. I called such people sadistic empaths and have posted about them.

Now, John Tierney asks whether we should value a president’s capacity for empathy. After all, Bill Clinton was notable for his ability to feel the pain of others. Of course, he was not very good at feeling the pain of Juanita Broaddrick or Kathleen Willey or Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky. Still and all, everyone admired Clinton’s capacity for empathy. Apparently, women found it seductive.

Tierney offers a balanced view of the debate over empathy. After explaining its value, he gives us the counterargument:

Empathy may not be such a great quality in a leader. Although the capacity to sympathize with others’ suffering is widely hailed as an essential virtue — Mr. Obama has said the world is suffering from an “empathy deficit” — there’s a downside that has inspired a lively debate among social psychologists.

When you let your feelings be your guide, you do not always make the best decisions. Tierney quotes Paul Bloom on the trouble with empathy:

But whom do you end up helping? Often the wrong people, Dr. Bloom says, because empathy is biased and parochial. It favors vulnerable children and animals, and discriminates against unattractive people. You’re more likely to sympathize with someone in your social group rather than an outsider, especially one who looks different.

Empathy is also innumerate, Dr. Bloom notes, which is why you may care more about one girl stuck in a well than thousands of war refugees or millions of people who will be affected by climate change.

And he adds that Bloom rejects the idea that we should seek out leaders who have a great capacity for empathy:

Dr. Bloom concludes that empathy is overrated as a guide for personal morality or public leadership. “Sob stories are not a good way to make public policy,” he said. “The best leaders have a certain enlightened aloofness.”

“They recognize the suffering of victims of terrorists, but they also recognize that going to war will create future victims. They make policy by taking into account numbers and cost-benefit analyses. They use rational means to achieve good ends.”

And, of course, empathy is ultimately selfish. It causes us to regulate our behavior as a function of our own feelings. It disables rational thought and blinds us to reality. Moreover, as we saw yesterday in the experience of John Elder Robison, it's possible to feel too strongly and too much. If you feel the pain of all of those who are in pain you end up feeling constant pain.

Tierney quotes Bloom who quotes Adam Smith. The great philosopher declared that empathy or “fellow feeling” was a poor guide for action. In place of empathy Smith proposed that we rely more on reason and principle.

Tierney writes:

Dr. Bloom, the empathy critic, agrees that this emotion can be goosed to some degree, but he says we are still better off relying on the less emotional strategy described in 1759 by Adam Smith in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Smith noted that “fellow-feeling,” his term for empathy, was a powerful yet limited emotion: An Englishman, he suggested, would lose more sleep worrying about the loss of a finger than about the deaths of 100 million foreigners in an earthquake.

How, Smith asked, could this selfish impulse be overridden?

“It is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love,” Smith wrote. “It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions.

“It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.”

3 comments:

  1. I confess I'll never understand the either/or way of seeing, and needing one side to contain all positive qualities and its opposite all negative qualities.

    And it seems to me that we need to clarify what we're talking about, and then look at specific uses.

    Stuart: Therapists and other culture warriors have touted empathy as the ultimate moral virtue. Here is their reasoning: since psychopaths do not feel empathy, the more empathy you feel the less likely you are to be a psychopath. Thus, more empathy means less crime and a kinder, gentler world. But, also a more feminine world.

    So first we might try assuming here "Affective empathy" as feminine feeling orientation and "Cognitive empathy" as masculine mental orientation and see where that takes us.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Affective_and_cognitive

    And as I'm also skeptical of the "feeling orientation", I see Affective Empathy can be biased, can be "tricked", and believe "appearances", so someone who looks weak is weak, and someone who looks strong is strong, and if someone who looks strong is being aggressive towards someone who looks weak, Affective Empathy can "take sides" of the weak against the strong, even if the reality of the situation is completely the opposite, if the "weak-looking person" has actually provoked the "strong-looking person".

    For example the Karpman drama triangle represents this problem - with three roles - Victim, Rescueer, and Persecuter. So it would seem a pure Affective Empathy fails the Rescuer who intervenes too quickly, before understanding the dynamic.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

    So someone expressing Cognitive Empathy probably ought to hold a more neutral point of view, so seeing a conflict, Cognitive Empathy can see frustration in both the Perpetrator and the Victim, and he can imagine times he felt like a Victim, and remember that sometime he acted weaker than he was, and remember when he let his temper get the better of him, and acted aggressively in an unfair way, and then his pride prevented him from admitting he was wrong.

    Then he can remember when he tried to be a Rescuer, that it worked for a while, but it made him do things for a Victim that they were strong enough to do for themselves, and encouraged passivity and dependence in the victim.

    And so taking in all those points of view, a person can use their congitive empathy to see sometimes you have to hold back a reaction and let a "drama" play out long enough for participants to learn from it, and so perhaps rather than being a Rescuer, he could merely be a referee that helps participants identify the ground rules of a conflict, and calls out participants who break their own claimed positions of conscience.

    And a part of this "theory of mind" is to acknowledge we're all different, and you can't use the same "model" for people in different states of consciousness.

    I might say the weakness of Cognitive Empathy is that its too slow, and its more of a defensive system, but it might be Affective Empathy can work quicker.

    If everyone is using Cognitive Empathy, you might imagine a game of chess, and if everyone is using Affective Empathy, you might imagine a football game. Both games can turn violent, but the physical games are more likely to need referees to intervene when the rules are broken.

    Actually I recently I saw a video with Chess Grandmaster Maurice Ashley in New York Washington Square Park, taking on a local "hustler", and its certainly the most intense game I've ever seen, just 4 minutes.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g

    If Ashley only listened to his aggression, his cheating rival would likely be knocked onto the ground, but Ashley wasn't interested in punishing cheaters, but testing character, and that takes Empathy, to hold back anger and to not automatically take aggression by another personally.

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  2. Ares Olympus @March 22, 2016 at 6:51 AM

    "I confess I'll never understand the either/or way of seeing, and needing one side to contain all positive qualities and its opposite all negative qualities."

    Please. Stop.

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  3. Bill Clinton may have felt our pain, but he enjoyed us having it. Or, he lied.

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