I argued empathy is a poor moral guide.
It’s biased.
It’s enumerate.
It zaps the spirit.
It can be weaponized to make us worse people.
But one question I often get is what replaces
it?
And in my book I make a distinction between
empathy and compassion.
Now a lot of people think the terms mean the
same thing and it’s not an argument of words.
You can use whatever words you want.
But psychologically there are two different
processes.
One is what I’ve been calling empathy which
is you’re suffering, I put myself in your
shoes.
I feel your pain and that has all sorts of
effects, most of them bad I would argue.
But a second distinct process is compassion
where I care about you.
I care about your welfare but I don’t necessarily
feel your suffering.
Now you might say well that’s just a verbal
difference or how do we know such a compassion
exists.
But there’s some really cool research exploring
this and actually I got into this because
I was at a conference in London and I bumped
into Matthieu Ricard.
He was hard to miss, long saffron robes, beatific
smile.
The happiest man on earth.
And I got to talking to him and he asked me
what I was up to and I told him that I was
against empathy.
And to me that felt kind of awkward but I
thought, you know, telling a monk you’re
against empathy.
But he said oh, empathy.
Of course you should be against empathy.
And he began to tell me about his research
and then I realized there’s a body of research,
neuroscience research that distinguishes empathy
from compassion, exactly the distinction I
was looking for where they put people in scanners,
FMRI scanners and they get them to engage
in empathy meditation where you feel the suffering
of the other person.
You imagine feeling it.
And you compare that to compassion meditation
where you care for people.
Loving kindness they call it.
Without any empathic connection.
And this work which was done in collaboration
to the neuroscientist Tania Singer illustrates
a real sharp difference where empathy is exhausting,
it is unpleasant, it is difficult and it makes
you withdraw.
Compassion is exhilarating, it’s energizing,
it is seen as a positive experience and it
makes you approach.
It makes you more likely to help.
And since then there’s been other researchers.
Some work by David DeSteno out of Northwestern
looking at the effects of mindfulness meditation.
And I’m naturally skeptical about this work.
A lot of claims about mindfulness meditation
are often overblown and I think we should
be cautious about them.
But DeSteno’s work has been replicated a
few times and it seems robust.
And the finding is it makes us nicer.
It makes us more compassionate and more kind
for strangers.
And there’s not exactly consensus as to
why this is so but one speculation they have
is it makes us nicer because it dampens our
empathic feelings.
Less empathy, more compassion, more kindness.
A lot of relationships are based on other
things and I actually think for many relationships
empathy gets in the way.
So think about what you want from a doctor
or a therapist.
You want them to understand you.
You want them to care about you.
But do you want them to feel your pain and
feel your suffering?
On the one hand if they do so, they’ll be
exhausted.
They’ll suffer from burnout.
If a therapist sees a series of patients for
50 minutes each day and she feels their depression,
their anxiety, their fear, their anguish she
wouldn’t make it through a week.
But more than that it would make them less
effective at what they do.
Think about what you want when you see a doctor
and you’re very anxious.
Do you want the doctor to be anxious?
No, you want the doctor to respect you, to
understand you, to listen to you, to be concerned
about you.
But not to echo your anxiety or your fear.
Certainly for a therapist if I go to see my
therapist and I’m deeply depressed I don’t
want her to get deeply depressed.
Now I have two problems.
I have me and I have her.
I want her to look at me with that therapist
look and say so how does that make you feel?
I want her to have some distance from me so
she can set herself to solving my problems
and to providing a more realistic perspective.
Or take parenting.
You might have a teenage son or teenage daughter
who’s extremely anxious for some reason,
maybe he or she left the homework for the
last minute and is just freaking out.
A good parent does not freak out along with
their child.
A good parent says okay, calm down.
Let’s take a minute.
Let’s figure out what to do.
Take a breath.
And is supportive and calm and loving.
But doesn’t inherit the anxieties and sufferings
of their children.
Part of what it is to love somebody is not
to share their suffering but try to make it
go away.
Now it is complicated.
In intimate relationships I think there is
a place for empathy.
Often we want to share our feelings and we
want to share the feelings of others.
Sometimes in a romantic relationship, a couple,
one person will feel angry or humiliated or
upset and wants their partner to feel the
same thing to share it.
Sometimes if you have a kid and your kid is
enthusiastic about something sharing the kids
enthusiasm is important.
I don’t doubt that empathy plays some such
role but I think we tend to overstate it.
I think when we think hard about what other
people need, what it takes to be a good person,
a good friend, a good parent what really matters
is understanding and compassion but empathy
often gets in the way.
In some way my book is an optimistic book
because I argue about all of our limitations
and how empathy leads us astray.
But in order to make that argument we also
have to have an appreciation of we’re smart
enough to realize that empathy could lead
us astray and that we’re smart enough to
act so as to override its pernicious effects.
So it’s empathy that causes me to favor
somebody who looks like me over somebody who
doesn’t.
Or somebody from my country or ethnicity over
a stranger.
But it’s rationality that leads me to say
hey, that’s not reasonable.
There’s no reason to do it.
It’s not fair.
It’s not impartial.
And so we should try to override empathy.
So what I argue is that we have the capacity
for rationality and reason.
This is actually fairly controversial.
In my field my fellow psychologists, philosophers,
neuroscientists often argue that we’re prisoners
of their emotions, that we’re fundamentally
and profoundly irrational.
And that reason plays very little role in
our every day lives.
And a good one of the main goals of my work
is to argue against that.
Now there’s a specific argument that is
often made which I think is just not a good
argument at all which is to say well, determinism
of a sort is true.
What we do, how we act, how we think is the
product of events that have started a very
long time ago plus physical law.
We are physical creatures.
We can’t escape from causality so we’ll
just continue doing what we’re doing.
And for the most part I actually agree with
that.
I think that notions of more responsibility
can be reconciled with determinism.
But I think determinism is correct but none
of that challenges rationality.
And as an illustration you could imagine a
computer that’s entirely determined but
is also entirely rational.
You could imagine another computer that’s
entirely determined but is capricious and
arbitrary and random.
And so even in a deterministic universe the
question remains what sort of computer are
we.
Are we emotional creatures or are we rational
creatures?
But there is nothing, not the slightest bit
of inconsistency between the claim that we
live in a determined universe and that we’re
rational reasoning creatures.
