What mechanism(s) drive(s) empathy?

 If you have a tuned guitar in a room and you sing, or otherwise produce, a note on the same pitch that one of strings is tuned to, that string will begin vibrating. This isn’t just true of guitars. Lots of pitched instruments will do it. Any stringed instrument, or tuning fork, for example, is capable of this.  (If you’re curious about the phenomenon, go to YouTube and search “sympathetic vibration”.) 

I think some people who place a lot of value on empathy, or who call themselves “empaths”, imagine something like this happening. A person over there has an emotion and they feel the same emotion. Some people have even go so far as to invent a technical language to describe this. “Somatic empathy” is one such term and it’s a telling one as “somatic” means “of the body”. Just like sympathetic vibration, the response is imagined as physical. It’s a reasonable hypothesis but I am not aware of any credible research supporting the existence of somatic empathy.

Otherwise, there has to be some sort of judgment for empathy to work. I judge that Cathy is unhappy and I respond to that. That judgment can be either conscious or unconscious. In the invented technical language of empathy, that is called affective empathy. And it’s important to note that there is an assumed criterion here. I have to feel the correct emotion in response. If I see that Cathy is sad and I respond by cruelly teasing her, that is not empathy.

But notice that my judgment of the other person’s feelings is assumed to be correct in both instances; that is I correctly judge what the emotion is and I respond appropriately What is ‘incorrect” when I tease is the emotion I feel in response to the correct judgment of what Cathy is feeling. There is a moral assumption hiding here that could be spelled out as, “Anyone who sees a sad person, will respond with the appropriate emotion.” 

What is the appropriate emotion? Well, that’s a bit tricky. It can’t be sympathy because we already have that word. To justify a new word, we need empathy to be something different. I think the issue here is that “empathy” is a synonym for “sympathy” but so is “pity”. That is to say, they don’t mean exactly the same thing but they are close. To feel sympathy or pity, you have to set yourself above the person you are responding. You feel sorry they are hurt but you don’t necessarily identify with them. Empathy requires that you be connected with the person you feel it for, which is why it worked with inanimate objects like paintings. 

I could feel sympathy for Cathy because her heart is broken following the failure of her latest relationship while simultaneously believing that is her own bad habits that have gotten into this plight. I might think, “When is she going to realize that she keeps making the same mistakes over and over again.” Empathy seems to require that I not only feel for Cathy but that I also feel for her plight.

I take it that the moral and political implications of this are obvious. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that. Where there is a problem is when it is obvious that it’s the morality or the politics driving the empathy and not the other way around. The person who feels no empathy with people they disagree with is a fraud. 

Let’s return to the issue of the judgments associated with empathy. I said above that it is not empathy if I correctly judge another person’s emotions but respond by being cruel to them. That’s, well, that’s interesting because it suggests that a person could be really good at assessing other people’s feelings without responding to them in the way that seems “natural” to us. And there are people capable of reading others’ emotions very accurately but who don’t feel any kinship with others. The most conspicuous example being psychopaths.

But that raises another issue. Is the opposite mistake possible? Can someone incorrectly judge another person to be suffering and then respond in a way that is deemed appropriate to that imagined suffering? Well, yes and this happens regularly. We’re actually pretty good at judging other people’s emotions but we’re not 100 percent accurate at it. We’ve all had the experience of expressing support for someone else only to find out they’re just fine.

(We’ve all also had the experience of having someone offer support when there has been nothing wrong. And that’s worth mediating on. I don’t like that experience. Sometimes I think it’s just an honest mistake but other times I have had the distinct impression that someone has tried to diminish me by claiming I must be sad, bitter, angry, jealous … .)

One reason we get it wrong is that judging an emotion is not only a matter of judging what a person is doing. It requires us to judge the response in a particular context. The facial expressions that go with orgasm and extreme pain are indistinguishable. It’s the fact that your partner is having ex with you when their face contorts that justifies your concluding that it’s pleasure. (You can still be wrong and you could, for example, be busy congratulating yourself on being a good lover only to be humbled when they announce they’ve just had a muscle cramp.)

Empathy is like any other emotional response. It should be always open to questioning and criticism.  I can be angry and be justified. I can be angry for no good reason. I can lack in anger, letting people abuse me. I can also be justifiably angry but overreact and assault someone. Empathy, to the extent that it is useful, requires secondary judgments. 

It’s worth noting in passing, by the way, that the most common reason we judge others’ emotions incorrectly is that we want to know what they think of us and it is very often the case that other people aren’t thinking about us or particularly interested in us. Jack sees that his wife is unhappy and wonders if he has done or said something to upset her. She, meanwhile, is wishing she’d handled an issue at work differently. 

Origin of empathy

 Empathy comes into the English language as an equivalent for a German word used in art criticism. Empathy, in this regard, is a skill. Someone who had this skill could not just respond emotionally to a work of art but could feel into a work of art.

“Not only do I see gravity and modesty and pride and courtesy and stateliness, but I feel or act them in the mind's muscles. This is, I suppose, a simple case of empathy, if we may coin that term as a rendering of Einfühlung; there is nothing curious or idiosyncratic about it; but it is a fact that must be mentioned.” [Edward Bradford Titchener, "Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes," 1909] 

Look at the girl in that painting. If it’s not familiar to you, don’t worry about it; in a sense that’s better. Do you see her not just as a representation, a form, but as the presentation of a human being? Can you feel for her?

The point is to not simply respond intellectually but emotionally. 

And not just the persons in a painting. The same room, with no one present, could provoke a response.

The obvious point here is that the painting does not have feelings. That doesn’t invalidate empathy. Speaking only for myself, I like this original notion of empathy more than what it has become. What we need to notice, though, is the difference. This original sense is not a way of connecting with someone else’s plight. 

I can imagine situations where this kind of response would be desirable abut also of situations where it would not. The most jarring example would be psychopathy in surgeons. We think of psychopathy as scary but many psychopaths are harmless. In some cases, surgery, it can be a benefit. So long as the psychopath sees their yearning for high social status and money a desirable outcome, they will do a. Good job and, because they are not terrified of cutting into another human being, they might be better at the job than someone who could be paralyzed by emotion. 

In other cases, empathy would be desirable. I think it’s telling and very important, that the original application as in art criticism. For you can enjoy art with feeling anything into the art.

The thing is, an empathetic response to a work of art is different from simply having an emotional response. If yellow makes me happy, then an abstract painting with a lot of yellow in it will probably make me happy. To feel into is something else and that something else would require an effort of my part. It’s very much an intentional act and that’s not the way people mean empathy when responding to another person.

Questions about empathy

 Like many others, I was deeply moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I don’t know that I’d even heard of the guy before. If I’d ever encountered him online or in the media, I’d forgotten all about him. 

I didn’t see the video and I don’t intend to. What I saw was people I considered to be friends respond with visceral hatred towards the man. They were at best, not sad, and at worst, gleeful, to see him dead. They cared not one little bit about his wife or family.

I don’t dump friends rashly. I decided to give them an opportunity to explain themselves. Various things he was supposed to have said were given as to why this guy was so horrible. It’s interesting that only things he had said were mentioned. No one could mention a single action. And the things he had supposedly said all turned out to have the usual problems in that they were quotes taken out of context or altered to make them seem hateful.

The weirdest thing though was the empathy argument for hating him. People said they hated him and he deserved to be hated because he had said empathy was not morally valuable. Weird, first of all, because it’s perfectly reasonable to have doubts about empathy. Lots of good and reasonable people both on the left and the right have questioned the value of empathy. Second, it’s weird because the people advancing this argument were obviously incapable of feeling empathy for Charlie Kirk. They hated this man, whom they didn’t know, and they had no feelings for his wife and his children.

So, I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into empathy over my next few posts. It strikes me that the term is not at all clear. Just for starters:

1. Is empathy an emotion or is it the capacity to feel an emotion?
2. The term has only been around about a century: how essential can this capacity be to live a moral life given that human beings managed to survive and live moral lives for centuries without needing to name it?
3. Why is empathy only used with the kinds of emotions we already associated with the term “sympathy”? Meaning, we speak of empathy in response to other people’s suffering. No one ever says they empathize with someone else’s rage or jealousy or hatred. Empathy seems to have been custom designed to replace sympathy. Sympathy, however, is an ancient word. Why would it need to be replaced or supplemented? 
4. What is the mechanism that makes empathy work? Usually, we have to figure out someone else’s emotions. We look at their expressions and consider the context and then determine whether this is pain or happiness or boredom or whatever. Like all such judgments, we can be wrong. People who use the term “empathy”, however, seem to imagine some sort of direct sense that involves no cognition. Some of them even use the term “superpower” to describe empathy. They do not consider or admit the possibility that someone could feel or not feel empathy based on judgments that turn out to be wrong. This smacks of magical thinking.

Celebrating my being betrayed

"It ain't the knife in the heart that tears you apart

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone

It's just the thought of someone sticking it in, sticking it in." Graham Parker

That's a quote from an old song, the chorus of which is, "Just can't get, just can't get no protection." And I guess that's the moral of the story if you prefer not to read all of this. What follows is a kind of Christian Stoicism, a position that a lot of people will find contradictory but that has deep roots in saints Paul and Augustine.

Twenty-five years ago I was subjected to the worst betrayal of my life. What made it the worst was the person who did it. The actual betrayal was something I was always going to get over; all it needed was time. (I don't mean by that that it was a trivial matter.) The shock that could have killed me inside was the person who stuck the knife in. And it is a bit of a blessing that this was all I had to face; there are, after all, people for whom being stabbed in the back is not a metaphor.

Before I get into it, a little bit about what I mean by betrayal because not everyone means the same thing by it. Last fall, I shared on Facebook that the anniversary of the this betrayal was coming up. I said I was not going to share details, what the betrayal was or who did it. I could not have been more vague about it. Shortly after the post went up, someone contacted me and said, "I think you should know that there are people mocking you for that post in groups you are not part of." I thought that was an interesting response. Two of the people who were doing this mocking separately got in touch with me and expressed concern about how I was feeling, apparently unaware that I knew about their cruel remarks elsewhere. They were also apparently unable to read; I had quite clearly said that not only was I long over the betrayal but that it had actually proven to be a very liberating experience in the longer run.

They also both thought they knew who the betrayer was but they were uncertain as to what exactly the betrayal was. They respectively speculated it might have been the time a particular person forgot a promise or the time there was an argument. I have more to say about that but I think the first thing to note is that neither of those two things is a betrayal. A betrayal is when somebody who was on your side openly or secretly works against you. They do this with the explicit understanding that what they are doing will cause you to fail. They don't just fail to come through in some spectacular way. I can understand why being letdown by someone you love can feel like a betrayal. When something really hurts, that intense pain can blind us as to other person's intention. And it does seem that in common usage the meaning has gotten fuzzy. A lot of people use "betrayal" to mean something that made them feel betrayed regardless of whether they actually were.

But that's not, as I say above, what betrayal means. Betrayal requires that the betrayer deliberately chooses to work against you with full knowledge of what they are doing. I had planned something and I had asked others to help, including my betrayer. And she had enthusiastically said she would and even helped me to plan the particulars. And then she secretly did things that guaranteed my plans would fail. Even as she said she loved me and would support me, she was planning to hurt me.

The odd thing was that, when my project did fail, it was painfully obvious what she had done. She either hadn't thought that through or she just didn't care. I don't know because I can't read minds. There was a particular thing that had to be in place for my plan to work she had made sure it was not in place. I couldn't have doubted what she had done and that she had done it deliberately even if I had wanted to because she made it clear she'd done it when I confronted her. And we had a moment. I remember her defiant, even triumphant expression. And then she said things.

"It took a long time coming

That big over the shoulder statement

But when it came, it flowed easy as poison." Marianne Faithfull

The experience brought moral clarity even before I was able to process all the details. The first hint was that someone else who was involved figured out exactly what had happened without being told and he immediately set about trying to make it better. It didn't work. At the time, I couldn't say why. I could see that he genuinely felt awful about it. He even acted like someone who had been complicit in it and he could not have been. The act of sabotage necessarily required that she keep the whole thing secret from him. If he had known, he would have stopped her.

The reason, I know now, that his immediate and absolutely genuine grief and guilt at what happened didn't comfort me at the time was that he'd figured it out so quickly. Imagine you're with someone when you hear a news report that someone has been assassinated and they immediately know who did it. There has been no arrest, not even a hint about who did it, yet they instantly know who did it. He felt badly because he knew, and had long known, what this person was capable of. He didn't expect this particular act of cruelty but he wasn't at all surprised when it happened.

That other shoe didn't drop until last fall when I shared that the 25th anniversary of this unspecified betrayal was coming up and that, because it had proven to be a very good thing for me, I planned to celebrate it but I wasn't sure how best to do that. And that led to the incidents I described up at the top of this post. But here's the really weird thing. As I said, two people thought they knew who had betrayed me even though they didn't have the vaguest idea what had been done, where and when it had been done, or how it had been done. That isn't surprising, this happened twenty-five years ago. What is surprising is they were, however, both absolutely correct about who had done it. And that's stunning. And neither had any doubt. They didn't tentatively guess about who my betrayer was the way they had about what she had done. They didn't even ask me to confirm. They knew! I'm in my mid sixties and I've known dozens of people who might have betrayed me over the years but they knew, without knowing any other details, who my actual betrayer was.

Here I have to admit to my own blindness. The man who figured it out at the time and the two others who figured it twenty-four years later were all able to do it because this betrayal was absolutely in character for the person who did it. My betrayer was not a trustworthy person and they always knew that she wasn't. I didn't. I didn't miss it for lack of evidence. There had been other betrayals of other people and I'd seen those happen. And here I'll stop explaining for their is a secret here about another betrayal of another person from years earlier that could still bring incredible shame on others were it come out. I think I'm the only person still alive who knows the details and I plan to take those secrets to my grave. The important point is, I should have known better long before that day twenty-five years ago and the fact that I didn't is entirely my fault.

Which brings me to forgiveness. I resolved that I would forgive my betrayer this year. It stopped hurting long ago but I had not forgiven. A big part of my not having done so is that she never asked to be forgiven. And I set out to do that this past Lent. I think I succeeded but nobody else has to believe me.

And now to celebrate ... well, to celebrate what? I think the thing to celebrate is my deliverance. I came out the other side of this experience without bitterness. I was angry, very angry, for a long time. But I'm past it and I've gotten over it. And I think I deserve zero credit for that. If it had been up to me, I would be bitter and I would have done resentful things in retaliation. But I didn't and I think that was because God was working in me.

What happened after the betrayal was hard. I've said this before but disillusionment is a difficult experience. On a purely linguistic level, that's odd. Having illusions is a bad thing and yet no one uses the word disillusionment in a positive way. It hurts like hell. There is massive cognitive dissonance when we are disillusioned.

You can't be betrayed by an enemy. Everybody expects their enemies to try and hurt them. When you're betrayed, someone who is supposed to be your friend turns out to be your enemy. Your entire moral universe is upset. You don't know whether anything was ever true. Every relationship you've ever had, every kind thing anyone has ever done for you may have been a ruse.

My betrayal disillusioned me and it would have, as I say above, been very easy to respond with resentment. The thing about being betrayed is that I was deceived. The whole thing happened because I trusted this person and I did so even though there was lots of evidence that she was not trustworthy. How had I allowed that to happen. This sort of thing had happened over and over again. The crucial difference twenty-five years ago that there was no blurring the matter. The illusions had to crumble at some point. I was blessed that they did at a a time when I was well-poised to deal with them. I was a in a good place in life and I had someone in my life who really did love me.

I'm going to celebrate by going to mass at a particular church in a particular place that means a lot to me and then I'm going to go out to dinner with a particular person who means a lot to me.