[P2P-F] Fwd: Empathy Notes #3: Empathy versus rationality?

Wed Jul 17 09:23:10 CEST 2013

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tom Atlee <cii at igc.org>
Date: Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 12:53 PM
Subject: Empathy Notes #3: Empathy versus rationality?
To: michel at p2pfoundation.net

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*What this message is about: Recent cogent critiques of empathy promote
rationality as its antidote. But each of these powerful capacities has
gifts and limitations. We need to use them well together to address our
current challenges and make a better world.*

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Empathy Notes #3: Empathy versus
rationality?<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-44a86c996bddcd1c1d9d0c115021ea72-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>

Several weeks ago my good friend Miki Kashtan sent me two articles - The
Baby in the Well<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-399467070059ccdf41fb7d1093a4ad84-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>by
Paul Bloom and The
Case Against Empathy<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-b0b4421a29ebc3491213207d9ffb0ebd-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>by
David Harris-Gershon - that critically compare empathy with reason.

*These two essays maintain that empathy causes us to focus on the narrow
needs of visibly suffering individuals - especially those who are like us
or whom we know and love. This focus distracts us from broader or invisible
suffering - and from the systemic causes of suffering - for which changes
in policy, systems, culture, etc., are called for rather than our personal
kindness and help. Therefore, suggest the essayists Paul Bloom and David
Harris-Gershon, reason is a more dependable guide to our moral responses
than empathy.*

Bloom calls empathy "parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate". Because of
empathy's "identifiable victim effect", he maintains, "the story of [a
missing teenager] took up far more television time than the concurrent
genocide in Darfur." His examples don't stop there: "Each day, more than
ten times the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina die because of
preventable diseases, and more than thirteen times as many perish from
malnutrition... In the past three decades, there were some sixty mass
shootings, causing about five hundred deaths; that is, about one-tenth of
one per cent of the homicides in America" and yet, thanks to our empathy,
we focus on the dramatic mass shootings rather than the more everyday
murders.

Bloom quotes the economist Thomas Schelling about how thousands of people
will send nickels and dimes to help “a six-year-old girl with brown hair
[who needs] thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her
life until Christmas" but they won't support a sales tax without which
hospital facilities will deteriorate, resulting in even more preventable
deaths.
Political Consequences

Reducing it all to real-life absurdity, Bloom tells us that "Newtown, in
the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, was inundated with so much charity
that it became a burden. More than eight hundred volunteers were recruited
to deal with the gifts that were sent to the city—all of which kept
arriving despite earnest pleas from Newtown officials that charity be
directed elsewhere. A vast warehouse was crammed with plush toys the
townspeople had no use for; millions of dollars rolled in to this
relatively affluent community. We felt their pain; we wanted to help.
Meanwhile—just to begin a very long list—almost twenty million American
children go to bed hungry each night, and the federal food-stamp program is
facing budget cuts of almost twenty per cent."

To make his point that reason is needed but impeded, Bloom invites us into
a thought experiment: "Imagine reading that two thousand people just died
in an earthquake in a remote country, and then discovering that the actual
number of deaths was twenty thousand. Do you now feel ten times worse? To
the extent that we can recognize the numbers as significant, it’s because
of reason, not empathy." He then notes a further impediment generated by
empathy: "Sensible policies often have benefits that are merely statistical
but victims who have names and stories." By focusing on the victims, we end
up with bad policy that doesn't give us the benefits.

In another reference to politics, both Bloom and Harris-Gershon point to
what they call "the politics of empathy in which each side vies for an
empathetic response. While progressives... point to the children at Sandy
Hook as clear evidence for our need to tightly regulate firearms,
conservatives... point to those helpless, unarmed victims. And America
empathizes." This empathy-driven dynamic does not help America make up its
collective mind on a moral issue, but rather confuses us and sets us
against each other.
Planetary Survival

Harris-Gershon notes "this beautiful human characteristic – beneficial when
the world is small, say a family or a village – has become a liability and,
in some cases, a destructive force in our world. In some ways, empathy is
killing us." He raises the issue of climate change - on which I share some
of his concerns, but fear he goes too far when he asserts that "We cannot
possibly feel emotionally the lives of those who do not yet exist, nor can
we emotionally absorb the staggering numbers of those who will suffer and
perish as a result of climate change." He may not experience powerful
emotional feelings for those unseen, unborn people, but such empathic
feelings are a driving force in my own psyche. However, I can well imagine
that many or even most people have a hard time stretching their empathy in
that direction or having such an overwhelming gut impact from the
personally felt suffering of future generations.

Harris-Gershon concludes with this: "if we are to survive as a society, if
our planet is to survive, we are going to somehow have to become smart
enough to rely on reason, and not empathy, to make our most important
decisions. Yes, we will always be moral. And empathy will always, as an
emotion, focus our attention on the personal stories we encounter. As it
should. But our survival depends, paradoxically, on our ability to overcome
our emotionally-informed morality. On our ability to look at climate change
statistics and say, 'Yes, I must act. Immediately.'”

Bloom agrees: "If a planet of billions is to survive... we’ll need to take
into consideration the welfare of people not yet harmed—and, even more, of
people not yet born. They have no names, faces, or stories to grip our
conscience or stir our fellow-feeling. Their prospects call, rather, for
deliberation and calculation. Our hearts will always go out to the baby in
the well; it’s a measure of our humanity. But empathy will have to yield to
reason if humanity is to have a future."
What they miss

Obviously Bloom and Harris-Gershon are making excellent points - especially
that we need to expand beyond the narrow focus of most empathy. But there
is a serious fallacy in their reasoning: they pose empathy and reason as
opposed sides in a dichotomy. They have framed the issue as reason, logic,
and statistics *VERSUS* emotion, empathy, and compassion.

While acknowledging the value of empathy, both essayists argue that reason
is far superior for dealing with today's challenges. However, their
arguments narrowly focus on the shortcomings of empathy, neglecting the
considerable shortcomings of rationality. Rationality has a strong tendency
to be neatly reductionist and cleverly self-serving. It is prone to
mistaking its maps for the territories they describe. It too often asserts
that it operates objectively, independent of values and biases, when closer
examination reveals it to be rife with values and assumptions that just
happen to be invisible to its supposedly detached practitioners. Reason
also tends to serve our need for rationalizations more often than our need
for wisdom.

This is of course not to say that empathy is superior to reason. The truth
- the truth that we most need to grasp - is that *both* reason and empathy
can be used in inadequate or destructive ways, and that *both* reason and
empathy can be used in wholesome, life-serving ways. They can also serve to
ameliorate each other's worst shortcomings.
The integration of empathy and reason

So we need to frame our problem here not in terms of how inferior one of
these powerful cognitive modes is compared to the other, but in terms of
their need for balance, for integral wholeness and interactivity, for
supporting each other and functioning in mutually enhancing ways to
generate the deeper, richer wisdom we need.
[image: 220px-Yin_and_Yang.svg]

To represent this, I imagine a yin-yang symbol (Taijitu) in which reason is
the white "fish" and empathy is the black "fish" (or vice versa). Note that
in that image empathy and reason move or dance together, intimately related
to each other. In our healthiest interactions with the world, we find
reason at the heart of our empathy and empathy at the heart of our reason. *
That's * the kind of consciousness - and world - we need and want. We need
empathy to guide our reasoning, and reason to guide our empathy.

Both our reason and our empathy have evolved in conditions very unlike what
we have today. So to meet today's challenges we need both reason and
empathy to expand, to evolve, to stretch so that they embrace - with each
other's help - more of reality, more of the whole of life.

*That evolution is already happening.* Historically we find empathy
embracing more of the whole through progressive movements for the rights of
slaves, women, gays, animals, nature, etc. In another thread of history, we
find reason embracing more of the whole through science breaking out of its
separate silos and mechanistic assumptions into interdisciplinary
investigations and holistic fields like ecology, nonlinear systems,
complexity and chaos theories, quantum uncertainty, etc. And we find the
two threads merging in the work of people like Buddhist systems thinker Joanna
Macy<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-1594fabaff5393cd78411853a0838beb-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>and
spiritually inspired evolutionary cosmologist Brian
Swimme<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-736cd07652f8c651cbbf02fec1a9341b-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>,
and in movements like the Pachamama
Alliance<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-6bcdef4b5f39be12848b6f12f3d59e0f-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>and
Permaculture<https://go.madmimi.com/redirects/1374040292-1a92e3a5f2ca77061f7db36f94aac736-eb0d3f6?pa=486716119239373648>,
which weave indigenous insights with scientific understandings of our
global and local situations to guide wiser forms of caring.

We still don't know whether this evolutionary process will happen fast
enough to counter the potentially terminal dynamics of the
empathy-vs-reason split. But that evolution is unfolding rapidly and offers
tremendous hope. I'll explore it further in my next post in this series.

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