#7 On Empathy
The afternoon forecast shows another bright hot day. You are tired of the sun, so you block all light that can enter your room. You like it like this, to lie comatose in silence. You are thinking about empathy, not about how to empathise but about the very frameworks of empathy. You have this habit to prod into things, this insatiable need to build up questions and tire yourself in this pursuit of answers. You remember the lines from a poem, “How treacherous the absurdity of this world! One never understands the infiniteness of the Why?” You sit at your laptop, and start translating thought to language. You hope something is uncovered and transmitted in this translation.
Isn’t this also empathy? To search for the writer in the written?
In an equation of empathy, the I remains an important element. If I see a wounded dog, and I empathise with it, I need this concept of identity to transpose the hurt of the dog onto myself. Thus, in a lesson on empathy, to be yourself remains an underlying truth. A perfect transposition is neither possible and will neither be termed as empathising, because if I mirror you, I cease to be me and hence it is not me empathising with you but you living your experience. Thus, the conflicting nature of empathising with someone lies in the fact of mirroring their latent circumstances, their identity onto yourself, while being cognizant of not turning into them. In this sense, I often wonder that empathy entails a sort of voyeuristic analysis to itself, wherein I borrow your experiences in order to analyse or perceive a lived reality that is outside my immediate self. At the same time, it opens a way of communication, to achieve this sense of transcendence which is not complete, which does not exist in the sort of a metaphysical oneness with each other, but an incomplete and inefficient dance of emotions, where two clumsy individuals try to understand each other.
It brings us to the more pertinent question, why do we empathise with each other?
We will start with a quote from Game Theory and Social Contract by Ken Binmore, “It is because we need the ability to empathize with others that we have developed a sense of personal identity—not the reverse…we have not evolved as a collection of isolated egos that moral philosophers are free to slot into whatever ideal society they may choose to invent. Our egos are themselves cultural artifacts to a substantial degree. But this insight can never be properly exploited if we insist on keeping the “I” as the centrepiece of our maps of inner space. The chief function of the “I” is to act as a mirror of others in our own minds and to reflect the manner in which we are similarly mirrored in the minds of others. Its nature is therefore inextricably bound up with the nature of the ”I”s with which it interacts. This is why game theory is so important if we are ever to understand what lies at the root of being human. If we persist in treating the ego as some kind of immaculate Platonic ideal that somehow exists independently of the society in which we live, we will never learn to know ourselves. What lies inside our heads is a result of biological and social evolution. Insofar as these processes are complete, we think as we think and we feel as we feel, because it is in equilibrium for such thoughts and feelings to survive in the game of life.”
Binmore sees empathy, like all other behaviours as an outgrowth of our biological and cultural history, of the path that humanity took to evolve to its present moment. In Binmore’s vision society is a game, and he is developing on his game theoretic vision. If we start with a fundamental two player’s game, called the Prisoner’s Dilemma which goes like this — there are two prisoners A and B. Both of them are kept in two different rooms, where they cannot interact with each other, or have any information about each other.
If both A and B remain silent then both of them serve one year in prison.
If A betrays B and B remains silent about A, then A is set free and B serves three years in prison.
If B betrays A and A remains silent, then A servers three years in prison, and finally.
If both of them betray each other then both server 2 years in prison.
The reason it is a dilemma is, because if both A and B act as rational agents then both of them should betray each other since that offers them the highest payoff (or minimum sentence), however the best option for them would be to remain silent. However, without any information about the other person, choosing to remain silent is one that no rational agent would make. Binmore builds on his vision using something he calls empathetic preferences, that is, both A and B try to think by placing themselves in each other’s position and if they are able to do that and understand each other’s preference, they can come to a viable conclusion of remaining silent, which is what is mostly seen in humans. Binmore tries to explain that empathy evolved as a necessity for survival in this evolutionary game, where the identity is an emergent concept of empathy and not empathy of identity. The ability to place ourselves in the shoes of other people, we were able to cooperate or defect, based on the kind of game we found ourselves in. In that way, empathy could also serve as a tool for manipulation or subversion, if we could truly understand the circumstances and mental framework of a large part of society, thus empathising with them but not sympathising. The more I think of Binmore’s version of empathy, it ends up feeling like a cold mathematical tool that I have to account for when making a game theoretic calculation, where my identity is at the confluence of ideas and information that is constantly mutating and evolving using the self as a medium. However, a brighter takeaway from Binmore can also be that despite the various strategies with which a game can be played, our evolution has chosen the one in which we have the ability to empathise with each other, and somehow that ensures the maximum chances of our survival.
However, a large part of our culture and biology interplay with each other, with a meme (a packet of cultural information) often dominates our behaviour towards things. In a story about the first signs of human culture, which you might have heard, Margaret Mead is asked by one of her students that what the first sign of civilisation in a culture was. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. Broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.
So somehow in the nexus of our biological and cultural evolution, a meme that led us to empathise and be cooperative and considerate has evolved and dominated the other nastier memes.
When we zoom in further to explore the nuances of empathy, we realise that it exists as a need, rather than an abstract concept. It is to say, that a want to belong, to be familiar and be understood and to understand, to be able to predict and adapt to each other, all lies deeply in the ability to empathise with each other. When I think of language, I often marvel at the use of all these identifiers to firstly isolate ourselves. My name, my pronoun, my personality traits contained in adjectives and all of me that can be contained in language is the first step to root myself. To be myself is the first step to empathise. Then, to talk to you, I employ a second person voice. You seem to be sad. You appear lonely. You are reading this and wondering what is this stupid man writing about. All of this acts as a sort of grace, as an invocation, an announcement that I see you, that you exist in my vocabulary, that there is a language for us. The final step, which might be the confluence of both of our narratives- this language in itself, beyond me and you, or rather putting ourselves out of the individual egos and building this framework on which we can communicate. The beautiful realisation is that there are actually no first steps or second steps. From the moment, the first word is uttered—we are involved in a game of empathising with each other. In fact, the realisation also makes us realise the ugly side of things which is the inability to empathise with people, how it often starts with erasing them from language, to not offer them proper words to identify themselves and to not let them share their stories.
The more we investigate, the more entrenched empathy seems to be in the structure of our civilisation. Empathy is a negotiation we do with ourselves for the other. We tell ourselves that the other’s hurt is as valid as ours. We attempt to understand others through a meta analysis of our understanding of their understanding of their experiences, and then inculcate that understanding into our experiences and form a coherent world view. The inherent lack in empathy thus also seems to be its necessity. As Binmore points out, that if we keep the I as the centrepiece while mapping out empathy, we will never even understand our own depths since we are essentially a mirror. However, at the same time, to preserve enough of the I to differentiate between the people we are empathising with and ourselves seems important. When I think of empathy, it often feels like a rough terrain, yet an adventure that we are destined to undertake.
And as we empathise with people, I often go back to sage advice that one of my friends had for me, when she said, “To be able to empathise means to understand, not justify.” Empathy begins with understanding and does not carry an ethical imperative with itself. As we build towards any moral philosophy or ethical framework, we have to understand that there has to be a place for empathy to build any society.