Without Empathy
The dictionary defines "empathy" as "the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner." To have empathy for another, then, means that we comprehend intimate information through a subtle, nonverbal, unwritten manner of communication. We are empathic when we can sense another's thoughts and feelings with enough clarity to impart an understanding of their actions, needs, and desires.
A capacity for empathy naturally manifests as a function of connectedness. From the technological connections of the Internet and telecommunications to such softer connections as sharing common interests, living together, talking, touching, dancing, and having sex, the experience of feeling connected leads directly to an enhancement of empathy. The closer and more connected we feel to others, the more means and opportunities we have for exchanging critical information, and the more empathic we become.
Conversely, when we lose the experience of connectedness, our capacity for empathy declines. To the extent that disconnection prevails throughout both the personal and political spheres of American culture, we have become a tragically antipathetic people. From a widespread lack of empathy comes much of the disrespect that riddles our daily communications, comes an inability to appreciate the special needs and difficulties of the underclass and various out-groups, comes the tortured rationales of the militarist, the unilateralist, the xenophobe, the monotheist, and the sexist, comes the flailing incompetence of our international relations. When people have no feeling for what's going on in the lives of others--worse, when people do not even want such feelings--they consign themselves to private little hells of failed relationship.
In reaction to the outrages of 9/11, most Americans felt perfectly justified in the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and any other country that might harbor terrorists; in the imprisonment, torture, or assassination of anyone with possible links to Islamic terrorism; and in insisting that the whole world support us in such actions. Even those who lived thousands of miles away from ground zero and knew none of the people killed in the terrorist attacks still felt righteously compelled to answer violence with even greater violence and treated all pleas for nonviolent reconciliation as unpatriotic and anti-American. We had been grievously injured and, though some innocents would surely suffer, we had to answer with more grievous injury.
Their utter lack of empathy caused most Americans to miss the simple fact: the perpetrators of 9/11 had lived through experiences every bit as terrible and terrorizing as those they inflicted on America--their countries had been invaded, their homelands bombed, their relations murdered, their people humiliated--and they thus felt every bit as justified in their rage, aggression, and violent force, even if innocents had to die. Their cause was every bit as just as our cause. More importantly, every bomb we unleashed in our war against terror would have precisely the same affect on those we bombed as did the exploding airplanes of 9/11.
Feeling empathy for others does not necessarily mean that we agree with their actions, that we like what they have done, or that we must in any way change ourselves in response to their demands. Feeling empathy does help us to understand why others act the way they do and to see that, all things being equal, we may have acted in much the same way.
