In his book Against Empathy, the (Yale University tenured) psychologist Paul Bloom offers a distinction between Empathy and Compassion. Empathy is feeling another’s pain and Compassion is knowing another’s pain. Empathy activates emotion and Compassion is more rational. Empathy celebrates an award winning photograph as a true representation of an unfolding crisis whereas Rational Compassion attempts to track demography, trends, ideological training and the funding sources of both the award winner and the award giver for a more accurate picture of the same crisis and it’s emergent narrative.
Empathy is Type 1 Fast Thinking and Compassion is Type 2 Slow Thinking, to borrow ideas from Daniel Kahneman’s stunning book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
One is Right-brained intuitive/kneejerk calling out and the other is Left-brained contemplative/boring work although one should not use these words in the company of a practicing neuroscientist unless one wishes to hear a rant about the popularist dumbing down of brain science.
Empathy is being reduced to tears at a Disney movie when a few coloured pixels take up human or animal form and embrace their inner journey displaying grace under pressure. Compassion is that which is displayed by Dr. House, MD the narcissistic meanie empathetically played by the brilliant British actor Hugh Laurie. His character roasts and ridicules everything the patient says but also cares enough to solve their challenging medical case despite their lies by quoting an obscure page of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the 40th minute of the programme. That’s compassion to save a life devoid of empathy.
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Dr. Bloom gives the example of a married couple based in New York who happened to be firefighters involved in rescue ops post 9-11. The husband and wife would do 10-12 hour daily shifts extracting dead and mutilated bodies, splattered organs, fingers and limbs from the rubble of the twin towers. After a few days, the woman simply could not go on. It was too much to take. The man lasted a few more weeks.
Bloom claims as women on average have higher empathy, her circuits were fried after a few days of this heartrending and gory situation whereas the man was able to go on doing his job as he probably internalised that literally feeling another’s pain would incapacitate him from doing the work. At that difficult moment in American history, his contribution at work was more important than what he was experiencing as a human capable of feeling feelings.
The provocatively titled book is a deliberate attempt to steer conversation towards the view that empathy makes us human but is not always a reliable guide for sensemaking and truthseeking. It is not that Dr. Bloom thinks humans have a false factory-fitted psychological setting that should be discarded. The title of the book is merely a marketing hook to get people interested. Empathy is useful, pleasurable, painful and an essential part of being human. However the book discusses case after case where empathy reliably misfires and compassion is the need of the hour. For several things we agree to care about, compassion serves as a useful guide and empathy causes emotional hijack.
Empathy gets movie-watching and art-consuming off the ground but rational compassion is a sounder foundation for system design. Buddhist monks who spend a lifetime shutting their eyelids and fixing internally the meanings of esoteric words in their bodies know this very well and immediately quoted the Pali words for both empathy and compassion to Bloom, showing that both were distinct tools with different applications.
As a lifelong fan of the moral philosopher Adam Smith, Bloom is never too far away from a Smith quote. Let us look at one here:
“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.”
Needless to say Adam Smith was sensitive to Empathy and Compassion centuries before Bloom wrote his book. He was sensitive to what Paul Slovic has provocatively called Genocide Neglect, desribed as “one death is a human tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic”. This is also why brochures of NGOs seeking donations zoom in on the extreme close up of a singular relatable story about a young girl or boy who is in a bad way rather than quote page after page of graphs and indices. Empathy moves us to action, a statistic usually does not. Bloom attempts to make a normative case that it should, knowing fully well that one cannot always get an Ought from an Is.
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“Art is nothing but a transfer of empathy from artist to viewer” – Zakir Khan, standup comic.
Zakir Khan is one of the most successful and talented comics in India today. Elsewhere he has said that there isn’t much that is new which will be said through art, but what is unique is that it is coming from you. You have to say it in your own way and that is the only reason to do art.
Unlike server space and cloud storage, it does feel like art is being produced in surplus at the present moment even as there is fatigue on the demand-side. (“OTT par kuch bhi naya nai challa bro sab bakwaas hai”)
The astounding risk:reward ratio for artists aside, I believe why actors and entertainers get elevated to being highly paid celebrities for doing a job society needs (just like the rest of us) is because the lines that underpaid writers give them to say are so personal but also so universal. The passive viewer for whom the actors have staged a drama develops a relationship of deep empathy with the person on-screen. Incredibly hard working actors sometimes fail to connect not because of any deficiency in talent or its application but possibly because they weren’t able to open the empathy floodgate within the viewer, perhaps because of their hair, teeth, skintone, jawline, waistline, shoulder blade, bust measurement or something else. (“Sir aapka face iss wale demographic ke hisaab se relatable nai hai sir. Aapka chehra dekh ke bachhe darr rahe hai sir woh Andey nahi khaenge”)
Of course rational compassion tells us that this relationship between actor and viewer is an illusion but try telling that to the thousands of people who visit Bandra daily for one hardworking human’s wave from the balcony of Mannat or the dozens of young men who are writing letters dripped in blood or worse to their favourite female actor.
Who knows what personal itch of their’s a distant celebrity is expected to scratch because of a fictitious relationship of empathy between two strangers? Celebrity culture based on on-screen popularity has no option but to isolate itself from the rest of the country and be policed by bulky security personnel – possibly because many of us are not born with the tools to distinguish empathy from compassion and may not understand how to channelise the upwelling of emotion for a fictional character – cinematic, literary or theological.
Granted, the traffic snarls around celebrities are also because many of our countrymen never acquire the capacity to not be assholes, losers or fully grown adults but in many cases it seems like a well-meaning citizen’s empathy misfires and the distant star/actor collecting their cheques after doing shift in work in Goregaon feels like they are our very own apne hi ghar ki Dhania Bahu who will patiently listen to us articulate all our microemotions and also creatively solve our domestic problems.
How deeply we care about people on screen who play relatable characters, no? Some other day I will attempt to argue that the salary of the highest-paid entertainer as compared to that of the highest paid surgeon/oncologist or psychologist and highest paid Yoga practitioner is a metric of the kind of pain a society is truly suffering from. Highly paid doctors are looking at the body, highly paid psychologists are looking at the mind but the highly paid actor/entertainer attempts to look at your soul.
When we compensate them by rewarding them millions for their contrived gestures and speech, we reveal what we are missing in our personal lives. We help actors monetize the struggle they undertook to entertain us through the triggering-of-our-empathy-by-enacting-prewritten-scripts by permitting them to further convince us which brand of insurance, underwear and car to buy so as to resolve some of our inner dilemmas and acquire progress and meaning. This form of celebrity-driven advertising clearly works in practice but if we could slowly wean away from empathy and towards compassion one person at a time, a different picture of reality would emerge. Perhaps.
What a mystery empathy is though, you have it for some and you do not have it for others. And who knows where it comes from and how we differ from each other in how much we have. And what is the training programme to develop more of it and also what is the programme to prevent emotional hijack by its overapplication?
The movie Munnabhai MBBS sets up this conflict of visions beautifully when Dr. J ‘Dot’ Asthana makes the ominous speech, “I do not love my patients. If I loved them, I would not be able to operate on them. My hands may shake if I am forced to operate on my daughter because I love her.”
He scores a fine goal for Team Compassion and Team Empathy issues a Jaadu ki Jhappi in response. Thanks to the skill of the director, writers and actors, empathy has a great run in the movie coaxing the subject (Woh Subject nahi insaan hai Mamu) out of a coma before a synthesis of both empathy and compassion is manufactured for a neat resolution in under three hours.
This is probably because like most dichotomies, Empathy versus Rational Compassion is persuasive and useful but ultimately limited. Both sides know fully well they need each other to survive, just like Batman and Harvey Dent. Perhaps the problem is neither empathy nor rational compassion but the “versus” we place in between the two words.
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To conclude, I have no conclusion. Why must there always be one? This kind of stuff shows up in conversation with friends and family and hence an attempt to broadcast it here through Zuckerberg’s dangerous tool. Thank you for reading! And thank you to Dr. Paul Bloom whose effort to gently nudge our shared culture towards compassion is something I empathise with.
– Nikhil Rao
