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A friend (with whom I share different political beliefs) forwarded this to me this morning. I just skimmed it as I am running late but thought some of you might find it interesting.
http://nypost.com/2016/12/10/obama-preaches-empathy-trump-projects-it/
http://nypost.com/2016/12/10/obama-preaches-empathy-trump-projects-it/
In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the moral guidepost of the story is
planted by Atticus Finch, who tells us, “You never really understand a
person until you consider things from his point of view. . . until you
climb into his skin and walk around in it.” President Obama tells us
“to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us”
because “when you think like this. . . it becomes harder not to act,
harder not to help.”
As a guide to living, this attitude is mistaken. Far from being the
spark for doing good, empathy is a kind of moral short circuit that
damages our ability to make rational choices. Empathy can be racist,
thrill-based, corrosive, hostile to facts and logic, with an alarming
tendency to cruelty and violence. “On balance, empathy is a negative,”
Yale psychologist Paul Bloom puts it in his cleverly contrarian book
“Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.” “It’s sugary
soda, tempting and delicious and bad for us.”
Empathy — feeling what you believe someone else is feeling — starts
with the basic error of availability bias: We focus on whatever
problem is right in front of us, such as what’s on the news, at the
possible expense of much larger problems affecting far more human
beings. “You cannot empathize with more than one or two people at a
time,” writes Bloom. These feelings crowd out more thoughtful
deliberations.
Say you learn an 8-year-old girl named Rebecca has become mortally ill
due to a faulty vaccine. You’ll be outraged. Halt that vaccine! Write
your congressman! Fueled by the satisfying surge of empathy, millions
like you could create a movement that will sicken many children by
stopping them from being vaccinated.
Raising children is a mass act of putting aside empathy: Frequently,
we not only ignore our kids’ pain, we actually cause them pain, for
their long-term good. We make them cry by forcing them to go to bed,
do their homework or see the dentist. You might say that resisting the
allure of empathy is one of our most important tasks as parents.
Moreover, controlling your empathetic urges is critical to leadership
in general. A business exec who couldn’t bear to fire anyone could
wind up costing everyone their jobs by driving the firm into
bankruptcy. A principal who never holds back any students because she
frets about the resulting stigma would be making things worse for
those falling behind. Empathy even handicaps nurses. A study cited by
Bloom found nursing students with high empathy spent less time caring
for patients and more time seeking help from other medical
professionals.
Empathy can usefully be compared to anger, Bloom says: Both are
universal responses mainly geared toward others, both can make us
irrational and both are moral — they include judgments about right and
wrong. Both have positive aspects; anger, for instance, according to
evolutionary theory, leads to enhanced cooperation among humans by
instilling punishment for those who cheat or are unkind to others.
Donald Trump proved how easily empathy and anger can operate in
tandem: He felt the same rage with the Washington establishment,
free-trade agreements and political correctness that his voters did.
Empathy isn’t necessarily a liberal trait; conservative Supreme Court
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito spoke of the need for
judicial empathy in their confirmation hearings. During the Ferguson
riots, the one thing both sides agreed on was empathy: Protesters felt
the pain of black youths shot by police, while defenders of law and
order put themselves in the shoes of cops menaced by aggressive
criminals.
To be a good person, though, it is critical to understand when others
are hurting. If, being kind, you want others to be happy, you have to
have what Bloom calls “cognitive empathy” or social intelligence — an
awareness of other people’s feelings. He encourages compassion,
otherwise known as concern for others, which should not be confused
with empathy. Say there are millions of people suffering from malaria
— you can have compassion for this group and wish to take steps to
alleviate their pain, but you don’t actually empathize with them.
There is a measurable difference — it can readily be seen on a brain
scan — between empathy and compassion. The former lights up the insula
and anterior cingulate cortex, while compassion buzzes the medial
orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum. More noticeably, compassion
training produces a warm and positive outlook, while empathy is
mentally draining and unpleasant.
Think about the most empathic people you know, the ones who are
constantly in an emotional five-alarm state due to distress about the
condition of the world. Do they seem happy?