OPINION: On a certain blindness

No person is born with empathy. It is soaked in over a period of time, if it’s acquired at all. In fact, many people show a complete lack of it. And the lack of empathy in the world is part of what makes us value it. Empathy is in terribly short supply, particularly when juxtaposed to all the anger and disgust expressed between people these days.

Jesus said “what you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” I don’t think you have to be religious to recognize the beauty behind this, that all life, even the breathing thing we view as beneath us, carries a spark of something that we don’t own.

It’s easy to view the ugliness of the world around us and feel a certain license to kill off our own empathy for others. We make judgments about others. We stick to them. We see things that affirm our judgments and ignore or get angry at those things that contradict our beliefs. We know others are doing the same thing. And we’re getting judged harshly just as we do the same. These things are painful. We’re all subject to society’s harsh judgment. But that doesn’t let any of us off the hook when it comes to judging ourselves, too.

I think our judgments are often rooted in partial truths, and there’s some satisfaction in seeing our own truths play out in so many great societal conflicts. But just as we recognize human failing so clearly in others, we have to be able to turn that assessment inward.

I appreciated these words about human shortcomings in a recent column by New York Times columnist David Brooks.

“Every sensible person involved in politics and public life knows that their work is laced with failure,” wrote Brooks. “Every column, every speech, every piece of legislation and every executive decision has its own humiliating shortcomings. There are always arguments you should have made better, implications you should have anticipated, other points of view you should have taken on board, Moreover, even if you are at your best, your efforts will still be laced with failure. The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend.”

Brooks goes on to say that our individual shortcomings can be redeemed by others.

“You may write a mediocre column or make a mediocre speech or propose a mediocre piece of legislation, but others argue with you, correct you and introduce elements you never thought of,” wrote Brooks. “Each of these efforts may also be flawed, but together, if the system is working well, they move things gradually forward.”

One of the most beautiful pieces you can find on human empathy was written by William James, the American psychologist and philosopher who died in 1910 at 68. In his essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” he speaks of how we are all afflicted with a blindness in regards to everything outside of the self.

“We are all practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform,” wrote James. “Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties … But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives.”

I love how James considers the perspective of a man from a dog’s eyes, how the man seems strange and foolish.

“With all his goodwill toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension,” wrote James. “To sit there like a senseless statue when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life?”

I don’t consider myself a naïve person. I know we will never eliminate our human ugliness from ourselves or our society, but we can turn things slightly the other way, make them a little better. And as we argue politics, we should do so passionately. The things that matter most deserve our deepest feelings, our deepest emotions.

But there is a right and a wrong way to go about this important business. And no passion should excuse any of us from attempting to be empathetic toward others. This is incredibly hard, but terribly necessary.

If we value that beauty we were given at birth, we must turn that coin over, shed our innocence in favor of a more learned gift.

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal.