So I've been reading about empathy
And I think the internet is breaking it.
So I’ve been reading about bias and empathy today, and I’m about to swing into purely theoretical territory, because I am a science fiction writer concerned with how we interact with the cosmos. So here we go.
Here’s the audio version of this post
What I read has semi-confirmed what I've suspected for a long time; that closer disasters have a greater emotional impact on us not because we are numb to the plight of foreigners, but that we are tribal animals. We look for our tribe when looking for who to protect. It is the same thing that sees clumping of similar children in schools, that makes comiccons so much fun, that makes herds out of total strangers in football stadiums and makes enemies of the other team’s supporters. It kept us in tightly knit groups during the ice age, but is it still useful, or is it harmful in this internet age?
Runaway empathy is how segregation can begin, how abusers can whittle away at a family's trust, and how new tribes evolve online (just look at how people are ousted from certain “communities” for asking piercing questions, and how people signal to each other by filling their social media bios with the typical formulae; political views / sexuality / gender presentation / hashtag / acronym, as if that means something about them as an individual. It does not in most cases, but it serves as a way to say “Hello I am one of you, lets’s be friends” to another human out there in the wilderness, and the internet is a wilderness. It is barren yet busy and frightening. There are tribes out there that we disagree with and which might be angry that we are sharing the same social media platforms, speaking our opinions which upset them. But we are all connected now, no longer allowed the stagnating freedom of nomads, we clamber around aging social media websites battling for a chance to be known.
Some people follow the political views / sexuality / gender presentation / hashtag / acronym formulae to the point that there’s barely room left for their name - they lose something of themselves in this desperate attempt to signal what tribes they are in. They become a piece in a greater machine, an individual in a hive mind. It is why people who disagree with a group from which they came (ex-muslims, detrans people, conservative christians turned liberal atheists) are ousted, silenced, and even punished, sometimes violently, for thought-crimes as simple as changing their mind later in life or realising something about their cult tribe was ‘off’ the whole time. It is why I am uncomfortable putting “atheist/skeptic” in my bio, not just because like with every tribe, the outspoken atheists are the worst ones, but because it simply takes up valuable characters and I actually have a personality outside of the few cardboard boxes you might cram me into if you wanted to write a scathing news article about me when I’m famous (EVIL AUTHOR MAN SAID A THING WE MISINTERPRETED. CANCEL HIM!)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, empathy.
Our empathy wants to attach us to similar people. We can empathize with them more because we know what it was like. I know what being bullied for being ginger is like, or what having an autistic brother (and now sister, the diagnoses are creeping in…) is like, so I can relate to and empathize with someone who’s been through that. Other people may clump together due to shared cultural heritage, shared trauma, or a shared sense of humour.
I’ve no idea what being an ex-muslim is like1, because despite some of the cultish aspects of my upbringing, I was never entrapped in any religion unless you count a conspiratorial hatred for local councils as a religion, which I don’t because we didn’t even get to wear silly hats.
So empathy is good for us. It helps us find people we can work together with efficiently, but there is a case to be made for less empathy, more reason.
I love this quote from Paul Bloom, the author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion
“In order for me to help a situation where women are discriminated against in my university, I don’t think I have to feel what it’s like to be a woman who’s discriminated against,” says Bloom. “I think that’s almost a narcissistic exercise. It’s not really about me.” - Paul Bloom
This makes a lot of sense to me. Something I noticed early in life is how eager people are to pretend they understand what you’ve been through, or even to pretend they have been through the same or worse. This desperation for relevance is often the sign of the adapting narcissist, but it is also a sign that our empathy is trying to take over, to make the alien across the room relatable. It’s why literature is successful when it takes universal experiences and makes them new and unique; it plugs into something we can empathize with. A character falling in love is probably something we can all relate to. Unfortunately marketing types know this, and they craft little stories to hook you in and make you feel things, leading to a sale.
Empathy can trip you up too. My mum once gave money to a ‘homeless’ person who she later discovered pretended to be homeless each weekend for extra cash when they weren’t working. Empathy can get you rushing to buy stickers for a charitable cause that later turns out to be nonsense, or have you ignoring the bigger picture of a disaster in favour of looking after a handful of people who really did not need all of your resources dumped on them.
So we need to get more rational as a species.
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How to stop letting runaway empathy control us.
We can of course get around this by realizing it is there, and through conscious awareness of it we can then substitute emotion for reason. Basically having a larger imaginative capacity might make you a more likely candidate for giving two shits about a natural disaster across the ocean. You can imagine yourself being there, and develop some empathy that way. But what about people who lack the capacity?
Just because you feel less emotionally affected by a distant tragedy does not mean you are bad. People care about their own tribe first. You are not racist for worrying more about closer disasters, though to some it might look like it. What’s happening isn’t you ignoring the plight of foreigners because you hate them, no, what’s happening is that your brain is keeping focus on its immediate environment. Better to worry about the fire in the forest we are stood in rather than the one on the next mountain range.
But we are connected creatures now, and all our fires intermingle.
It is much better to replace empathy with reason wherever possible, for the simple reason that it is better for everyone. Because self-preservation is the reason our species is here, reading and thinking. Because we are all one big tribe. That’s the trick. Our granular way of seeing things is an illusion created by our need to break the world down into data… the truth is much, much more complicated, and huge, and beautiful.
We are all one tribe. All of us. Even the shitheads.
What’s interesting about that point is that a few ex-muslims have messaged me on twitter asking me about what it’s like to be allowed to be an atheist. It’s sad to see people having to hide themselves just to survive.