By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 05, 2017
Just over 14 years ago, my daughter almost died minutes
before entering the world. My wife had to have an emergency C-section. The
whole thing was harrowing. Someday I’ll tell the whole story. But because of
that experience, and simply because I am a father, I could empathize with
late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s story about his son’s birth. His story is almost
surely more harrowing than my story, but that doesn’t matter. Empathy is the
ability to feel what someone else is feeling.
Empathy is different than sympathy or compassion.
Sympathy is when you feel sorry for someone. Compassion is when you do
something about it.
But empathy is something else. Researchers studying the
brain can actually see how the various centers controlling certain feelings
light up when we observe or imagine the experiences of others. “If you feel bad
for someone who is bored, that’s sympathy,” writes Yale psychologist Paul Bloom
in his brave and brilliant new book, Against
Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, “but if you feel bored, that’s
empathy.”
Bloom, a liberal transplant from Canada, distrusts
empathy because empathy is like a drug. It distorts our perspective, causing us
to get all worked up about an individual or group. He compares it to a
spotlight that illuminates a specific person or group, plunging everything and
everyone else into darkness.
“When some people think about empathy, they think about
kindness. I think about war,” Bloom writes. He’s got a point. Look at the
Middle East today. Sunni nations empathize with the plight of suffering Sunnis,
and that empathy causes them to further hate and demonize Shiites. Many people
around the world empathize with the Palestinians, blinding them to the
legitimate concerns of Israelis. And vice versa.
Adolf Hitler was a master of empathy — for ethnic Germans
in the Sudetenland, Austria, and elsewhere. The cause of nationalist empathy
for the German tribe triggered profound moral blindness for the plight, and
even the humanity, of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.
Again, Bloom is a squishy liberal by his own account, but
he’s also a leading scholar of how the mind actually works, not how we wish it
would work.
Human beings are naturally inclined to sympathize and
empathize with people like them. There has never been a society where people
didn’t give priority to helping family and friends over strangers. This tends
to blind us “to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with,”
writes Bloom. “Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism
and racism.”
Look at the intractable debate over the phrase “black
lives matter.” The slogan itself is a kind of spotlight, argue supporters,
highlighting the legitimate complaints of African Americans. But it also blinds
them to why others respond to the term by saying “all lives matter.”
I don’t go as far as Bloom in detesting empathy. It seems
to me not only natural but also defensible to give priority to figuratively
kindred people. England is a lot more like America than, say, Singapore. That
similarity has forged a long and important bond, both formally (e.g., treaties
and shared institutions) and informally in terms of an emotional and cultural
bond. If England were attacked, our empathy for its plight would inform our
response in ways that I think are important and useful.
But where I agree with Bloom is that empathy alone is
dangerous and can distract us from rational thought and meaningful compassion.
Which brings me back to Jimmy Kimmel. His story about his
son aroused a riot of empathy across the nation. And he used that response to
make an argument about health-care policy that was largely devoid of any
consideration of the facts, trade-offs, or costs of what is the best way to
deal with people, including babies, who have pre-existing medical conditions.
He was largely wrong on the facts: Babies with dire medical conditions are
covered by their parents’ insurance, and when their parents are uninsured,
doctors don’t just let the baby die on the table. That doesn’t mean there
aren’t inequities in the system or that the current health-care regime is
anywhere close to perfect.
But it is very difficult to have a rational discussion
about the trade-offs inherent to any health-care system — including socialized
medicine — when all anyone can think about is the ordeal of a newborn baby and
his loving parents.
No comments:
Post a Comment