A Failure of Empathy
I have an onerous relationship with the word “empathy”. It is probably not the word or its inherent meanings but the suspicious ease with which we supply it as a universal antidote while never fully diving into its fathomless depths. My other grouse is how it is used interchangeably in lieu of the self-work we need to do when it comes to reaching its mothering fount — compassion. As a psychologist and a social scientist, I have frequently dissected and anatomized the term under the lenses of personal and social frameworks. The word’s etymology is best traced to Ancient Greek, a portmanteau of empátheia, literally “passion” (formed from ἐν (en, “in, at”) + πάθος (páthos, “feeling”). A basic google search will report back the story of British psychologist Edward Tichener — a disciple of the colossus Willhelm Wundt — conceiving the word in an attempt to make meaning for the somewhat untranslatable German word “Einfühlung” (fully:Einfühlungsvermögen) which can denote variously sensitivity, understanding, sympathy et al. In its truest interpretation, Einfühlung means “in-feeling” (appearing for the first time in Robert Vischer’s Ph.D. dissertation, circa 1873) — perhaps an indication of going emotionally inwards, originated to represent a now mostly extinct branch of experimental psychology which concerned itself with empirically comprehending introspective modalities through aesthetic response. In present day Greek, empátheia — ironically — stands for feelings of acidic negativity and prejudice against another. When it comes to how social media interactions unfold these days, often the latter endures with more strength than the formerly attributed.
I am a millennial by whiskers’ length. I have navigated my youth in both time periods — BT and AT; Before Twitter & After Twitter. In the beginning we treated Facebook and Twitter (Xanga & Livejournal for the bona fide fossils among us) as a hyperactive kitten would its first encounter with the moving dot of a laser pointer. We followed it around, we tried very hard to pin down its intangibility and above all, we dedicated exhaustive attention to any mutation in its trajectory. And we disagreed a lot. The unimpeded magnetism of cyber societies rested on the myth of a prostrate and inclusive digital landscape, nevermind that every single form of social media platform (as well as gmail) in its original avataar was a strictly-by-invite entry. To quote Seattle’s premier MILF drag queen Jinx Monsoon — DELUSION! CONVINCE YOURSELF! And we did. We suspended cynicism about restrictive classism in favor of freedoms that were quite blurry in their welcome. We changed habitats but retained the same modes of interactions without realizing the depth of damage that could accrue in the shadow of anonymous opinionating. A friend had once equated vehement twitter exchanges to the gibberish of the last few drunks who had finally descended upon a reluctant audience at a house party. This is something Marshal McLuhan had predicted in a slightly more eloquent phrasing— “The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb.”
It is this bomb, with or without the delicate calligraphy on its casing, that seems to tick inside our skulls with a relentless heat when we now participate in conversations via social media. I am the first to agree that being platformed in itself is an indication of privilege as well as ease of networking. In the nearly 2 decades I have spent trying to understand the role of community catalysts, it would be some kind of psychological amaurosis to assume that digital soapboxes are enough to empower. As the organism splits into its plural shapes and we find ourselves hamster-wheeling between legions of apps, the fact remains that a significant percentage of people don’t have access to this quick bridge across geographical and socio-cultural boundaries. This illusion of majority is defeating in itself. That said, it isn’t all insignificant. Twitter, for instance, has been a utile instrument in organizing protests, forming virtual connections beyond the grips of ableism and alienation, updating the world directly about totalitarian regimes from the ground while also creating a universally recognized dog rating system. Twitter also is a dangerous terrain where fascistic, bigoted and misogynistic behaviours recur unchecked. It is this antithetical space which could have been of help to the most marginalized amongst us and yet somehow often endangers — physically as well as psychologically — those very people. All of it from a distance resembles a social psychology experiment on LSD.
In 1951, gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch started conducting a series of “conformity” experiments in a laboratory on the campus of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. These rather critical experiments were designed to study the interactions between individuals and groups from a behavioural standpoint. Asch was interested in assessing the correlations between an individual’s own opinions, beliefs, ideas and actions v/s the desire to fit into a majority group as well as the group’s general influence. In short, he studied how easy or hard it is for an individual to conform to a group purely for social validation, i.e. being liked & accepted. Social norms, unlike rules, are unwritten instructions for how one should behave in certain social settings. They exist as a loaded contradiction where a covert and pervasive awareness of their presence often collides with this entrenched lack of desire to acknowledge their presence. Sometimes twitter’s callout culture seems like an extension of Asch’s meticulous lab work.
When Asam Ahmad wrote his crystalline yet whetted essay “A Note On Call-Out Culture”, the sentence that resonated most deeply with me was — ”It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out.”
Very quickly we tend to substitute support with submission, any disagreement is emphatically misconstrued as an act of malice or worse, domination without appraising its context. Misinformation spreads like wildfire because the faintest question or critique is lumped into an offensive that was never intended in the first place. Apart from that, intent and impact are comfortably dissociated. As Ahmad highlights in his essay, failure is not just a probability but a distinct possibility while walking this continuously expanding and changing path of social justice/awareness especially when it comes to social media interactions. It is impractical to assume that everyone is going to get everything right at all points in time and truly, it is how we address these failures without arm-twisting the language of discourse — which btw was originally assembled to liberate not merely castigate — to curry personal favours needs attention. In Asch’s experiments, the term was “distortion of action” — a situation where individuals know the right way but will give into a drove’s incorrect rush simply to not seem out of place.
This is a growing trend on a medium such as twitter where a desire to participate in search for instant gratification seems to outweigh even the lightest labour needed for a more comprehensive understanding of what exactly you are participating in and whether you need to do so. These days, people are brands. Every step taken is an attempt to add or subtract from this brand. Amusingly this is as anarcho-capitalistic as it gets, whether it is the similarities in standardized bios that seem to be churned by a meme generator or mutual shoutfests about topics we don’t have enough information about but will jump in as long as visibility of some sort is guaranteed. Activism can easily deform into egotism in this ecosystem. Petty score-settling disguises itself as public service where malingering, fabrications and earnestly damning allegations can easily traumatize and harm with impunity. And a lot of this has something to do with how voiceless we feel in our real lives. But instead of addressing our irl problems, we take everything online while doubling the aggression because these spaces conveniently take away our ability to humanize someone and instead present folks as abstract forms lurking in the digital ether.
Stealing from Debord, we live in a society of spectacles. As someone who has seen the drama unfold from both sides — a seasoned athlete of outrage marathons as well as a victim of a mindless smear campaign — I have recently started questioning the nature of our engagement with these networks we have created for ourselves. It is an AI spiderweb at times. Our energies get sucked into a time warp that has no inclination to return anything back to us apart from false dichotomies. This is most obvious in how progressive language that is means for discovery gets reduced into vapid tropes (self-care & emotional labour come to mind instantly). Even if I distance from the need for nuance, where is our appeal for empathy? How are we not even remotely interested in ridding ourselves of our own internalized hatreds to the extent that pinning it all on random strangers on the interwebs has become a viable solution? Why do we assume that the only method for self-expression is to shut someone else down? Why do we not distinguish between reacting and responding or even reacting and feeling? We cite Audre Lorde a lot on the internet and a lot of times without deeper engagement with her work. Let’s also consider her stance on handling pain — “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
One of my favourite non-fiction books in recent years has been a collection of essays by Leslie Jaimson titled “The Empathy Exams”. She writes how empathy is not merely inquiry but also imagination — an ability to enter another’s pain, to walk the wet ground of emotions through acknowledgement and without disdain for getting ourselves a little muddy along the way. Empathy then is a scale where we make distinctions between feeling, responding and reacting. An intention that needs setting and resetting on a regular basis. A thermostat for our emotional states, if you will. It is not an automatic reaction but a choice; a choice we make not just when convenient but also when we are unsure but would want to appeal to our best selves as opposed to being steered by more rabid versions. Yes, calling out problematic incidents and behaviours is crucial but let us not be swept by the same toxic assumption that individual blame and shaming are somehow sufficient recourse for oppressive and systemically powerful structures while vilifying rank unknowns. It may expose the fault-line but it is thoroughly incapable of fixing it. On the flip side, this herd mentality feeds into the prevalent binary of carceral logic which classifies everyone as either a criminal or a punisher and we are all quite familiar with the success rates for that practice. We need to depend as much on calling-in as calling-out, as much on mediation, evidence-based critiques and smaller circles as on the speedy impulse to fuel fires or egg on destructive tendencies for a briefly entertaining free-for-all. This needs a moment of pause, a slight turn inwards (in-feeling) before judgment, theatrics and refusal. Perhaps this is what we are unwilling to do and the real question is why.
In a session, a therapy client said she wanted to grow like trees not buildings. Meaning: A little bit gnarly but always green with chance and a flourishing hope for renewal despite the weather braved. This has stayed with me for a long time.
“We have not learned that touch itself can become light. We have no beacon, no word, to orient ourselves.”
- Luce Irigaray, To Be Born
Perhaps we begin here. Perhaps we relearn how to touch gently through words and not always look for weaponized dialogue as if we have been stranded with our woundedness in invisible war-zones. Perhaps we heed attention to what Gurwinder Bhogal wrote in his tweet : “Empathy is not a finite resource. You don’t need to triage your compassion.”
Scherezade Siobhan is a psychologist, writer and a community catalyst who founded and runs The Talking Compass — a therapeutic space dedicated to providing mental counseling services and decolonizing mental health care. She is an award-winning author and poet whose work is published or forthocming in Medium, Berfrois, Feministing, SPR, Jubilat, DATABLEED, Nat Brut, Winter Tangerine, Cordite among others. She is the author of “Bone Tongue” (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), “Father, Husband” (Salopress, 2016) and “The Bluest Kali” (Lithic Press, 2018). Find her @zaharaesque on twitter/IG/Facebook. Send her chocolate and puppies — nihilistwaffles@gmail.com.
