What is empathy?

What is empathy?

ANDREW SCULL

TLS/April 10, 2018

“Small Echo” by Graham Dean, 2004

© Graham Dean/Bridgeman Images

The images seem so seductive. Reproduced in striking colours, they show our brains in action, regions lighting up as our thoughts and emotions fluctuate. Here’s an angry brain. There’s one bent on seduction. And compare these two: the brain of someone blessed with a strong empathy instinct; and a psychopathic brain, whose empathy circuits remain dark and unilluminated even when confronted with sights one might assume would melt the coldest of hearts. What wonders modern functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) can reveal. Why, we can watch in real time as someone’s brain morphs from one state to another. Our Victorian forebears were entranced by the old pseudo-science of phrenology, which extrapolated from the external lumps and bumps of the skull to reveal the character that lay beneath: benevolent or miserly; loving or hostile; irascible or placid. But now we have real science at our disposal. The advances of modern imaging technology mean that we no longer have to guess what the brain is up to. Our innermost thoughts and character are on display, and via scans that lay bare who has lots of empathy and who has none, who lies and who is a truth-teller, whom we should trust and welcome as a friend, and whom we should shy away from. Thanks to modern neuroscience, we can begin to piece together, for example, how we might “improve our society by harnessing the extraordinary positive force of empathy”. Since “neuroscientists, psychologists and geneticists now know which parts of the brain are specifically linked to empathy and compassion”, we should be “considering how we can enhance these abilities . . . .The empathy instinct is an idea whose time has come”.

Harnessing this new technology, Peter Bazalgette assures us in The Empathy Instinct , would allow us to create a more civil society. That may seem an odd sort of promise for someone who did so much to debase popular taste through his role in developing modern reality television to make, but then returning prodigal sons are always welcome. Bazalgette assures us we can work with the “profound insights into the human mind” that “the mapping of our emotions using functional brain imaging” has made possible, and all sorts of improvements will then follow. His particular hero is the Cambridge academic Simon Baron-Cohen, whose pioneering work he repeatedly draws on and praises.

What exactly is it that the fMRI scans show us about the brain? Crudely, and with a lag, they measure blood flow in the brain, and thus can trace levels of activity in particular regions of the brain in limited but potentially scientifically interesting ways. The digital data that MRI machines produce can, through careful manipulation, be transformed into pictures, and those images can be produced or manipulated to appear in colour , so as to highlight patterns to which we wish to draw attention. Few will be surprised to learn that our changing thoughts and feelings are associated with physical changes in our brains. Note well, however, that the observed patterns differ from individual to individual, and from experimenter to experimenter. Moreover, statistical averages derived from the gross changes in brain function in large experimental groups – themselves derived from simple simulated experiments that in no way capture the intricacies of everyday social situations – present enormous difficulties when we attempt to interpret them at the level of the individual subject. Correlations of this sort, even if they were more robust and replicable than many of them appear to be, prove nothing about the causal processes involved. More seriously still, we possess no way to translate “heightened activity” into the contents of people’s thoughts; nor do we have the prospect of making such translations. As if these problems are not serious enough, it is wrong to think that “empathy” (or other forms of thinking, feeling and remembering come to that), is localized in particular regions of the brain, or is the property of individual neurons. on the contrary, it is the product of complex networks and interconnections that form in the brain as we mature. FMRI images don’t allow us to “see” an empathy instinct (or a property instinct, a justice instinct, or a democratic instinct – all “instincts” discovered by some of the neuroscience crowd).

 

Let us pretend for a moment, though, that we can accept Bazalgette’s claims about the digital mapping of the “empathy instinct”. He then invites us to consider how differently the history of the twentieth century might have been, if only this new knowledge had arrived a few decades sooner. Hitler, Stalin and Mao between them liquidated over 100 million of our fellow human beings. “Had we the benefit of today’s diagnostic tools, chiefly MRI scanners, we might have seen some serious abnormalities in the three dictators’ brain functions.” (Or not, as the case may be.)

Just how the existence of these images might have prevented the horrors of mass exterminations is left unclear. The difficulty deepens when Bazalgette goes on to acknowledge the mass involvement of Germans in the killing of Jews, and of Turks in the massacre of Armenians. on the account he offers in the remainder of his book, we all possess an “empathy instinct” to a greater or lesser degree, and it is this “instinct” which underlies our ability to counter “religious conflict and racism, [to fight for] decent health and social care, effective and humane criminal justice”, and human rights more generally. All those Germans and Turks (like Hitler, Stalin and Mao) must have misplaced their “empathy instinct” temporarily, allowing a civilized society to behave collectively in such a barbarous fashion. Unblushingly, this is the intellectual move Bazalgette makes: why did these “terrible events” occur? “Whole communities switched off their empathy to do cruel things to their fellow citizens.” So here we have an “explanation” – an “instinct” – that can conveniently be invoked in an ad hoc and frivolous fashion to explain whatever one observes, because whenever the evidence contradicts what the instinct theory would lead one to suggest – why, the people in question must have just switched off their empathy.

Where does this empathy instinct come from? From our genes, Bazalgette suggests. It is a quality we inherit (in varying quantities, to be sure). Simon Baron-Cohen is again invoked as the authority here. on this occasion, it is Baron-Cohen’s pop psychology book Zero Degrees of Empathy (2011) which claims that people with this “borderline personality disorder” make up perhaps 30 per cent of suicides, and half of those addicted to drugs.

These are statistics whose provenance is, to put it charitably, murky in the extreme. Baron-Cohen then adds an even more far-fetched estimate that this condition is “70 per cent heritable and 30 per cent the result of abuse and neglect in childhood”. So the “solution” to the nature–nurture debate relies in the event on bluster, bad science and speculation, rather than evidence. Whether one is trying to explain schizophrenia, depression, homosexuality, or (as in this case) empathy, claims to have discovered genes that give rise to and shape complex human behaviours have evaporated when put to the test.

And why do we possess an empathy gene? Because of our evolutionary history, of course. Here, Bazalgette retails the fairy stories evo­lutionary psychologists have constructed to “explain” why various social and cultural constructs have arisen and persist. We have been here many times before. Victorian brain scientists, for example, invoked “the facts of physiology” to explain that the existing gendered social and moral order was rooted in the inescapable realities of the natural world.

We are inclined to laugh these days at such transparently self-serving attempts to justify male privilege, the exclusion of women from higher education and the public sphere by invoking the ineluctable realities of biological “science”. The contentions that allowing women to undertake a university education, to enter the professions, and to compete alongside men would invite “race suicide” are treated with the scorn they deserve, discredited by a century and more of progress towards the emancipation of the second sex. But here they are trotted out again in the guise of modern neuroscience.

As Professor Baron-Cohen would have it (and he is echoed by Peter Bazalgette), there are male and female brains. Female brains have evolved to be better at empathizing and communicating and are hard-wired for empathy. Male brains are more suited to rational understanding and system-building – from making machines and writing software to engaging in abstract thought, writing music, engaging in politics, or theorizing about the fundamental foundations of physics.

Like most recent commentators, Peter Bazalgette assumes that empathy is a “good thing”. His dust jacket is adorned with a quotation from Barack Obama that has rapidly become a cliché: “It we are going to meet the moral test of our times, then I think we are going to have to talk more about the Empathy Deficit. The ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to see the world through somebody else’s eyes”. It is a shibboleth the Yale psychologist and neuroscientist Paul Bloom aims to bury. In Against Empathy , he seeks to persuade us that empathy is something that can lead us down some very dubious moral pathways and is not to be trusted as a guide to how to conduct ourselves.

It is at first blush an arresting intellectual move, one sure to stir up controversy and sell his book. Lest this seem a trifle cynical on my part, I note that Bloom jabs at Stephen Asma for the title of his book, Against Fairness : “Not to pick on Asma here, but can you imagine a more obnoxious title?”

So what is it about empathy that draws Bloom’s ire? Before we can address this question, it helps to be clear about what we mean by the term. The basic sense in which most of us use “empathy” is analogous to what Adam Smith called “sympathy”: the capacity we possess (or can develop) to see the world through the eyes of another, to “place ourselves in his situation . . . and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence from some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them”. Bloom quotes this passage with approval, and indicates that it is the basic sense in which he intends to approach the subject.

In making moral choices, many would claim that empathy in this sense makes us more likely to care about others and to consider their interests when choosing our own course of action. Siep Stuurman, for instance, in his huge study The Invention of Humanity , sees the emergence of a sense of common humanity, and the widening and deepening of a discourse of human rights, as depending on long processes of cultural change and intellectual argument whereby the deeply ingrained ethnocentrism that was omnipresent at the dawn of history was increasingly modified and left behind, moving towards (though never entirely realizing) a changed mental universe where “people came to see foreigners as fellow human beings or even as equals”.

Where Stuurman, looking at the longue durée , sees the empathetic circle gradually widening, and the discourses of otherness and inequality ceding ground to notions of common humanity, Bloom is inclined to focus on the limits to our ability to overcome particularism and bias. Going further, he suggests that much of the time, empathy can reinforce rather than mitigate our biases. It’s easier, he suggests, to feel sympathy for those most like us, so as a guide to action, “empathy distorts our moral judgments in pretty much the same way that prejudice does”. Moreover, empathy focuses on small numbers of people. We cannot, Bloom argues, feel all others’ pain.

Conversely, understanding others’ feelings doesn’t necessarily lead one to treating them better. on the contrary: the best torturers are those who can anticipate and intuit what their victims most fear, and tailor their actions accordingly. Here, Bloom effectively invokes the case of Winston Smith’s torturer O’Brien in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four , who is able to divine the former’s greatest dread, his fear of rats, and then use it to destroy him.

As his subtitle indicates, Bloom wants to substitute what he calls “rational compassion” for this fuzzy thing called empathy, an emotion he argues is all too likely to lead us astray. His is a utilitarian ethics, and one that suggests that attending to empathy, and to empathy alone, is often likely to lead us in morally dubious directions. Fair enough, and his astringent and often witty prose in many places successfully skewers the bathetic nonsense memorably encapsulated in Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain”, and gracing the pages of the myriad books one can purchase on Amazon touting the merits of a soppy sort of empathy – at least 1,500 with “empathy” in their titles by Bloom’s recent count. “All you need is love” – really? Other passages, however, suggest to me that Bloom actually has a soft spot for empathy and the kindness and regard for others that can flow in its wake – provided only that we temper our emotional responses with a strong dash of reason, and an attention to the broader consequences of our decisions. And that, I think, is a more defensible position than simply announcing, to create a stir, that empathy is an unambiguously “bad thing”.

The Invention of Humanity contrasts sharply with the pop psychology and philosophy on offer in Bloom’s and Bazalgette’s breezy volumes. Stuurman is a retired Dutch intellectual historian. He brings a formidable erudition to examine the passage from the earliest recorded history, where strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, scarcely human and often treated as less than that, to a world which at least pays lip service to notions of basic equality, a common humanity and the conviction that we all possess basic rights. There is an obvious danger of producing a teleological story here: inevitably, at least some of us living in the twenty-first century prefer contemporary mores to the extreme xenophobia and violent hostility so evident in ancient times. We intellectuals, after all, have helped to invent and to propagate these new ideals, and often take them to be self-evident. Outside the ranks of the neurological reductionists, we, like Stuurman, believe that “ideas matter and that canonized ideas matter a lot”.

Stuurman, however, is mostly alive to the danger of march-of-progress narratives, and, in particular, to the limits and contradictions embodied in successive claims to have embraced unambiguously morally superior ways of being in the world. His is very much an intellectual history. Though he gestures throughout at factors such as travel, cultural contact and exchange (of both material goods and ideas) as motors of change, his focus is most centrally on the evolution of ideas about equality and cultural difference across the whole arc of human history. The idea of our common humanity is, he insists, an invention, a highly complex cultural construction, not somehow given in our genes or mechanically produced by the organization of our brains and nervous systems. To reconstruct its long and tortured history, he turns to a galaxy of major thinkers, seeking to show through a close examination of their writings how discourses of inequality and inferiority (often extending to enslaving or exterminating the other), were disrupted by different ways of thinking that transformed the ways human relationships were understood and articulated. “How and in what historical circumstances”, he asks, “did cross-cultural humanity become thinkable?” His answer relies heavily on the examination of how, why, and to what extent some thinkers found it possible to put themselves in other people’s shoes, to begin to comprehend and grant validity to alien cultures, and to develop some degree of critical distance from the culture into which they had been born and lived. As this implies, empathy with the stranger, and what flowed from that empathy, are absolutely central in Stuurman’s mind, to the halting and uncertain widening of mental horizons, and to the emergence of the idea that we share a common humanity, with all that ultimately flows from accepting such a proposition.

Concerned not to be trapped in an ethno­centric, purely Western mental universe, Stuurman ranges widely across different civilizations. Homer and Confucius, Herodotus and Ibn Khaldun, the Judaeo-Christian and the Islamic traditions, and the major thinkers of the European Enlightenment, are all invoked to unpack how our common humanity came to be imagined and invented. So, too, are less obvious figures such as travellers and ethnographers, as well as anthropologists of various stripes. Attention to the language, attitudes and behaviour of European colonizers is matched by an attempt to recover the sensibilities and reactions of the colonized. The American and French Revolutions sit astride an examination of the Haitian Revolution, and discussion of national liberation movements in the developing world is paired with the African American struggle for equality in the United States.

At times, the exposition can seem a laboured and dutiful recital and precis of different strands of social thought. Overall, however, the intelligence and learning of the author shine through, as does his constant attention to the blind spots and limitations of the thinkers whose work he examines. This is not contextual history. Stuurman wants to mine the past, to recover what he thinks is valuable in different intellectual traditions, to look for commonalities and points of difference, and to search out the problems and persistent inequalities that often lay below the surface of seeming assaults on inequality. Telling here are his critiques, for example, of Enlightenment ideologues and their limitations. “All men” – but what about women? And what about those who lacked the qualities of enlightened gentlemen? “Savages” were fellow human beings, who shared the capacity to reason, but had developed it in only rudimentary form. Egalitarianism would be realized in the future, but only once “advanced” societies had tutored the backward, and brought them into the modern world (that is, remade them in their own image). Here Stuurman elaborates on how arranging the history of humanity in a tem­poral sequence engendered a new form of inequality, and thus provided a novel way of combining a claim of human inequality with continued unequal treatment of some people: temporal inequality meant that one could acknowledge “the equality of non-Europeans as generic human beings but downgrade them as imprisoned in primitive and backward cultures”.

In the nineteenth century, such notions justified imperialism by reference to its “civilizing mission”, no matter the rapacious realities of colonial rule. Or in the twentieth century, they could be employed to justify authoritarian, dictatorial and murderous regimes. For their leaders were the enlightened, the vanguard more advanced than hoi polloi , and tasked with overcoming the false consciousness of the masses and leading them to the promised egalitarian paradise. Yet the Enlightenment, Stuurman insists, was Janus-faced. Though its ideas were mobilized to underwrite the “scientific racism” of the nineteenth century and the vanguardism of the Leninists and Maoist of the twentieth, it can be seen as giving a decisive boost to the idea that we possess a common humanity, and to efforts to criticize and supersede a whole array of social inequalities. Indeed, it was on the discourses of the Enlightenment that the critics of racism, authoritarianism, and the subordination of women drew to construct their intellectual assaults on these structures, as he acknowledges others have previously grasped.

The book closes with a discussion of the construction, in the ashes of the Second World War, of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the newly constituted United Nations, and with the debate over Samuel Huntington’s claims about the forthcoming clash of civilizations. Many are inclined to be cynical about the former, and with good reason. Those signing it, on all sides, stand convicted of hypocrisy and worse, and Stuurman acknowledges as much. Still, he lauds that document’s importance, claiming that it “created a powerful global master language of universal equality, which can rightly be counted among the major turning points of the global intellectual history of common humanity and equality”. Whether such optimism will prove justified remains to be seen. Huntington’s prognosis is much bleaker. Where the invention of humanity will lead to next, particularly as we appear to be entering the twilight years of Pax Americana , is anybody’s guess. Siep Stuurman’s excellent book ought to play an important role in the coming debates – at least for those of us who acknowledge the capacity of humans to reason and to change their minds, and who reject the image of us as machines ruled by our genes and the mechanical operations of our male and female brains.