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31 pages

English

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Our society functions by separating us from each other: almost as soon as we're born, we are taught to divide people into groups and see some as more deserving (and more human) than others. Everything from massive inequality to war depends on this process of categorisation and dehumanisation. In this provocative, inspiring piece of writing, Raoul Martinez asks how and why our empathy is controlled, and argues for a very different world - one of deeper understanding and indiscriminate compassion.

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Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	04 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781786892379
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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RAOUL MARTINEZ
Creating Freedom
Empathy
This text was originally included as part of Creating Freedom , first published in Great Briatin in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EHI ITE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Raoul Martinez, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 237 9

Author’s Note
Empathy is central to our humanity. Through it we can feel another’s elation, grief, pride or shame; it is a foundation for love, intimacy and community that enables us to achieve that most precious of things: connection. When we empathise with someone, we humanise them. Labels, categories and the prejudices that accompany them fall away and, instead, we perceive a person worthy of moral concern. It is this potential that gives empathy such power.
The practice of empathy can enhance our maps of reality and raise our level of objectivity. It can also help to expose the decisive role of luck in our lives. We do not all have access to the same internal and external resources. Some of us must contend with depression, low self-esteem, the effects of neglect, abuse, learning disabilities or addiction. Some of us struggle to secure enough income to feed our children, pay our rent or heat our homes. Some of us are forced to flee war and disaster, risking life and limb to create a new life in a hostile environment. To place ourselves in the shoes of others helps to reveal the power of circumstance in shaping options and identities. The more we cultivate an awareness of the startling diversity of human capacities, opportunities and experiences, the less inclined we are to blame, pass judgement, and dismiss. Viewing the world from multiple perspectives helps us to approach others with the understanding that, ‘had I truly been in your situation — had I confronted the world with your resources and capacities — I would have done as you did’. Such awareness is an antidote to feelings of entitlement, and a strong foundation for compassion and solidarity.
The world is blighted by conflicting worldviews, extreme inequality and many forms of dehumanisation. Expanding the reach of empathy by cultivating the imagination through education, art, stories and shared experiences is, and has always been, essential to transcending the literal and figurative barriers that divide us. If we can empathise with one member of a marginalised or persecuted group, it opens the door to humanising the group as a whole and challenging the ways in which they are mistreated. Connection to the plight of one can foster concern for the many.
Forms of oppression and dehumanisation exist all around us. In recent years, people of colour, indigenous communities, LGBTI communities, Muslims, Jews, women, welfare claimants, disabled people, refugees and immigrants have all been targeted. A resurgent politics of hate and division is exploiting widespread dissatisfaction with establishment politics. The economic crisis of 2008 and the suffering it caused unleashed long held disillusionment and anger. Today we are facing multiple interacting crises: the climate crisis, the refugee crisis and the crises of inequality and democracy. Unless we act quickly, they will only get worse, and the pressure to reinforce the mental and physical boundaries separating the privileged, wealthy, and secure from the oppressed, poor, and desperate — within and between nations — will increase. We will need every means at our disposal to resist this pressure. At the heart of this struggle will be the fight to expand the reach of empathy, for when we examine the ways in which we empathise — who we empathise with, who we do not, and why — disturbing patterns emerge. Not only do morally irrelevant factors such as attractiveness, skin colour, and proximity determine the directions in which our empathy flows, but its emotional power tends to blind us to the importance of scale. The heart-wrenching story of one person’s death moves us in a way that statistics about millions of fatalities never will. This heightened receptivity to the humanity of a single individual or group can leave us indifferent to the welfare of many others.
The following pages are extracted, with minor edits, from my book Creating Freedom: Power, Control and the Fight for Our Future (2016). I explore the concept of empathy through the lens of power and control. Fostering divisions by channelling empathy to where it is politically useful and away from where it is inconvenient has always been an effective strategy for consolidating power and maintaining control. Empathy is a tool that can serve many ends. The more we understand it, the better placed we are to harness its power in the struggle for compassion and freedom.
Raoul Martinez, May 2017

Empathy
For centuries, Western philosophers, politicians and economists have asserted that humans are essentially greedy, concerned primarily with their own preservation, pleasure and comfort. Neoclassical economists postulate that humans are rational and selfish, focused on the maximisation of their own well-being, which is often defined in narrow, materialistic terms. This caricature does not fit the facts. Research across a range of disciplines has converged on a different conclusion: empathy, the capacity to ‘step into another’s shoes’ and get a sense of how things look and feel from their perspective, is an integral part of what makes us human and is central to the practice of compassion. 1
Child psychologists have observed that three-year-olds have the capacity to view things from another’s perspective. 2 At twelve months, infants seem able to empathise with the distress of others, offering them toys, stroking them when they look upset and helping strangers who appear to be struggling, even if they have to clamber over obstacles to do so. 3 Quite automatically, our brains ‘mirror’ the brain states of others: the neurons that begin to fire when we encounter the emotions and actions of someone else are called ‘mirror neurons’. Recent research suggests that they are part of a more complex ‘circuit of empathy’ comprising at least ten regions of the brain. 4 This empathy circuit facilitates our understanding of the experiences of other people. Damage to these neurons seriously impairs empathetic potential.
Primatologists have no doubt that our cousins on the evolutionary tree of life, the great apes, regularly display empathetic behaviour. Chimpanzees frequently console and reassure one another. When a chimpanzee loses a fight or crosses paths with a predator, others embrace and groom it to calm it down. Numerous experiments with primates also point to a powerful instinct for fairness. In a classic experiment conducted by American psychiatrist Jules Masserman, rhesus monkeys refused to pull a cord that gave them food while simultaneously administering an electric shock to another monkey. Monkeys would sometimes go for days without pulling the cord, starving themselves rather than hurt a companion. In another case, a bonobo chimp was observed looking after a wounded bird in captivity and trying to free it from its enclosure by climbing to the top of a tree, helping it to spread its wings and releasing it into the air. The first attempt failed, but, after protecting it for a while longer and allowing it to heal, he tried again and the bird successfully flew to freedom. 5
Frans de Waal, one of the world’s leading primatologists, sees important implications arising from our enriched understanding of human nature. Speaking of politicians who justify policies by claiming that nature is a selfish struggle for life, he states: ‘They read into nature what they want to, and I feel it is my task to point out that they got it all wrong. There are many animals that survive through cooperation, and our own species in particular comes from a long line of ancestors dependent on each other. Empathy and solidarity are bred into us, so that our society’s design ought to reflect this side of the human species, too.’ 6 The central role played by cooperation in the survival of our species is now widely accepted among biologists.
Empathy is the ability to identify what someone else is feeling and thinking, and respond to them appropriately. The capacity for profound empathy and the compassion it engenders exist in almost everyone, but the degree to which we empathise is not fixed. Culture influences and channels our potential for empathy. It can be stunted or constrained by many factors, from ideology and early experiences, to genes, hormones and neurology. 7 A serious lack of empathy makes it easy to treat people as less than human, to ignore their subjective inner world and see them as objects to be used for our own purposes. The interesting question is not whether we have the capacity to be empathetic, but why we extend our empathy to some groups and not others.
Dehumanisation
Renowned criminologist Nils Christie began his career studying German and Norwegian concentration camp guards in the wake of the Second World War. The guards fell into two broad groups: those who maltreated prisoners, killing or torturing them, and those who treated prisoners relatively well. Christie wanted to understand why the second group behaved more humanely. After interviewing numerous guards at length about their experiences, he arrived at a telling conclusion: there was indeed a difference between them, one that left an indelible mark on his life, and it lay in their ability to ‘see the prisoners as human beings’, the ability to be close enough to the prisoners to understand that these people who were ‘miserable, starving, dirty’ and willing to betray a friend to get their hands on a crust of bread were only doing what they themselves would likely do in those s