I finally got around to reading Educated. It was recommended to me by multiple people I trust, but I kept putting it off because it looked very intense. And, geez, the book is intense! I listened to it on Audible. It’s beautifully written, but very, very intense.
The journey the book took me on was quite magical, even though it’s non-fiction. Part of the reason is that it’s so beautifully written from the beginning and it reads like I’m living a life with the author, having no idea what is to come. But of course the book is written after all the stories have concluded, and I still couldn’t get my head around how the earlier stories can be so beautifully told by someone who has lived through the ending. Another reason is of course that my upbringing relates to absolutely nothing in this book.
Some time ago, there was a twitter thread about small rural American towns. The thesis was that it is very unlikely for liberal Americans to live in bubbles, because conservatives are everywhere. On the other hand, it’s very common for conservatives in America to never meet/talk to a liberal. I don’t know to what extent this is true, but I just remember being fascinated by the idea of small, rural, conservative towns.
I did live in a “liberal bubble” (not so much nowadays, though). My mother is the matriarch of the house and we lived near her parents, both of whom had ran away from their homes in pursuit of education for some reason or other. My parents believed in never arguing in front of me, but they didn’t argue a lot to begin with. All of their career advice for me amounts to “just do what you enjoy and we’ll be supportive”.
In any case, the point is that my childhood couldn’t have been more different from Westover’s, but her book is so beautifully written that I feel like I understand her pain. I also must admit that I held beliefs about people with experiences like hers which I no longer hold.
This got me thinking: how do we understand other people’s pain? There’s a lot of talks about empathy and “emotional intelligence” and relating to other people as people, but I actually think empathy is overvalued.
Empathy, or the ability to relate to other people’s pain like one’s own, depends on shared experience. When it’s successful, it can be very strong as a motivator for both understanding and action. But it’s not always successful. If I have never experienced something, I can’t just “know what it’s like” by imagining very hard.
So it’s not that empathy is bad or we shouldn’t try it, but we must allow an alternative. If we take as dogma “you don’t truly understand if you can’t empathize”, then we’d have to conclude that most people can never understand most people.
Another risk of empathy-based understanding is that it ambiguates whose pain it is that we are supposed to understand. If I try to understand your feelings by remembering my own feelings during a similar incident — what if you feel differently than I did? Did I feel the wrong thing? Are you feeling the wrong thing? Are the two incidents not actually similar? On the one hand, these questions really shouldn’t be all that important when we are talking about pain and understanding. On the other hand, I have witnessed people feeling the need to pause their pain to tackle these questions on numerous occasions.
In addition to Educated, I’ve been listening to books by Kwame Anthony Appiah. (I don’t usually read moral or political philosophy, but Appiah narrates his own books and I love love his narration style.) One of these books is Cosmopolitanism, where he argues that moral progress in the sense of greater tolerance of diversity and multi-culturalism is rarely, if at all, achieved through moral reasoning, but more likely to be achieved by people meeting each other constantly and getting used to each other.
—Diogenes (404-423 BC) as reported in Diogenes Laertius The Lives and Opinions of the Ancient Philosophers 3rd Century AD
According to my limited knowledge in moral philosophy, this classifies him as a “Humean” instead of a “Kantian”. I also recall that Humeans put a lot of emphasis on empathy as the foundation for moral understanding. (Humeans, please don’t get mad at me if I’m wrong about this.)
There’s something I like about Appiah’s phrase of “getting used to each other” and I don’t think it needs to be founded on empathy. Most of my conversations with friends do not require empathy to succeed — my friends tell me what they think and feel, and I believe them. I don’t believe them because I’ve experienced a similar thing; I believe them because I don’t have a reason not to. Similarly, when I complain about something to my friend, I don’t really need them to “feel my pain” (though some of them inevitably do); I just need them to believe me.
Something like this has been on my mind for some time, but I haven’t been able to put my finger on it. “Let’s stop empathizing” just sounds very wrong.
But maybe we *should* stop empathizing sometimes, if only so we can hone our other skills. It is not easy to hold someone’s pain in your head without actually knowing what it’s like, while needing to figure out what to do with it. It is also not easy to explain your pain to someone whom you know will never fully grasp what it’s like, but can still perhaps “understand” it to a greater or lesser degree. I’m still learning both of these skills.
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