I’m not sure when empathy became the most highly prized emotional virtue, but I know it wasn’t always this way. It seems like every orientation course, personal development program, and discussion of ethics now emphasizes the priority of cultivating and practicing empathy. Its praises are sung in news, entertainment, and social media. Political candidates are said to be qualified because they have empathy. When criticizing or discrediting an opponent, it is enough to assert his or her lack of empathy.
As in many other contemporary debates, the controversy around empathy is exacerbated by the failure to offer careful definitions. What many people call empathy is actually sympathy, which everyone agrees is an appropriate and desirable attitude. It does not help that popular attempts to define the two often confuse them, even while claiming to distinguish them. (Merriam-Webster reverses the definitions; Dictionary.com properly defines and distinguishes them.) The terms are also loaded with psychological freight. Pity is described as “paternalistic.” Sympathy is characterized as inadequate. Empathy is useful because it allows us to identify with another in their suffering. But what if co-identification makes us less capable of loving and serving them in their distress?
I have often stated my antipathy for empathy. Before you dismiss me as an uncaring person, let me define the relevant terms. After that you can dismiss me as uncaring, because while I deliberately cultivate and practice sympathy, I just as deliberately avoid empathy, and in most cases, deny its ethical propriety and utility.
Although definitions are not usually derived strictly from etymology, a brief lesson in the formation of both words may be helpful. Both empathy and sympathy are compound words with Greek roots. Pathos, meaning experience or suffering or, more popularly, feeling, is the stem in both cases. The prefixes em- and sym- describe in and with, respectively. Thus we have empathy as experiencing in or suffering in and sympathy as experiencing with or suffering with. The derivation of each word shows why their meanings are often confused. But derivation is inadequate to provide a complete definition, so we must go beyond lexicography.
Sympathy is feeling sorrow, pity, or compassion for someone or something outside oneself. We feel sympathy when we observe a baby bird crying for its mother after falling out of the nest. Sympathy is appropriately expressed in condolences to a friend whose loved one has died. We sympathize when we understand and acknowledge a painful or difficult situation in which another person finds himself.
Empathy is feeling another’s sorrow, injustice, or suffering as our own. It is a vicarious emotion. An external situation becomes a personal experience. We claim the pain, wrong, and woe that rightly belongs to another. We not only grieve alongside but as another person. We are not offended for them but personally offended because of what happened to them as if it was a wrong done to us. Sympathy is offering condolences to a mother whose son was shot by a police officer. Empathy is viewing that mother’s pain as your own, imagining the young man who was shot as if he were your own child.
It might seem at first as though empathy is the preferable attitude to cultivate. Doesn’t the Bible command us to “rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15)? The Bible does say to do this, but what if we are not rejoicing with those who rejoice but instead rejoicing in circumstances we have claimed as our own? What if we are no longer weeping with those who weep but instead grieving over external wrongs we have decided to own? Is this noble? Is it virtuous? Or is it selfish, arrogant, and presumptuous?
I have had near-death experiences in hospital emergency departments three times in my life. In each of those cases, God used the decisive, deliberate, and dispassionate actions of competent medical professionals to save my life. I did not need an empathetic doctor. I did not want a nurse who would weep and wring her hands and despair over my survival. I needed someone who could remain emotionally cool, aloof, and objective in the situation. They were not indifferent to my suffering. They sympathized. But they had to remain emotionally detached from it. It is one thing to witness the injuries of another and wince because you know they are hurting. It is quite another to view their injuries as if they are your own.
I am using a medical example to make the point clear, but the principle applies across the board. You cannot effectively counsel a family member going through divorce if you view the circumstances of betrayal as a personal offense. You cannot render aid if you are overwhelmed by the situation in which it is required. You cannot rationally discuss racial injustice if you view every instance in which it is asserted as an attack against yourself. Social media is full of empathetic people talking about injustice, oppression, and evil in this world, and all of them are angry, because the empathetic person takes every occasion of harm personally.
Empathy is sometimes inevitable. If someone attacks my wife or my child, I take it personally. If you attack my family, you are attacking me as well. But even when empathy is inevitable--perhaps we should say especially when empathy is inevitable--it is still dangerous. It compromises perspective and judgment. This is why the man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. An effective advocate will be sympathetic, but his ability to advocate effectively depends on a degree of emotional detachment that provides situational objectivity.
Empathy impairs judgment, at best, and is presumptuous, selfish, and wicked, at worst. Another person’s pain does not belong to you. Personal offense, paralyzing grief, and despair over what happened to someone else is inappropriate and ugly. The situation is not about you, but empathy makes everything about you because its subject is, by definition, internalized. This is why empathy, though sometimes inevitable, should never be cultivated. We are to feel with another person whatever emotions are appropriate to their situation. We are not to feel as if their experience is our own. It isn’t. Not everything is about you. It isn’t about me. It is about the other person. As Lewis taught us so well, the truly humble person “will not be thinking about himself at all” (Mere Christianity). But this is exactly what an empathetic person does, even if with noble intentions. It is an arrogant corruption of a true virtue. So sympathize liberally, but don’t empathize if you can avoid it, and if you have cultivated empathy, begin the hard work of unlearning it. You will be more useful, more compassionate, and more effective if you do.
--JME
