Dolphins

Dolphins

The science fiction author, David Brin, once wrote something about empathy and sympathy that was wrong in an important way. It’s important to understand why, as it cuts to our ability to both defeat our enemies and help our friends:

Here’s another, related connection. Empathy is NOT the same thing as sympathy.

Empathy is the power to understand the thoughts and feelings of others. It is a pragmatic tool that is needed by hunters, like tigers, who must try to think like their prey. Empathy is frightening when it is set in a fierce, zero sum game.

But in a surfeit? Amid positive-sum games? When appetites are satisfied and fear is low?

satiation + empathy => sympathy.

Your ancestors, upon hearing of dolphins stranded on a beach, would have run toward them. As YOU would, today, upon hearing the same news.

Only with very different intent. Think about that.”

Now here’s the odd thing – dolphins were actually greatly beloved in the ancient Mediterranean world. I’m not so sure that those ancestors would have run towards them for any different reason than we do.

But that’s an aside – I do think that Brin slices almost correctly but over-fine. Empathy does have a tendency to lead towards sympathy. But I think you can have sympathy and still kill. The hunters I knew in my youth had both empathy and sympathy for the animals they hunted, and they killed them. Mind you, my father very seriously told me he would beat me within an inch of my life if I ever wounded a deer and didn’t track it and kill it. Because letting it suffer needlessly wasn’t something he found acceptable. He had empathy for deer, he had sympathy for deer. He killed deer.


Most hunters I’ve met are similiar. And I have nothing but the most visceral contempt for any hunter who doesn’t feel that way.

Moving back to Brin’s comment about our ancestors – most hunter gatherers, from the evidence we have, treated their kin – their bands or tribes, very well. They lived lives that by most metrics were better than those lived by the majority of people alive today on earth.

Satiation is not required to move from empathy to sympathy. Because Brin mistakes what sympathy is. You can love and kill – the common joke about hunting trophies “I love my wife but I don’t put her head on the wall” is simply the pathetic cry of someone who doesn’t understand. You can love and kill and those who don’t get it have had a failure of empathy.

The best generals get inside the head of their enemies. Then they kill them in large numbers. And when you read their memoirs you’re often struck by the fact that they had the greatest empathy and sympathy for the enemy. It didn’t stop them from killing them.

So much for the idea that sympathy is somehow effete and a product of fat and happy people who don’t have what it takes.

And yet there is a lot of truth to Brin’s overall point. When times get hard many people do indeed get mean. If you’re hungry you probably will carve up those dolphins. But there’s no reason you can’t have sympathy for them as you do it – there’s no reason you can’t kill them quickly and humanely and be respectful by using every bit of meat and bone and blubber that you can.

There’s another disease related to the question of understanding and empathy. Often you will hear “oh you couldn’t understand you’re not male/female/gay/oppressed/black whatever.” This is a claim to privileged understanding of the world based on classification. Often it is an attempt by the disadvantaged to preserve some point where they are acknowledged as the primary authority.

But it’s bullshit and carried to its logical extreme it is very damaging. Empathy is the ability to imagine that you are someone or something else. To crawl inside their skin and see it for a time from their perspective. Whenever someone says “oh you couldn’t understand” what they do is say “I don’t want your empathy and sympathy. I want to shut you out.”

And when you do that, when you claim “I am so different from you that you can’t understand” people hear the following “I don’t want your sympathy or empathy. My pain is precious and mine only.”

And the human response is to say “fuck you then. Take your pain and choke on it.”

Because the offer of sympathy, of understanding; of empathy – is the first reaching of a hand out. It is the way that we bond. When you look at the conversation of friends and acquaintances what stands out is that most of it is not transactional. Most of it is people reaffirming each other, showing they understand, showing empathy and sympathy and fellow feeling. Saying “I understand and I stand with you.” When you tell someone they can’t ever understand what you are saying is “I don’t want your friendship. We are nothing alike. Get away from me.”

Having done that, you have just, in real human terms, forfeited much chance that that person will ever be your friend, will ever take your concerns and feelings as meaningful. Will ever help you.

That’s not to say that a twisted version of empathy can’t be used as a tool to demean people. It often is, the sort of “poor you, it must be awful to be such a horrible wretched scum as you are” is very common in those who help others in order to get a sense of superiority. Shutting such people out is entirely natural, but extend it to the entire world, or entire classes of people, and suddenly you have shut out the possibility of real connection with those people.

There is no real understanding without empathy. Empathy arises from imagination. And it is simply the ability to pull yourself out of yourself. You can put yourself inside other people, but you can as easily imagine yourself inside a system or an object and feel what that is like.

Finally, in a world with as many interconnections as ours it is vitally important to extend fellow feeling; extend empathy; out as far as possible. Because when you lose some species you never met in your entire life, that could affect you. Because when the Inuit lose their hunting grounds to unusual high heat – that’s a precursor to what will affect you. And in a non-zero sum game, as Brin implies, sympathy for others may well rebound back to you.