Response to Paul Bloom by LESLIE JAMISON

To Paul Bloom’s list of empathy’s hazards—excess, burnout, relational asymmetry—I would add a few more. For starters, empathy can fuel an ironic kind of self-absorption: the encounter with another person’s experience becomes another way of experiencing oneself. I think of this as the Agee effect: in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of three sharecropper families in Alabama, Agee’s feelings about poverty constantly threaten to upstage the poverty itself. We feel his guilt and anguish so exquisitely that the material conditions that have inspired them sometimes blur into the background. Empathy becomes the main event; it risks undermining its own best intentions.

Empathy can thwart its own goals through exhaustion or preoccupation: one may be too depleted or distracted by one’s own feelings to act on them. It can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst to ameliorating the pain that has prompted it.

I see Bloom’s critique of empathy in similar terms: as the beginning of a process rather than its completion. It is not that empathy does or doesn’t make us better, but that it can make us better. We need to ask ourselves how.

Empathy offers two major kinds of good: the enabling of better care and the consolation of witnessing itself. Though it is dangerous to see empathy as the end of a process rather than its inaugural gesture, sometimes the act of trying to empathize can offer solace.

Last year I reported a story about Morgellons disease, a controversial illness that leads patients to report a variety of dermatological symptoms, most notably fibers inexplicably emerging from their skin. Because the disease is controversial, Morgellons patients are usually dismissed by doctors. I found that the simple fact of being listened to—having their experience imagined, and thus validated—meant something to them.

More recently I was involved in a public event in which the autobiographical writing of several incarcerated men was read aloud. Attendees were invited to write responses to the authors. Having their experiences heard—knowing that a room full of people had imagined their lives—did nothing to set these men free. But they did say it mitigated the sense of invisibility that makes incarceration so painful. Empathy should not be confused with advocacy, but acts of witnessing and listening and feeling do carry meaning. And these efforts can lead to better care by providing not only an emotional impetus but also an understanding of what kinds of care might be useful.

Bloom is right, regarding the example he cites from my book The Empathy Exams, that I appreciated the care of a doctor who didn’t simply echo my fears. But without empathy, this doctor wouldn’t have been able to offer the care I ended up appreciating. He needed to inhabit my feelings long enough to offer an alternative to them and to help dissolve them by offering information, guidance, and reassurance.

My doctor’s form of empathy was successful because it was specific: he was able to discern and respond to my particular concerns. Specificity is what makes empathy so powerful. It is also what makes me distrustful of the distant compassion that Bloom advocates.

This kind of compassion involves feeling for rather than with; it is grounded in a general ethos of care rather than in particular sentimental attachments. It is more durable and efficacious in the long run because it is more general and less immersive. But this distance comes at a cost. We lose access to the particular contours of someone’s needs. Our offers of concern or aid can suffer as a result. If burnout and exhaustion are the dangers of too much empathy, then abstraction is the danger of too little: the risk that kinds of pain will become kinds, assumed rather than interrogated. Too much abstraction can mean we end up causing harm even when we mean to offer care.

Bloom is right to question the notion that empathy is inherently valuable. But he shouldn’t dismiss empathy so much as issue the call to examine the nature of its power. How can it create good? How should it be deployed? His position represents the beginning of a longer conversation in which we ask ourselves not just whether empathy makes us good but what good empathy is made of.

Jamison, Leslie. “Forum Response: Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/against-empathy/leslie-jamison-response-against-empathy-leslie-jamison.

Response to Paul Bloom by SAM HARRIS

In recent weeks, Israeli bombs have rained down on Gaza, and images of the resulting death and destruction have inflamed world opinion. Never mind that the government in Gaza is run by Hamas, an avowedly genocidal organization that uses its own civilians as human shields. Nor does it matter that some of this carnage seems to have been caused by Hamas’s own rockets gone astray. To bear witness to the suffering of the Palestinian people is all: the sight of a lifeless girl pulled from the rubble, her inconsolable parents, the spokesman for UNRWA breaking down in sobs during an interview—every image presents its own moral imperative and settles the case. Israel stands convicted of evil.

It’s not often that one comes across a scientific argument that could help resolve moral and political emergencies of this kind—much less one that is deeply counterintuitive and yet easily understood. In his provocative article, Paul Bloom has produced such an argument.

Bloom’s thesis is that emotional empathy, the ability to identify with others and “feel their pain,” is generally a poor guide for ethical behavior. As he acknowledges, many will find this idea grotesque—how could sharing another’s pain be anything less than a virtue? Indeed, many readers will feel that their very humanity depends on the strength of their emotion when witnessing suffering of the sort on display in Gaza. To question the merits of empathy is to question love, compassion, and basic human decency.

However, Bloom likens empathy to anger, and the comparison is remarkably astute. We want to be able to feel anger when circumstances warrant it, but then we want to stop feeling it the moment it is no longer useful. A person who is unable to feel anger would be, as Bloom says, “the perfect victim,” but feeling too much of it reliably leads to misery and chaos. Generally speaking, to have one’s moral judgment colored by anger is to have it clouded. Bloom argues that empathy is like anger in this respect, and I am convinced that he is right.

One commentator on the war in Gaza unwittingly echoed Bloom’s thesis when he responded to those condemning Israel by saying, “Dead babies are not an argument.” It was a brave and arresting statement that requires some unpacking. He surely did not mean to minimize the suffering of the Palestinians nor the horror concealed by the phrase “collateral damage.” But the truth is that noncombatants die in every war, however just. In fact, one finds dead babies in many other circumstances—and they are rarely, if ever, the only consideration.

For instance, more than 30,000 people die in traffic accidents in the United States each year, and many more are grievously injured. Much of this death and suffering is inflicted upon helpless children. But when was the last time you saw an image of parents howling with grief over the body of their son or daughter killed in a car crash? Children are killed and disfigured on our roads every day, and every day we fail to stop the slaughter. Yet a simple solution exists: we need only set the maximum speed limit on our roads at fifteen miles per hour. Why don’t we do this? The answer could hardly be more callous, and it surely has nothing to do with self-defense or any other existential concern (as it does in the case of Israel). We simply prefer to drive faster than that. Indeed, to drive so safely as to ensure the lives of all our children would be to guarantee inefficiency and boredom. Apparently, we judge these evils to be worse than some number of dead babies.

To be moved to action merely by empathy is to lurch blindly toward who knows what. The harrowing images coming out Gaza are not the whole story, and they manipulate world opinion in ways that few people seem willing to acknowledge. I am making no claims about the ethical or strategic necessity of Israel’s actions. I am simply saying that emotional arousal over the plight of the Palestinians offers little insight. Bloom has finally given us an argument for why wisdom and compassion must apply the brakes to empathy so that we can think clearly about decisions that affect the lives of millions.

Harris, Sam. “Forum Response: Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/against-empathy/sam-harris-response-against-empathy-harris.

Response to Paul Bloom by JESSE PRINZ

Empathy has been enshrined as the panacea for the world’s woes: cultivate it and crime will plummet, poverty will vanish, wars will end. But Paul Bloom demurs, and I with him. I am lucky to have a talented psychologist as an ally in this unpopular campaign.

My doubts about empathy parallel Bloom’s. First, research shows that empathy is not a key player in some core aspects of moral reasoning, such as thinking about inequality, the environment, or cases where large groups of people are threatened. Second, empathy is not a great motivator; studies show that when we feel another’s pain, we tend to do little about it. Third, empathy is easily manipulated, leading us to give preferential treatment to those who don’t deserve it. Finally, empathy is biased: it increases when those in need are salient, similar to ourselves, and close by. We contribute more to a neighbor in need than to the thousands ravaged by a distant tsunami or the millions who die from starvation or disease. Indeed, we often feel greater empathy for cute critters, such as abandoned puppies, than for struggling people. In making policy, we would be better off ignoring empathy. The crucial question is not whose suffering touches us most but who needs us most.

As Bloom points out, some researchers paint a rosier picture. In a groundbreaking series of experiments, the psychologist Daniel Batson tried to show that empathy leads to altruism—that people are willing to endure serious pain on behalf of a stranger if they are induced to empathize. Critics of this work, such as Robert Cialdini, have argued that this effect is driven by identification; people sacrifice themselves for others if they think they are highly similar. What links empathy and altruism is in-group favoritism.

Which brings us to President Obama’s remark that the lack of empathy makes us “plunge into wars” and “ignore the homeless.” I suspect the opposite is true. Wars reflect our tendency to form biased bonds with group members. If someone threatens a fellow citizen, empathy incites us to support aggressive reprisal. As with sports, we empathize with the home team and revel when the other side takes a blow. Cultivating empathy for the enemy is about as easy as cultivating comfort on a bed of nails. Likewise, empathy is not the key to charity. Getting the affluent to grasp the hardships of homelessness is prohibitively hard, and even when successful it can induce debilitating distress rather than the will to make a difference.

Without empathy, are we not left with cold indifference? Don’t we lose our moral compass? On the contrary, empathy can be the cause of moral inertia and indirection. Fortunately, there is a better guide to good action: attending to injustice.

Here are some examples. Many homeless people are members of denigrated ethnic minorities or suffer from physical or psychological disabilities; their plight is symptomatic of discrimination. Global poverty is worst in nations that have been ravaged by imperialism and exploitation. War exposes innocent people to political instability, poverty, injury, and untimely death. Environmental destruction threatens the lives of other creatures and deprives future generations of vital resources. We don’t need empathy to justify efforts to rid the world of such ills. We need a sense of justice.

Our sense of justice has two components. It begins with principles that tell us when someone has been treated unjustly. For example, we have strictures against killing innocent people; and we have strictures prescribing equal opportunity. These principles are grounded in reason and subject to rational debate. But justice also requires passion. We don’t coolly tabulate inequities—we feel outraged or indignant when they are discovered. Such angry feelings are essential; without anger, we would not be motivated to act.

The link between anger and our sense of justice might seem problematic. After all, Bloom calls anger “irrational, arbitrary, and self-destructive,” suggesting that it is no better than empathy. Here I disagree. Admittedly, many things push our buttons, and anger can cause us to overreact. But suppose we suppress our personal gripes and heed the anger that injustice stirs. Righteous rage is a cornerstone of women’s liberation, civil rights, and battles against tyranny. It also outperforms empathy in crucial ways: anger is highly motivating, difficult to manipulate, applicable wherever injustice is found, and easier to insulate against bias. We fight for those who have been mistreated not because they are like us, but because we are passionate about principles. Rage can misdirect us when it comes unyoked from good reasoning, but together they are a potent pair. Reason is the rudder; rage propels us forward. Bloom recommends compassion, but the heat of healthy anger is what fuels the fight for justice.

Prinz, Jesse. “Forum Response: Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/against-empathy/jesse-prinz-response-against-empathy-prinz.

Response to Paul Bloom by MARIANNE LAFRANCE

Paul Bloom would have us do away with empathy. His reasons are several: it is a poor guide to action; it is biased; and it leads to all manner of bad outcomes including empathic distress, anxiety, depression, and burnout. If he is right, then by all means, nip it in the bud.

Once one adopts Bloom’s characterization of empathy, the consequences he enumerates are probably inevitable and certainly worrisome. He makes a reasoned and fair-minded case. To be empathic, according to Bloom, is to put “yourself in her shoes” and “feel her pain,” and the results can be undesirable.

There is, however, a subtle distinction that goes missing—namely, the difference between sharing a person’s metaphorical shoes and sharing his or her feelings. Although they are related, experiencing what a person feels is not the same as imagining being in her situation, which researchers call perspective taking. For Bloom, feeling another’s pain gets all the attention.

Bloom acknowledges that feeling another’s pain and grasping his or her situation are different psychological, and even neural, processes. But when he considers the painless kind of empathy—what “other people are thinking, their motivations, plans, what they believe”—he dismisses it as other than real empathy. He calls it “coldblooded.” It is the warm-blooded, feeling-someone’s-pain kind that concerns him.

If Bloom, however, were to see empathy as encompassing both feeling and perspective taking then there would be reason to preserve and promote it rather than give up on it. Sharing a person’s pain is all about emotion; walking in his shoes allows for the possibility of understanding his circumstances.

What do psychologists know about taking a person’s circumstances into account? Consider a well-established social psychological finding: the actor-observer effect. When people (called actors) are asked to explain their own behavior, they tend to look outside themselves and point to the influence of external factors: “I bought this house because it has all the best features—open-floor plan, a great office, a bar . . .” When an observer is asked to explain my behavior, she is likely to zero in on my personality or motivation: “She chose that house because she is a workaholic at heart and still likes to socialize.”

There is more, however, to the actor-observer effect than acknowledging that an action can be interpreted in multiple ways. Social psychologists see bias not, as one might think, with the actor’s perspective, but rather with the observer’s perspective. Why? Because observers tend to discount the situational influences that actually affect choices and outcomes. We often attribute another person’s action to her inner dispositions, when crucial situational factors were really at work.

Observer myopia can be corrected; all it takes is a formulation of empathy that incorporates perspective as well as feeling. Some years ago, researchers Denis Regan and Judith Totten had female undergraduates watch a videotape of a get-acquainted conversation between two women with instructions either to observe one of the participants or to empathize with her. For example, empathic observers were told “to concentrate on the way she feels while conversing” and directed, “In your mind’s eye you are to visualize how it feels to [the study participant] to be in this conversation” (emphasis added). Empathy worked wonders to correct the attribution error. When observers considered the perspective of the target as well as what she was feeling, they were significantly more likely to make situational attributions and less likely to make personality attributions for her behavior than were standard observers who were not instructed to be empathic.

It is hard to argue with Bloom’s contention that empathic distress is destructive. But real empathy is not only about shared pain. It is also about understanding a person’s circumstances—an understanding that might help us assuage others’ distress as well as our own. Joseph Lelyveld, former editor of the New York Times, captured this axiom while he was working as a reporter; it is an insight about empathy that, if adopted, would make us the “better people” Bloom envisions: “Every person is an expert on the circumstances of his life.”

LaFrance, Marianne. “Forum Response: Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/against-empathy/marianne-lafrance-response-against-empathy-lafrance.

Response to Paul Bloom by NOMY ARPALY

It is common to think that some politicians and their constituents would benefit, morally speaking, from a few months of living in poverty or living as black people in America. I have many times wished every man had to spend a day as a woman. The thought is that many people would change their feelings and behavior toward poor people, African Americans, or women, if only they learned in more detail what it is like to live in their circumstances.

That is a reasonable thought, as we have all had such changes of heart. Perhaps you once thought that there cannot be a divorce for which no one is to blame, and you judged divorced people accordingly. Then you found yourself getting a divorce and realized how limited your ability to imagine other peoples’ lives had been all along. Perhaps you realized something even more embarrassing: that a divorced friend had been telling you her story for years and you disbelieved her. You dismissed what an honest person told you from her personal experience because your puny imagination told you it couldn’t be right. In other words, you lacked empathy.

There are several things called empathy, and Paul Bloom shows some of them are overrated. One overrated thing is the tendency to replicate in yourself the suffering of the other. An anxious patient wants a calm doctor, not a doctor infected with his anxiety. Those of us who can’t watch violent movies without feeling the characters’ pain are probably no better at compassion and at doing the right thing than those who can watch Tarantino with equanimity.

But, Bloom’s research notwithstanding, some things often called empathy are truly invaluable. I am talking about the ability to imagine another person’s life and the ability to accept evidence of another person’s suffering even when one’s imagination fails. While having these abilities cannot in itself make a person good, even the best of us will do bad things if we do not have at least one of them.

People who suffered from severe depression often tell me they wish their families had shown greater empathy. They do not wish that their families had become depressed as well. They talk about the husband, wife, father, or mother who angrily told them, “Just snap out of it”—even after they attempted suicide. Sometimes, though not always, a doctor’s diagnosis of major depression broke the spell, and the relative, filled with remorse, said something like, “Honey, I had no idea you were in so much pain.”

Why did he have no idea? Did he think that the patient preferred to cry all day, forgo favorite foods, have trouble at work, or, as can happen when one takes too many pills, have her stomach pumped? The patient, we can realistically assume, had no reputation for being a liar, and she did tell her relative that she was suffering greatly and trying in vain “snap out” of that suffering. Unfortunately, we often refuse to believe that something can happen when we have trouble imagining it, and since the normal relatives also had never experienced the kinds of despair involved in depression, they failed to see them in another. Of course there are some people who are lucky enough, when they are depressed, to have relatives or friends who are better at listening to them and putting themselves in their shoes.

If lack of empathy in the sense I am talking about can make the mentally healthy act unfairly and harmfully toward the depressed, surely it can make those of us who live comfortably act unfairly and harmfully toward the steel worker who lost his job. If President Obama maintains that we need to empathize with the worker in question, or with the less fortunate in general, I am all for it. Bloom might be right that somewhat detached compassion is the best emotion with which to help alleviate suffering, but if we do not empathize with people, their suffering can be invisible to us, and this is the cause of many of our sins.

Arpaly, Nomy. “Forum Response: Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/against-empathy/nomy-arpaly-response-against-empathy-arpaly.

"Against Empathy": Two excerpts from Paul Bloom

Against Empathy

PAUL BLOOM

When asked what I am working on, I often say I am writing a book about empathy. People tend to smile and nod, and then I add, “I’m against it.” This usually gets an uncomfortable laugh.

This reaction surprised me at first, but I’ve come to realize that taking a position against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens—a statement so outlandish it can only be a joke. And so I’ve learned to clarify, to explain that I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbor, doing the right thing, and making the world a better place. My claim is actually the opposite: if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide….

Most people see the benefits of empathy as akin to the evils of racism: too obvious to require justification. I think this is a mistake. I have argued elsewhere that certain features of empathy make it a poor guide to social policy. Empathy is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

In light of these features, our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. . . .

It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.

Or consider long-distance charity. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone who hears about the plight of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly.

Bloom, Paul. “Against Empathy.” Boston Review, 26 Aug. 2014, bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy.

__________________

Empathy Can Lead to Short-Sighted and Unfair Moral Bias

PAUL BLOOM

What does it take to be a good person? What makes someone a good doctor, therapist or parent? What guides policy-makers to make wise and moral decisions?

Many believe that empathy — the capacity to experience the feelings of others, and particularly others’ suffering — is essential to all of these roles. I argue that this is a mistake, often a tragic one.

Empathy acts like a spotlight, focusing one's attention on a single individual in the here and now. This can have positive effects, but it can also lead to short-sighted and unfair moral actions. And it is subject to bias — both laboratory studies and anecdotal experiences show that empathy flows most for those who look like us, who are attractive and who are non-threatening and familiar.

When we appreciate that skin color does not determine who we should care about, for example, or that a crisis such as climate change has great significance — even though it is an abstract threat — we are transcending empathy. A good policy maker makes decisions using reason, aspiring toward the sort of fairness and impartiality empathy doesn't provide.

Empathy isn’t just a reflex, of course. We can choose to empathize and stir empathy for others. But this flexibility can be a curse. Our empathy can be exploited by others, as when cynical politicians tell stories of victims of rape or assault and use our empathy for these victims to stoke hatred against vulnerable groups, such as undocumented immigrants.

For those in the helping professions, compassion and understanding are critically important. But not empathy — feeling the suffering of others too acutely leads to exhaustion, burnout and ineffective work. ...Consider a parent dealing with a teenager who is panicked because she left her homework to the last minute. It’s hardly good parenting to panic along with her. Good parents care for their children and understand them, but don’t necessarily absorb their suffering.

Rationality alone isn’t enough to be a good person; you also need some sort of motivation. But compassion — caring for others without feeling their pain — does the trick quite nicely. Empathy and compassion are distinct: Recent neuroscience studies, including some fascinating work on the power of meditation, show that compassion is distinct from empathy, with all its benefits and few of its costs.
Many of life’s deepest pleasures, such as engagement with novels, movies and television, require empathic connection. Empathy has its place. But when it comes to being a good person, there are better alternatives.

Bloom, Paul. "Does Empathy Guide or Hinder Moral Action?" New York Times, 29 Dec. 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/12/29/does-empathy-guide-or-hinder-moral-action

DFW video and transcript

This is Water

David Foster Wallace

(The transcript below follows the content of the video pretty closely, though it contains a few additional bits from Wallace's graduation speech, such as his final few sentences. If you'd like to read the complete talk, you can find a full transcription here.)

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude — but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a matter of virtue — it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being “well adjusted,” which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in, day out” really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home — you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job — and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid god-damn people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do — except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am — it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flatout won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line — maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible — it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it
commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Roman Krznaric video and transcript

Roman Krznaric

“The Power of Outrospection”

The 20th century I see as the age of introspection. That was the era in which the self help industry and therapy culture told us that the best way to discover who we are and what to do with our lives was to look inside ourselves, to gaze at our own navels; and what we've discovered of course is that that has not delivered the good life.

So the 21st century needs to be different; instead of the age of introspection we need to shift to the age of outrospection. And by outrospection I mean the idea of discovering who you are and what to do with your life by stepping outside yourself, discovering the lives of other people, other civilisations. And the ultimate art form for the age of outrospection is empathy; I want to talk about what empathy is, why it matters and, ultimately, how we can expand our empathic potential.

Of course empathy is more popular today as a concept than at any point in his history. Barack Obama's been talking for several years now about America's empathy deficit. You've got business people talking about empathy marketing. The neuroscientists are measuring the empathy parts of our brains - but I think what we need to do is focus more on two things. First, the way that empathy can be part of the art of living, a philosophy of life. Empathy isn't just something that that expands your moral universe, empathy is something that can make you a more creative thinker, improve your relationships, can create the human bonds that make life worth living.

But more than that empathy is also about social change, radical social change. A lot of people think of empathy as sort of a nice, soft, fluffy concept - I think it's anything but that. I think it's actually quite dangerous because empathy can create revolution. Not one of those old fashioned revolutions of new states, policies, governments, laws but something much more fiery and dangerous, which is a revolution of human relationships.

Now if you open a standard psychology textbook you'll see two definitions of empathy. One of them is this: “Affective empathy. Empathy as a shared emotional response,” a sort of mirrored response. So, if you look at the face of this child in anguish and you too feel anguish, that's affective empathy, you're mirroring their emotions.

The second kind you'll find when you open your psychology textbook is this: “cognitive empathy,” which is about perspective taking, about stepping into somebody else's world, almost like an actor looking through the eyes of their character. It's about understanding somebody else's world view, their beliefs, the fears, the experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at themselves.

We make assumptions about people, we have prejudices about people which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality, we use labels. And highly empathic people get beyond that, or get beyond those labels, by nurturing their curiosity about others. So how might we nurture our curiosity, where can we find inspiration?

I think we can find inspiration in George Orwell, who you might think of as, you know, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, but he was also one of the great empathic adventurers of the 20th century. You might remember or might know that he came from a very privileged background -- he went to Eton, he was a colonial police officer in Burma -- but what he realised in his 20s was that he knew very little about his own country particularly about the way that those people living on the social margins really experienced life.

So he decided to do something about it and conduct one of the most brilliant empathy experiments which was to go tramping on the streets of east London. He wrote about this famously in his book Down and Out in Paris and London. But the important thing about Orwell's experience was that it not only expanded his moral universe--he became a more compassionate person--but it also cultivated his curiosity about strangers, he developed new friendships, he gathered a whole load of literary materials he used for the rest of his life. In a way this empathy adventure made him good but it was also good for him.

Highly empathic people tend to be very sensitive listeners, they're very good at understanding what somebody else's needs are. They tend to be also people who in conversations share part of their own lives, make conversations two-way dialogues, make themselves vulnerable.

Worth thinking about as well is to think about political conversations. “It won't stop until we talk.” This is the motto of a grassroots peace building organisation in Israel and the Palestinian territories called 'The Parents Circle'. What it does is bring together Palestinian and Israeli families who share something very special - these families have all lost members of their own families in the conflict. And The Parents Circle brings them together for conversations, picnics, meetings where they share each other's stories, they discover that they share the same pain, the same blood - the make that empathic bond.

They also have other fantastic projects, my favourite one is called 'Hello Peace'. It's a free phone telephone line so anybody can pick up and call that number. If you're a Palestinian and call it you're immediately put through to an Israeli, you can have a half hour conversation. If you're an Israeli pick it up you're put through to a Palestinian. Since 2002 over a million calls have been logged on the Hello Peace free phone line. That's the kind of project which is trying to create grassroots empathy.

Now we normally think of empathy as something that happens between individuals. But I also believe it can be a collective force, it can happen on a mass scale. When I think of history I think not of the rise and fall of civilisations and religions or political systems; I think of the rise and fall of empathy: moments of mass empathic flowering and also of course of empathic collapse.

As you probably know in the 1780s in Britain slavery was an accepted part of society. People felt the economy was as dependent on slavery as our economy is on oil today; half a million African slaves were being worked to death on British plantations in the Caribbean and nobody thought this could ever be eroded. But in the late 1780s, there was the rise of the world's first great human rights movement. And it was a movement powered by empathy. Its leaders developed a very empathic campaign. The idea they had was to try and get people in Britain to experience or understand at least what it was like to be a slave on a slave ship, on a slave plantation. They published oral stories of former slaves talking about what it like to be whipped until they were lying on the ground. They also ran public meetings where they showed these little instruments, which were used to keep slaves' jaws open to force-feed them. They organised for former slaves to give talks around Britain about their experiences.

And this led to a sort of revolutionary social movement really. It led to petitions, it led to public protests, it led to the first great fair trade boycott of sugar. Eventually it led to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and later slavery itself. What this all led to, or what it really showed, was that empathy could be a collective force.

We normally think of empathy as empathising with the down and outs, the poor and marginalised, those on the edges of society. I think we need to be more adventurous in who we try to empathise with. I think we need to empathise with those in power. We need to understand how those in power, in whatever realm it is, think about the world and their lives and their ambitions. We need to understand their values. Only then are we going to be able to develop effective strategies for social, political and economic transformation.

Equally, I think we need to apply our more ambitious thinking in policy realms such as thinking about climate change. We all know there's a huge gap between what we know about climate change and the amount of action that people are taking, i.e. not very much. I think that gap is explained by empathy in two forms. I think there's an empathic gap in terms of we're not empathising across space with people in developing countries like in India, people who are being hit by climate change induced floods or droughts in Kenya. And, almost more importantly perhaps, we are failing to empathise through time with future generations and I think we need to learn to expand our empathic imaginations forwards through time as well as across space.

How are we going to do it? I think we need new social institutions. We need, for example, empathy museums - a place which is not about dusty exhibits, you know like an old Victorian museum, but an experiential and conversational public space where you might walk in and in the first room there is a human library where you can borrow people for conversations.

You walk into the next room and there are 20 sewing machines and there are former Vietnamese sweatshop workers who will teach you how to make a t-shirt like the one you're probably wearing under sweatshop labour conditions and you'll be paid five pence at the end of it - so you understand the labour behind the label.

You may well go into the cafe and scan in your food and discover that the working conditions of those who picked the coffee beans of the drink that you're drinking. You may see a video of them talking about their lives trying to make a connection across space and into realms that you don't know about.

I think we need to think about bringing empathy into our everyday lives in a very sort of habitual way. Socrates said that 'The way to live a wise and good life was to know thyself' and we've generally thought of that as being about being self reflective, looking in at ourselves, it's been about introspection. But I think in the 21st century we need to recognise that to know thyself is something that can also be achieved by stepping outside yourself by discovering other people's lives. And I think empathy is the way to revolutionise our own philosophies of life, to become more outrospective, and to create the revolution of human relationships that I think we so desperately need.