When a dear buddy lost his brother in a car accident while we were in college, I came home for the funeral to be with him and give him someone to talk to. One of the things that brought him comfort was told to him by the rabbi, that if all the people in the world threw their troubles into a big pile and got to pick anyone’s trouble to take out, they would choose their own.
We all have our problems and, much as we care about others and would like to be there for them, help them if we can, we no more want their problems than they want ours. We are not them. They are not us. So be it. So how did sympathy become something only bad people gave?
But sympathy has gotten a bad rap. Now considered the noblesse oblige of emotions, it’s disdained as a facile “poor you” of a sentiment, the equivalent of pity. Sympathy, in short, is to be avoided — something you are warned not to give and would be loath to receive.
Instead, we are to upgrade to its superior, empathy. Schools and parenting guides instruct children in how to cultivate empathy, as do workplace culture and wellness programs. You could fill entire bookshelves with guides to finding, embracing and sharing empathy. Few books or lesson plans extol sympathy’s virtues.
What’s the difference, you ask, aside from empathy being the hip new word and sympathy being the old tired word?
“Sympathy focuses on offering support from a distance,” a therapist explains on LinkedIn, whereas empathy “goes beyond sympathy by actively immersing oneself in another person’s emotions and attempting to comprehend their point of view.”
And from Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute: “Sympathy has to do with sharing emotions but is still focused on the individual who is sympathizing, rather than truly seeking to understand another’s perspective.” Spare us your sympathy, in other words.
While it mostly comes off as yet another fadish bit of semantic nonsense, the voices of correctness take this very seriously. It reflects not just the word you use (have all the Hallmark cards replaced “sympathy” with “empathy”?), but the depth of your caring about others more than yourself. If you’re sympathetic, then it’s all about you. If you’re empathetic, then it’s all about them. Believers will die on this hill, much like they believe that using the wrong pronouns is the equivalent of physical castration even if there’s no blood.
The problem, of course, is that no one really feels what another is feeling because no matter how hard they try, how much they want to, they’ve had different life experiences that render them an individual. They may know the feeling of being the victim of “injustice,” but the best they can do is filter it through their own life experience.
Still, it’s hard to square the new emphasis on empathy — you must feel what others feel — with another element of the current discourse. According to what’s known as “standpoint theory,” your view necessarily depends on your own experience: You can’t possibly know what others feel.
Does this make you the devil because you aren’t, and can’t be, them?
“Empathy is asking too much,” Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and the author of “Against Empathy,” told me. In an article in The Boston Review, Bloom asks us to imagine what empathy demands should a friend’s child drown. “A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain,” he writes. “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.”
One can be a compassionate person, care about others and still not pretend that they can immerse themselves in other people’s world of problems. And that doesn’t make them the devil, but a decent human being. If you can’t appreciate this, you have my sympathy, and that’s the best you’re going to get.
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Calls for “empathy” have become a tactic for demanding subservience. Narcissists and moral crusaders won’t turn down compassion, but what they want is for their feelings and beliefs and demands to be revered and centered: “If you loved me you would.”
They see empathy as the praxis of sympathy. This is not inherent in the word itself, but in how it is selectively utilized in their rhetoric. Like if “BE KIND” were painted on cop cars.
Wait I’m spending time posting comments in response to a NYT article that justifies a semantic debate by linking to a “bad rap” academic study that actually lauds sympathy and whose thesis is that it is “not a particular emotion but a type of emotional experience.” The media intelligentsia complex strikes again.
“A tactic for demanding subservience.” Damn. You’re right.
This must be a new definition that came out within the past decade. I always understood sympathy and sympathizing as sharing another person’s emotions and feelings, while empathy is more about putting yourself in another person’s shoes and seeing things from a different perspective, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily have to share their feelings; the latter is more abstract and cognitive. For instance, you might *empathize* with a child sex abuser when told their life story about how they were repeatedly sexually abused for several years from age 7, and thus judge them less harshly, but you definitely don’t *sympathize* with their desire to sexually abuse children.
The new calls for “empathy” seem to be that, if taking someone else’s perspective doesn’t result in you also sharing their feelings and emotions (what had traditionally been understood as “sympathy”), then you must not really be empathizing with them. Which sounds more like a narcissistic demand: “if you really understood me or what I am saying, then you would agree with me and feel exactly what I am feeling.”
It’s more than that, it’s that unless you can empthasize with them and fully understand and feel what they are feeling, you can have no opinion on what they did at all. Your opinion and input into the situation means zero to them, and you are summarily ignored. They don’t want your sympathy, they want you to AGREE with them.