Editorial: The Need to Be Right is Destroying Our Capacity for Empathy

Somewhere in Austin, as you read this, an exhausted nurse is driving home after a 12 hour shift, thinking about her family, and her patients. A worried child is crouching under a tree, thinking about her father, who lost his job, and hasn’t been the same. A pair of friends in different parts of the city are missing each other, feeling alone.

Empathy is the ability to feel for these individuals, to enter into their emotion rather than just observing it dryly from the outside. It’s the ability to get down with the child on eye level and hear her out, and in doing so, maybe to make her feel less alone.

It’s not so much about concocting the right phrase to make someone feel better, or convincing them why they should feel differently. It’s about genuinely feeling for someone.

Empathy is fundamental to human life and thriving. Yet today, in the time of coronavirus, many Americans have skipped empathy and gone straight to our favorite national pastime: hyper-partisan information warfare.

Every news item is a chance to battle each other. Every headline and fact is hurled or parried like a javelin. If we speak about the sick, someone immediately demands to know why we haven’t mentioned the jobless. If we speak about the jobless, someone condemns us for ignoring the sick and the vulnerable.

This has to do with the hyper-rationalization of news and public discourse. For too many of us, whenever we flip on the TV news, crack open a newspaper, or log on to social media, we are on the lookout for political takeaways and public policy lessons. Many of us are actually taught and trained to do this. Journalists are taught to be skeptical and ask tough questions. Job applicants in some industries are tested for ‘critical thinking’ skills. Scientists and researchers are encouraged to test and retest the assumptions of their predecessors.

And for good reason: our ability to ask tough questions helps us learn and improve the world around us. But when we jump straight to ‘solutions,’ we are rushing past something important — we are rushing past empathy.

And then the conversation quickly turns to “Here’s why my solution is right and yours is wrong.” Already we’ve skipped past the weary nurse, the suffocating patient, the jobless father.

For the hyper-rational, hyper-critical among us, this is convenient because it’s much easier to skip to political posturing than it is to empathize. It helps us avoid what psychologists call empathic distress — the feeling of discomfort that you get when you hear a baby’s cry, or see someone in physical pain.

It gets even easier for us to ignore human suffering when we’re ‘social distancing,’ and communicating to each other more often than not only through screens.

Over the past two months, 70,000 people have died of coronavirus in the United States alone. This could be a time for mourning, resolve, and reflection. Yet many Americans have skipped the mourning and taken the funeral as an opportunity scream at each other across the casket.

Have we lost the ability to simply suffer alongside one another?

Being empathetic doesn’t require us to abandon critical thinking or our political convictions. But it might require us to take a minute with a news story, to let it sink in, before we quip about it on social media.

Originally published at https://www.honestaustin.com on May 5, 2020.