Hear me out.
In 2019, the former first lady, Michelle Obama, gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention. She spoke about polarization and a surge of aggression in America.
“Empathy,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The ability to walk in someone else’s shoes; the recognition that someone else’s experience has value, too. Most of us practice this without a second thought. If we see someone suffering or struggling, we don’t stand in judgment. We reach out because, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ It is not a hard concept to grasp. It’s what we teach our children…
“But right now, kids in this country are seeing what happens when we stop requiring empathy of one another. They’re looking around wondering if we’ve been lying to them this whole time about who we are and what we truly value.”
In her estimation, our biggest problem is a lack of empathy. Me for you and you for me. Her solution is to create more.
Paul Bloom, on the other hand, a moral philosopher, argues that empathy itself is a problem in human interaction, not a solution. He says empathy, “however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.”
Paul Slovic, another moral philosopher, agrees. He says empathy is a poor tool for improving the lives of others, because the human mind is bad at thinking about, and empathizing with, millions or billions of individuals.
“An individual life,” he says, “is very valued. We all go to great lengths to protect a single individual or to rescue someone in distress, but then as the numbers increase, we don’t respond proportionally to that.”
He describes a phenomenon called psychic numbing, loosely defined as the larger the number of suffering people, the more apathy.
So is the problem not enough empathy, or empathy itself?
*
Samson DeWitt (now Felix) descends the stairs behind Simon, with his sister, Bathsheba (now Katie). In front of them, Randall Flagg stands weaponless in bare feet, blinking at the snowy peak of Mount Denali. He will bury his rifles in the dirt, he decides. Starting today he will fight no more.
Nearby, Story Burr-Nadir holds her brother’s hand. Hadrian, too, looks up at the mountains, but in his mind are different words. He thinks, This is a place we can heal. He spent six days locked in a hotel room in Washington DC eating energy bars and watching the world end on TV, before his sister and her friends came to rescue him. He looks over at her now, squinting at the wildflowers, and smiles.
“You and me,” she tells him, and he nods, because what else is there?
Duane Yamamoto comes up behind Simon and takes his hand. They are pioneers, who will sleep on the plane until their homes arrive. They will eat the food they’ve brought until they can lay in provisions. There is one phone between them, which they’ve agreed to use only in case of emergencies.
Last out, the Prophet Paul descends the nose stairs and kneels in the loam. He bends forward and kisses the mossy ground, thanking God for delivering them here to the new promised land.
Is that what happened? Simon wonders. Or did we deliver ourselves?
As with everything else about God, where you come down on the issue revolves around faith.
*
As a writer, your author has long believed that fiction is an empathy delivery device. He believes that if, on the page or the screen, a writer can make you, the reader, care about someone who is not you, you will go out into the world with a broadened empathy for others. And that this will make the world a better place.
Consider this, however.
Empathy, like any emotion, can be manipulated. Isn’t that what I’ve just described? An author writing a story to produce feelings? Empathy, therefore, is a tool that can be used for good, or for ill. As Adam Smith once wrote, to feel empathy for someone who has been wronged is to feel anger or hatred toward those who’ve wronged them. So if I want to make you angry, I just paint you a picture of a poor victim and the person or people who abused or manipulated them.
Help the victim, I might say, but also punish the victimizer.
Say I told a large group of people a story that they themselves are victims—of manipulation by dark forces, of disdain by people they’ve never met, of being left behind like a dog on the side of the road—what would those people do to help themselves and punish those they believed had abused them? For who among us doesn’t empathize first and foremost with themself?
*
There were 3,478,769,962 people alive on Planet Earth the year I was born. There are 7,794,798,739 today. In my lifetime, 4.3 billion extra people have come to live with us here on this shimmering blue-green ball. Babies with parents. Human beings who need food and water, homes, and schools, who generate waste and drive cars and have babies of their own.
It’s possible we haven’t thought this thing through all the way. There’s no denying that an individual person, after millions of years of evolution, is a very efficient problem solver. But what he or she can reliably solve is their own individual problem, perhaps—for a select few—the problems of a community bigger than a city, but smaller than a country. And yet, at some point, our ability to solve a problem breaks down when the size of the problem grows too big.