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Wednesday, September 6, 2017 // The Statement
Empath in the Wild: The Sorry Rug
B
oth my father and mother have been
working
in
Republican
politics
my
entire life, but my political leanings fall
pretty far to the left, due to a nebulous
conglomeration of incidental factors. The contrast
between the reddish hue of my family environments
and the blueish one of my educational and extrafamilial
social
environments,
along
with,
I
think,
my
experiences having separated parents, have taught me
to see both sides of things — or else suffer alienation
from those dearest to me.
I spent eight years of my childhood attending a teeny
tiny Montessori school, where the curriculum was as
much academic as it was interpersonal. The Montessori
approach to teaching and learning is loosely structured
and individualized to each student. This, paired with
my school’s fairly extensive financial aid program,
meant that I was in classrooms with kids of different
abilities, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and varying
financial backgrounds as well.
In the classroom, I was socialized from a young
age to see others not through these filters, but
instead to see them as the multidimensional human
beings they are. I didn’t have homework when I went
there, and each time I had a disagreement with one of
my peers, we had to sit across from each other on the
“sorry rug,” accept one another’s apologies, and hand
each other fake yellow roses.
There is an underlying message I learned from
being surrounded for so much of my childhood by
people who are different from me in more obvious and
culturally determined ways than, say, another upper-
middle class white girl who lives in the suburbs. It’s
a message of empathy. And since then, I’ve practiced
and developed this skill so I can
empathize with a wide variety of
people, including my mostly affluent,
mostly white, mostly conservative
family members, and also my friends,
family, acquaintances and strangers
who are none of those things.
Empathy
is
a
semi-social
act.
It begins by placing myself in the
company of others, physically or
virtually, say, via the internet, then
thinking about it in solitude. Then my
empathetic practice can (but doesn’t
have to) influence my actions toward
other people.
According to the Oxford English
Dictionary,
it’s
“the
power
of
projecting
one’s
personality
into (and so fully comprehending) the object of
contemplation.” So, empathy is a contemplative
act, not dissimilar to some forms of meditation. Of
course, the empath’s understanding of someone
else’s point of view is subjective — More on this later.
And like meditation, empathizing takes practice.
A hundred small empathetic thought-feelings for
people who hold perspectives varying in magnitude
of difference from my own can allow me to
empathize with someone who holds a drastically
different perspective — or even someone who hates
me.
Throughout my life, I practiced empathy not only
for people who are different from me in all of the
ways my Montessori classmates were, but also for
my close family members to whom, because of my
educational and social environments, I had grown
dissimilar.
In
the
intensely
polarized
sociopolitical
environment of the 2016 presidential election, my
tendencies as an empath had me lost. How can I
see close friends with immigrant parents cry on the
phone with their parents when the results of the
election became clear, then turn to face my father,
who voted red this time around?
Inner tensions like this one, the result of witnessing
and coming to understand my friends’ and family
members’ drastically different personal experiences,
have challenged me to contemplate the bounds of
empathy. There have been times when I’ve come
to understand so deeply why someone might vote
for Trump that my thoughts have sounded similar
to those of an apologist. Because of the slippery
slope from empathizing to making (un)ethical
compromises, I’ve questioned whether continuing
to develop my empathetic practice is a morally
sustainable endeavor. After sustained reflection
and numerous conversations with people of varying
backgrounds, I’ve come to an understanding that, if
practiced carefully, empathy is actually a necessity.
I’ve come to find similarities between how people
talk about empathy and how people talk about beauty.
I think empathy is beautiful, and as Elaine Scarry
writes in, On Beauty and Being Just, beholding a
beautiful thing can help to further justice in the world.
When one perceives something to be beautiful,
it is because the object of beauty makes sense to its
beholder. When I empathize with someone, their
perspective feels valid to me; it makes sense to me,
even if only for a brief period of time. According to
Scarry, beauty is fleeting, but for a moment it gives the
beholder a sense of conviction.
At the same time, perceiving a beautiful thing also
confronts me with my own capacity to make errors
in judgment. Something I didn’t think was beautiful
before appears beautiful to me now. Something that
appeared beautiful before falls out of sense to me, pales
in comparison to another more truly beautiful thing I
behold.
Beauty prompts a search for that which is more
beautiful. “It comes to us,” Scarry writes, “with no
work of our own; then leaves us prepared to undergo
a giant labor”. Beauty is a starting place for education,
she argues. And if empathy is beautiful, then it, too,
prompts a search for that which is more true, which
makes more sense to me.
But if I’m constantly searching for things
that make more sense to me, one can argue it
follows that eventually the most
beautiful thing will be my own
perspective. But this is an erroneous
counterargument.
The
more
I
practice empathy, the stretchier my
empathetic imagination becomes.
Empathy and reason converge when
I understand the perspectives of
oppressors but ultimately take the
side of the oppressed.
If empathy is beautiful, I argue
experiencing empathy is sacred —
Something that has no precedent in
my imaginative memory, something
that puts me in awe, something that
prompts me to consider my errors in
judging this beauty, and something
that ultimately acts as a vital force.
BY REGAN DETWILER, COLUMNIST
statement
THE MICHIGAN DAILY | SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
DESIGN BY REGAN DETWILER