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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

