Join Me in a Practice of Empathy
tldr: A reflection on empathy in the age of polarization, including an invitation to join me for an hour of practice. AND a reminder that you can still join us for Six Weeks of Meditation
Can you think of a “phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say?”
Seriously, give it some thought. Dare yourself to think something that is offensive. Something that defies your idea of who you are.
Let’s try taking on that perspective. Adding context. Moving beyond our caricature of people we find repulsive.
I got this exercise from Rachel Kadish (please forgive the paywall). Who calls it the most important writing exercise she has ever assigned. And I want to invite us to do it together.
Please keep reading even if you can’t join us. But I think a few of us will want to come together for an hour on Friday, March 8 at 2:30pm EST and give the exercise a try. Exercise details are outlined at the end of this note.
Click here to register so we can send you an invite. There is no cost to join.
I am about to share more about why I think this exercise is so important. But I also want to tell you that this is a great way to start our “Six Weeks of Meditation.” And that you still have time to sign up! Again, whether you can join us on Friday or not.
There is a lot of talk about empathy and about being an empath. About the importance of developing empathy. And, on the other hand, about how challenging it can be to “feel everything.”
But I think our empathy is quite selective. And our sensitivity can tend to be more “aversion” and “desire.” More “I wish they were one way but they are another way.” Likes and dislikes masquerading as empathy, rather than actual empathy.
I think we tend to feel for and with those we care about. Those we agree with. And much less so with those who we see as the “opposition.” The people we experience as a threat.
Here I want to say quite clearly that we can have empathy and still have healthy boundaries. That we can have empathy and still go into political battle. That empathy is actually for us. That it is a way to nurture and sustain our own humanity.
Our age of intense polarization is a threat to the ideal of pluralism. Our opposing poles in the culture are at war with each other. Each pole feels like the other side poses an existential threat. When someone poses an existential threat it is natural for us to want to create a world in which they no longer exist. We want to eliminate the other. And the other wants to eliminate us.
I don’t have to describe the catastrophic results of this tendency. Clearly, we are experts at waging war upon each other. We’ve been doing it for millennia. Switching between oppressor and oppressed depending on how much power we are wielding.
Empathy is Medicine for the Soul
My concerns are not exclusively political. I have long been concerned with the way an ideological stance for justice can be so easily used to dehumanize the other. The way our politics give us an out.
The wisdom of the ages calls us into love, kindness and compassion. Justice itself is rooted in compassion. Yet we allow ourselves to be overtaken by ideologies that justify hatefulness and resentment. We risk our souls, the essence of what it means to be a good human. And we allow ourselves to hate, to resent and to want to obliterate the other.
This is not why we were born upon this earth.
Ask your ancestors.
Including the great warriors among them.
The songs and the stories that have made it through the ages made it here to teach us wisdom. The narrow path to becoming a good people.
We are becoming more brittle
Kadish says that she has taught versions of the writing exercise (below) for more than two decades. And that she has used it:
“...in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten angrier, I’ve noticed that students’ approach to the exercise has become more brittle, regardless of whether students lean right or left.”
And this is one of my central concerns. How brittle we are becoming. How afraid we are about coexisting with people who hold different perspectives.
I find that “ideological communities” are inherently brittle. They are brittle precisely because they are held together by the threat of exile. In this way, they are very much like fundamentalist religious communities. Very much like the community in which I grew up.
How often do you find yourself having to whisper your actual thoughts? Your more nuanced perspective? Whispering your questions? Your not knowing? Your lack of certainty?
Something is terribly wrong here.
If you are not allowed to not know. If you are not allowed to poke holes. How else are you supposed to live and learn? How else are you supposed to nurture curiosity and the possibility of new understandings?
We might not have the state police of East German lore. But we don’t need it. The police live in our heads. And we are just as afraid of speaking openly with our neighbors.
So I want to create space for us to do the opposite. To step boldly and courageously into the mind and experience of “the other.” I want us to come together and actively expand our moral imagination.
I am in no way a moral relativist. I am not down with both-sideism. I stand on the side of justice. I believe there is in an evil force that moves through the world. That moves within each one of us. And that we have a duty to keep it at bay. To find right relationship with it.
What I don’t believe in is black and white thinking.
I don’t believe there is an evil “out there” that does not also exist within me.
I believe in the wisdom of the ages. In the sanctity of life. In the essence of our shared humanity. I understand that we all hold fear. And that this fear makes sense. Because we are all so vulnerable. And because we all have been hurt. And because we all will be hurt.
This fear leads to contraction. And it is in this contraction that we become small minded. And it is when we are scared and small minded that we dehumanize the other. And it is when we dehumanize the other that we lose our own humanity.
Clementine Morrigan, who is one of the clearest and most courageous voices challenging cancel culture today, puts it this way:
“The heart of my principles, my politics, and my practice is the fundamental belief that every person has inherent and irrevocable dignity, that our fundamental belonging to this world is not something we earn, but something we are always deserving of, that actually can’t be taken away. I believe that the only way toward transformation, responsibility, and justice is through a profound refusal of the worldview that acts as if dignity and belonging to the world are conditional.”
This is at the heart of the wisdom of the ages. And it is the aim, the ideal, the work, that allows us to keep evil at bay.
It is not just a belief. It is a practice. And Rachel Kadish has a great exercise for us to practice together.
Join me and other courageous souls on Friday, March 8. Register here.
The Writing Exercise
Write down a phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say
Spend 10 minutes writing a monologue in the first person that’s spoken by a fictitious character who makes the upsetting statement.
The statement doesn’t represent you. Speaking as if you are someone else is a basic skill.
The troubling statement must appear in the monologue.
It shouldn’t be minimized
You should not feel the need to forgive or account for it.
What’s required is simply that somewhere in the monologue there be an instant — even a fleeting phrase — in which we can feel empathy for the speaker. “Perhaps she’s sick with worry over an ill grandchild. Perhaps he’s haunted by a love he let slip away. Perhaps she’s sleepless over how to keep her business afloat and her employees paid. Done right, the exercise delivers a one-two punch: repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity.”