Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters 9781032321714, 9781032324852, 9781003315285

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Why Now Empathy?
2 Easy Empathy
3 Difficult Empathy
4 The Social Conditions of Empathy
5 Empathy with the Enemy
6 Critical Empathy
7 Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy
Index

Citation preview

Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters

Difficult Empathy takes up the question of empathy as fundamentally a rhetorical concern, focusing on the ways we encounter and understand one another in what we read and write, hear and say. The book centers around the argument that empathy as a rhetorical event occurs not simply in the minds of individuals but as a product of the rhetorical situations, practices, cultures, and values in which we engage. Rather than identifying empathy as a cure-all, or jettisoning the concept altogether, the author acknowledges empathy’s potential as well as its limitations by focusing on what makes empathy a hard and ultimately worthwhile practice. This nuanced and original study will interest scholars working at the intersection of rhetoric and composition with empathy, as well as those studying empathy in fields such as critical and cultural theory, politics, media analysis, social psychology, and the cognitive humanities. Eric Leake is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Texas State University, where he is Director of the Master’s Program in Rhetoric and Composition.

Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication

37 Digital Ethics Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression Edited by Jessica Reyman and Erika M. Sparby 38 Rhetorical Ethos in Health and Medicine Patient Credibility, Stigma, and Misdiagnosis Cathryn Molloy 39 The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies Ethics, Sponsors, and Academic Knowledge-Making Karen J. Lunsford and James P. Purdy 40 Sacred Rhetorical Education in 19th Century America: Austin Phelps at Andover Theological Seminary Michael-John DePalma 41 American Women Activists and Autobiography Rhetorical Lives Heather Ostman 42 Language and Power on the Rhetorical Stage: Theory in the Body Fiona Harris Ramsby 43 Violence, Silence, and Rhetorical Cultures of Champion-Building in Sports Kathleen Sandell Hardesty 44 Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters Eric Leake

Difficult Empathy and Rhetorical Encounters

Eric Leake

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Eric Leake The right of Eric Leake to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 9781032321714 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032324852 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003315285 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285 Typeset in Sabon LT Pro by codeMantra

For Lee and Linda, my parents and first teachers of empathy.

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

1

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?

1

2

Easy Empathy

18

3

Difficult Empathy

41

4

The Social Conditions of Empathy

65

5

Empathy with the Enemy

89

6

Critical Empathy

115

7

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy

140

Index

153

Acknowledgments

This project began in conversation with Bronwyn Williams, who not only helped me think more fully about empathy but in so many ways models it. My interest in empathy is rooted in my experiences with family and friends and everybody who has extended me empathy and has helped me do the same, despite my limitations. Lisa Blankenship’s work on empathy has provided a foundation for my own, and in collaborating with her I have been fortunate to gain a deeper understanding of rhetorical empathy as well as a friend. I owe so much of my thoughts on these topics to discussions with wonderful students, friends, and colleagues. Thank you. Whatever this book does well, it is due to their influences. Any failures are purely my own. I am forever grateful for the constant support of my parents and siblings. Finally, I thank my wife, Stacia, and our children, Wallace and Frances, who blur the distinctions between empathy and love.

1

Introduction Why Now Empathy?

When I started studying empathy as a doctoral student, I set up a Google news alert. Once a week, I received emails with news mentions of “empathy.” In the early years, this was helpful. When Barack Obama championed empathy, as he often did in speeches, press remarks, and interviews, I saw it in my weekly empathy news digest. The same went for write-ups of prominent research in empathy, such as the finding that empathy was on the decline among college students (Konrath et al.), and initiatives to promote empathy, such as the Empathy Project at Capital University, which I later reported on (Leake, “Teaching Empathy to the ‘Me’ Generation”). I still receive those weekly Google alerts, but they are less helpful now. The references to empathy are too numerous and too diffuse, as empathy is mentioned all the time as a way to be a better business leader, as a means of personal growth, as lacking in communication with one’s spouse/children/neighbors/friends/colleagues, as experienced in virtual reality, as possibly attributable to cats. Every area of discourse seems to be concerned with empathy. While public attention to empathy has increased, the exactness of the term as commonly used has diminished. Empathy has come to be a generally positive and poorly defined quality of concern for the wellbeing of others. How exactly we empathize, what empathy does and for whom, its uses and limitations, and the contexts in which it operates, those tend to be ignored. Without conceptual precision, empathy is simply thinking about others, and it is not very useful in this respect. I typically skim and quickly delete my Google news alerts for “empathy.” An increased popular interest in empathy is itself important, so I want to start there. Why are we—academics, educators, social news followers, even business leaders, or anybody generally reflected in Google news alerts—so interested in empathy now? In asking this question I am following the lead of Daniel Gross, who poses a similar question in his work on rhetoric and emotions to ask not only how emotions are constructed, distributed, and given meaning in socio-historical contexts, but also to ask why now the interest in rhetoric and emotions generally, and in particular emotions specifically? We are compelled socially to ask some questions at some times, and not to ask others. Why now the academic and greater social interest in empathy? DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-1

2  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? It helps to start by thinking of what empathy is. Developmental psychologist Martin Hoffman defines empathy as a “the spark of human concern for others, the glue that makes social life possible” (3). I expect the interest in empathy now is a recognition of the felt experience that our social glue is stretching and breaking, like old rubber cement. Of course, “we” were never as socially cohesive as we might have imagined ourselves to be, a realization all too keenly experienced by those who have been systematically excluded from privileged conceptions of the public. At this moment, our sense of the disintegrating social glue is more than merely a recognition of historical forces of marginalization, as important as that recognition is. Our sense of the social glue stretched and breaking is more of a concern about the viability of social cohesion at all, that we really can work toward understanding and feeling with one another, and that such work, if not fully achievable, is at least worth the effort. Concern about the viability of empathy is heightened by the to-beexpected backlash against empathy. Around the time Obama was talking of concern over the country’s “empathy deficit” in a speech to graduates (Obama, “Cultivate Empathy”), empathy was being promoted widely as a cure-all for society’s many ills. If only people would have more empathy for one another, then we might better address social inequalities, international relations, and climate change, the thinking went. Empathy was expected to bring many of our most pressing issues closer to resolution. I am not against empathy. I think that it certainly can help address significant social problems, but empathy alone, and empathy unsupported by other measures and unaware of its own limitations and biases, does not solve things. The widespread endorsement of empathy led to a backlash. The first wave of the backlash came on the political right after Obama identified empathy as a key quality in any justice he would nominate to the Supreme Court. In remarks released by The White House, Obama said: I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a case book. It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives—whether they can make a living and care for their families; whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving as just decisions and outcomes. (“Obama’s Remarks on the Resignation of Justice Souter”) I have written elsewhere about the promotion and performance of empathy in Obama’s speeches, about how he advocates for empathy as a political value and how he offers his own story, along with the stories of others, as sites of enabling public empathy (Leake, “Empathizer-in-Chief”). Obama’s reference to empathy in nominating a Supreme Court justice, a nomination that would place Justice Sonia Sotomayor on the court, is notable for how empathy is

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  3 identified as not only a personal value but as a political and juridical one. For Obama, empathy is an attention to how the lives of other people are experienced and felt, individually and in aggregate. That kind of felt understanding leads to better, more just decisions, he argues. The conservative opposition to nominating a judge with empathy was immediate. Conservatives, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, saw empathy in conflict with other legal values of fairness, justice, and impartiality. “This idea of ‘empathy’ sounds appealing at first,” McConnell told a class of law school graduates shortly after Obama’s statement (Isenstadt). “But you can see the problem with this view if you ever find yourself in front of a court and you’re not arguing for the party or group for whom the judge is empathetic.” McConnell works hard to position his statement. He acknowledges that empathy is appealing. At this point, empathy is what we might consider an unopposed good; nobody wanted to take a position as against empathy. So, McConnell acknowledges empathy’s potential for biases and places empathy in conflict with other fundamental values, those of justice and fairness. George Lakoff has identified a similar conflict, between care and justice, aligned with the family metaphors of the “nurturing mother” and the “strict father,” as a fundamental value difference between conservatives and liberals in American politics. The debate over the role of empathy in Supreme Court nominations added political spin to the term, so that empathy’s association with liberals was strengthened as was its opposition by conservatives as being against fairness. The often more important question in subsequent years was the question of exactly who is deserving empathy and to what ends, an issue mentioned by McConnell with his suggestion of empathy for one group coming at the expense of another. Empathy here is positioned as a limited public resource, as a zero sum. Political conservatives were not alone in their opposition to empathy. The second wave of the backlash against empathy came from academics who distrusted empathy’s efficacy and its roots in a liberal humanism that could obscure meaningful differences. The most prominent academic critic of the concept may be psychologist Paul Bloom, the author of Against Empathy. Bloom’s central critique of empathy is that it is a poor guide for moral actions, given its emphasis on feeling with others and its many biases. Bloom allows that empathy is important in individual relationships; that it can be an enjoyable and essential component of aesthetic experiences, such as reading novels or watching films; and that it can lead to positive actions. “But on the whole,” Bloom writes, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives. (2–3)

4  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? Bloom’s opposition to empathy depends upon his definition of it. So much of what is said about empathy, in support and in criticism, depends upon the definition of it. Bloom focuses on empathy as “feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience” (3). Cognitive and reflective empathy, which are at the heart of what I will describe as difficult empathy, are not central to Bloom’s concept of empathy or his critique of it. He does important work, however, in highlighting the liabilities and limitations of empathy, in contrast to much of the popular support of empathy. “The problems we face as a society and as individuals are rarely due to lack of empathy. Actually, they are often due to too much of it,” Bloom writes (5). Here I am reminded of Kenneth Burke’s comments on war as a “perversion of communion” (22). The problem is not a lack of empathy but too much empathy, empathy directed at a select few, and empathy that privileges uncritical feeling detached from thinking. Critiques of empathy make for surprising company. We have conservatives, such as McConnell, arguing against empathy as opposed to justice. We have Bloom highlighting the poor quality of empathy as a moral guide given its emphasis on feeling over deliberation and its preference for familiar individuals rather than unfamiliar populations. Joining them in critiquing empathy are those who see it as too likely to serve the interests of the powerful in reinforcing social hierarchies. Folklorist Amy Shuman, for example, writes of both the promise and liabilities of empathy: “Empathy offers the possibility of understanding across space and time, but it rarely changes the circumstances of those who suffer. If it provides inspiration, it is more often for those in the privileged position of empathizer rather than empathized” (5). Shuman advocates a critique of empathy so that empathy might “remain a process of negotiating, rather than defending, meaning” (5). The critique of empathy offered by Shuman is one based in accountability and reflection. Shuman is not abandoning empathy but focusing on the work it does and can do, for better and for worse. In her critique of racial impersonation as empathy, focusing on works in which white characters temporarily experience life as Black characters, Alisha Gaines holds empathy accountable for privileging personal feelings, particularly those of white audiences, over broader social progress. “Such racial goodwill has insidious consequences, refusing to admit how race and racism are both structural and institutionalized,” Gaines writes (6). And Fritz Breithaupt argues that a focus on empathy as leading to positive social action occludes the negative possibilities of empathy. For Breithaupt, empathy is morally neutral and a driver of anti-social actions as much as prosocial ones. His analysis includes dark modes of empathy such as sadism and emotional vampirism. These are but some of the prominent critiques of empathy in recent years. I read them as attempting to hold empathy accountable, placing empathy in relation to other values, and considering the limitations and potential negative consequences of empathy. In doing this, critiques of empathy also offer opportunities to make empathy more focused and useful, which gets to the work of difficult empathy.

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  5 Empathy, Rhetoric, and Encounters Any accounting of empathy depends upon a clear definition of the term. Empathy is notoriously ambiguous as a concept. It is sometimes used to focus on an emotional response in line with the situation of another, a feeling with another, that may be considered affective empathy. At other times, it is defined as attempting to understand another person’s situation, their interests and experiences and history, often by taking into account the other person’s perspective and thoughts, in what may be considered cognitive empathy. I like to work with the definition of empathy provided by philosopher Amy Coplan for its specificity and nuance. As Coplan defines it, “Empathy is a complex imaginative process in which an observer simulates another person’s situated psychological states while maintaining clear self-other differentiation” (5). In calling it complex, Coplan considers empathy both affective and cognitive; in calling empathy imaginative, she emphasizes the creative work of empathy in creating another’s assumed state. Coplan’s definition also underscores the importance of situatedness in perceptions of empathy and in maintaining self-other differentiation, so that the empathizer does not forget that they are not the empathizee, nor are the empathizee them, through acts of conflation or erasure that can easily occur under assumptions of empathy. Empathy is closely related to sympathy and compassion. The general distinction is that empathy is a feeling with another rather than a feeling for, as is implied through sympathy, for example. Sympathy, and the related concept of pity, also tend to reinforce hierarchical distinctions as it is generally the more privileged who pity the less so. Even if the poor were to pity the rich, such pity is built upon the idea that those who are materially rich may be poor in other areas, such as life meaning, and it is this relative poverty of meaning for which they are to be pitied. Sympathy and pity also tend to be focused on negative experiences. Empathy tends to be too, but it is possible to empathize with somebody else’s happiness or success. Definitions of compassion, such as that offered by Bloom in his argument for rational compassion over empathy, are often more general and less focused than empathy, reflecting more of a wider interest in the wellbeing of others rather than an attention to the emotional and cognitive experiences of a particular person. The history of empathy is much more fascinating and detailed that I will account for here. Susan Lanzoni’s Empathy: A History provides a thorough review of the concept, its origins, and how it has changed over time to become the positive social ideal it is today. There are a few key points in that history worth noting for this project. The term “empathy” is relatively new. It comes from the German Einfühlung, literally “feeling into,” which was first developed by German aesthetic philosophers Robert Vischer and, especially, Theodor Lipps in the late 1800s and early 1900s (Stueber). Empathy originally was more concerned with the relationship of observers and things, such as art and objects. The idea was that observers would physically feel themselves into objects as a response to a painting, for example, or a classical

6  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? Greek column, feeling the column’s upright strength and the weight it bore. (Gustav Jahoda provides a helpful account of early uses of the term Einfühlung in Lipps’s work and its relation to sympathy and empathy.) American psychologist Robert Titchener is credited with coining the term “empathy” from Einfühlung in 1909, which helped empathy become more of a psychological concept instead of an aesthetic one. In time empathy became more associated with our ways of feeling with and understanding other people rather than art and objects, although the history of the concept remains with us in its attention to perceiving faces and bodies and responding bodily. Empathy now has much wider disciplinary interest beyond aesthetics and psychology. It is a key concept in moral philosophy and care ethics (Nussbaum, Slote), developmental psychology (Hoffman), cognitive literary studies (Keen), literary criticism (Gaines), neuroscience (Iacoboni), rhetorical theory (Blankenship), education (Mirra), anthropology (Hollan and Throop), and more. Part of the resurgence in interest in empathy in recent years may be attributed to the discovery of mirror neurons as an explanation for how we might mirror the actions of others as though we were ourselves acting, a supposed neurological basis for empathy. There was a lot of excitement surrounding mirror neurons, although there also is reason to be careful not to overhype their implications. Moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum have championed moral emotions including empathy as reasons to teach the humanities, and literary fiction in particular, in order to promote more empathically aware citizens. This too speaks to a wider concern that the seams of the social fabric are coming undone. There is hope that empathy might mend those, but the degree of that potential, and how best to do so, needs more consideration. This book builds upon these areas of research in empathy as well as its social promise and limitations. This book is a rhetorical study of empathy, and so I am interested in how empathy is enacted, performed, and solicited as a means of understanding others, making meaning, and promoting persuasion. I follow Gross in considering rhetoric as “at once an embedded cultural practice and an inventive attitude which allows us to reflect critically upon those very same cultural practices” (10). Indeed, a central purpose of this study is to reflect critically upon cultural practices of empathy, to understand empathy as culturally practiced and informed by cultural values and situations. My rhetorical approach gives particular attention to the situation and broader context of a rhetorical event, the people involved, the audiences, the constraints, and the purposes of any discursive encounter. These rhetorical concerns are especially important when critically reflecting upon empathy. It is imperative to ask who is empathizing with whom, under what conditions, and why; or, as Theresa Kulbaga puts the question, “Empathy to what end?” (518). Empathy has an important place in rhetorical history. As Dennis Lynch writes, “Empathy used to be at the center, at the heart, of rhetorical studies” (5). He identifies empathy as a rhetorical strategy in appeals to the emotions, as a mode of invention in considering the feelings and perspectives

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  7 of an audience, and as part of the social climate that supports rhetorical engagements. Aristotle’s concept of pity is the strongest historical precedent for empathy as rhetoric in the European rhetorical tradition. (I will consider pity in greater detail in the next chapter on easy empathy.) The most important modern rhetorical concept in relation to empathy is Burke’s idea of identification: “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (55). For Burke, persuasion is based upon identification, and identification is about persuading others that you share their interests and ways of being, not only through any specific address but “as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skills” (26). Empathy was a key component of the non-adversarial rhetorical practices built upon the person-centered therapeutic techniques of Carl Rogers. Those are best articulated by Rogers in his speech “Communication: Its Blocking and Facilitation” and further developed by Nathaniel Teich and others. Empathy lost is position as a central concern in rhetoric due to its many liabilities, potential for bias, and association with a more feeling-driven personal rhetorical approach that was criticized for inadequately addressing social and structural concerns, although so-called expressivists in rhetoric and writing studies would respond that they always were concerned with the social as well as the personal, that indeed their interest was in the personal in relation to the social. As in other fields, there is a renewed interest in rhetoric and writing studies in empathy, which tracks larger trends in a reconsideration of the emotions, personal narratives, and social relations and structures. Lisa Blankenship provides a very helpful historical and cross-cultural account of the history of empathy within rhetoric. She outlines a theory of rhetorical empathy with four key characteristics: “Yielding to an Other by sharing and listening to personal stories,” “Considering motives behind speech acts and actions,” “Engaging in reflection and self-critique,” and “Addressing difference, power, and embodiment” (20). Shui-yin Sharon Yam’s Inconvenient Strangers focuses on reflective and strategic narratives as potentially transformative practices of deliberative empathy that necessarily include “attunement toward the intersection among materiality, emotions, and intersubjectivity” within specific sites of citizenship discourses in Hong Kong (15). Additional work is being done on pedagogies of empathy, particularly in literary approaches to social justice (Bracher) and writing pedagogies (Leake, “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy”). This book builds upon the work of Blankenship, Yam, and others by further pushing rhetorical consideration of empathy with attention to the challenges of how we encounter and understand others, the situations in which we attempt to do so, and the potential consequences of such engagements. Like Lynch, I find empathy a valuable rhetorical concept, in part because of the challenges empathy presents and the fault lines it reveals. Lynch writes, in stating that he is not trying to recenter empathy

8  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? as the fundamental concept in rhetoric, nor trying to defend empathy from the serious critiques of it, “I will argue instead that empathy is rhetorically productive not in spite of but because of the dangers to which it is prone” (7). I agree; empathy’s difficulties are what make it valuable as rhetorical concept and practice. I describe the engagements with difficult empathy in this book as rhetorical encounters, making encounter itself a key term worth considering. The Oxford English Dictionary defines encounter first as “a meeting face to face.” This idea of encounter includes being in the presence of another, of meeting as individuals at a particular time in a particular space. Meeting face to face also echoes Emmanuel Levinas’s notion that our ethical obligations to one another are based upon such meetings, in our recognition of the proximity and difference of the other. Levinas is also concerned with the encounter, as is Martin Buber in I and Thou. Although I cannot pursue here more deeply the lines of inquiry established by Levinas and Buber, I use encounter aware of the resonance it has with their work, the ethical obligations we have to others, the potential for encounters to make us realize that we are not alone, the significance of meeting face to face, and that we are defined in part through our engagements with others and in recognition of what we share as well as the ways we are different. Encounter was an important concept to Rogers as well, specifically as invoked in encounter group sessions that involved sharing one’s emotional responses with others, with an emphasis on emotions and responses rather than judgments. Part of the idea of encounter groups was to learn more about oneself, others, and intergroup dynamics through these facilitated exchanges. Encounter groups—also known as training groups or T-groups—were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. They also were somewhat controversial. I am not taking a stance on them here, but I do find the emphasis on emotional response and recognition in connection with others to be worth highlighting. The Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition of encounter is as “the fact of a meeting with (a person or thing), esp. undesignedly or casually.” Here we have encounter as unexpected. This meaning is valuable, as the encounters analyzed in this book often are unexpected in their occurrence and implications. These types of encounters are important as they demonstrate what it means to live in proximity to others, interacting with them in the world and in texts, in ways planned and unplanned. Those unplanned encounters are some of the most important. Encounter is related to similar words in other languages, such as the Spanish verb encontrar, meaning “to find.” I am attracted to this idea of encounter as finding, as learning even, perhaps something about ourselves, others, and the world, to find what we are looking for as well as what we are not. Encounter also has etymological roots in conflict, in being against, as countering or meeting as adversaries. I do not intend encounter in this way, although the potential or expectation for conflict certainly is in the background in ideas such as difficult empathy and empathy with the enemy. It is important to recognize, however, that

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  9 difficult empathy often occurs in areas of conflict, that conflicts perceived and unperceived are part of what makes empathy difficult. These also are some of the occasions where a critical practice of empathy is most valuable. Finally, I take up “encounter” from a line in a first-person article by Rodger Jacobs in the Las Vegas Sun. Jacobs writes about his experience as one of the so-called new homeless losing his home and moving into a long-term budget hotel during the Great Recession. His articles, the responses of readers, and the social conditions that support and inhibit empathy are the focus of the fourth chapter. He ends his first article with a direct address to readers that “should you encounter a weary-looking man” as you go about your day, consider stopping, saying hello, dropping him some money, without fear of coming in contact with him. Jacobs’s invitation is one of community, exchange, and chance, with all the personal and social meanings those imply. It also is an invitation realized in text, as readers are encountering Jacobs in the pages of the newspaper. Likewise, Leslie Jamison writes in the title essay of her collection The Empathy Exams of playing the part of a medical actor and performing ailments and medical histories in “encounters” with medical students to help them learn to demonstrate empathy (2). Encounters are opportunities for empathy, they are chances for practice and learning, be those encounters between medical students and medical actors, between Jamison and her readers, between Jacobs and his readers, or elsewhere where we meet and respond to one another. This is another focus of encounter in this project, meeting on the page in the ways that we read and write about one another. These encounters are fundamentally rhetorical, as all encounters are rhetorical when we meet and understand one another in discursive environments charged with meanings, values, and implications. Overview of This Book This book engages current work in empathy in two important ways. First, it argues for greater attention to empathy as complex cognitive and affective rhetorical encounters. Empathy has long been a central concern of rhetorical studies, particularly in considerations of audience, emotional appeals, and identification, although it lost standing due to its biases and liabilities. As rhetoric and composition has reengaged with the personal and the emotional and has attempted to better address social divisions and injustices, empathy itself has reemerged as an area of inquiry. Second, the book contributes to the broader area of empathy studies by adding conceptual diversity to work on empathy. As David Gruber and others have argued, we need conceptual diversity in our references to identification and related concepts so that we might distinguish their many modes and purposes. Empathy has come to mean anything and everything. It often works as an unopposed positive term, which undermines its usefulness. As Bloom writes in his critique of empathy, “Some people use empathy as referring to everything good, as a synonym for morality and kindness and compassion” (3). This book works toward

10  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? greater conceptual diversity in discussions of empathy. It identifies modes of empathy—all grounded in rhetorical theory and critical practice, all related to difficult empathy—so that we might expand the field of empathy studies and detail the factors that make empathy difficult as well as promising. I draw from interdisciplinary work on empathy in social and developmental psychology, moral philosophy, and rhetoric and composition. I began with a consideration of why empathy is receiving greater attention within and beyond rhetoric and composition, a question that is itself a rhetorical concern. This introduction includes an acknowledgement of my own positionality and the importance of self-examination as a foundation of difficult empathy. The chapters then progress by defining modes of difficult empathy through rhetorical analysis. The intention in defining each of these modes is to make them useful when discussing the rhetorical work, challenges, and potentials of empathy. In developing this project, I was influenced by the organizational model of Breithaupt’s The Dark Sides of Empathy, in which each chapter focuses on a different conception of empathy. While Breithaupt considers the ways empathy can motivate harmful actions, I examine the ways empathy can be limited, challenging, unsettling, and potentially productive. The book’s concepts are developed through rhetorical analyses of key texts. The first two modes—easy empathy and difficult empathy—serve as a basis for those that follow: the social conditions of empathy, empathy with the enemy, and critical empathy. Chapter analyses include attention to differences in race, gender, social position, bodies, access to wealth and opportunities, political affiliations, and other forms of identity that are central to the work of empathy. The book concludes with an emphasis on critical empathy as pulling together the various modes of difficult empathy in practices that recognize empathy as always contingent, approximate, interested, and in process. The next chapter develops the concept of easy empathy as opposed to difficult empathy. Easy empathy is a feel-good empathy that allows the empathizer to see themselves exactly as they want to be seen. It does nothing to challenge social positions and instead can reinforce hierarchies. This is a mode of empathy closely associated with pity, which is generally felt by the more powerful for the less so in ways that would reaffirm the social standing and goodness of the powerful. The chapter grounds the concept of easy empathy in a reading of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory of pity, which depends upon social positions as well as a sense of shared vulnerability. Easy empathy does not require commitment, significant effort, structural change, or a reappraisal of oneself and others. The critical work of difficult empathy is all the more important as a counter to the false comforts of easy empathy. The chapter argues that much of what is popularly advocated as empathy falls under this concept of easy empathy. In easy empathy, self-centered feeling and social presentation take the place of action and critical reflection. This is not to say that easy empathy can do no good but that its benefits are generally secondary to the comfort of the empathizer.

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  11 Chapter 3, “Difficult Empathy,” develops the core concept of the book. As opposed to easy empathy, difficult empathy challenges the empathizer’s conceptions of themself and others in ways that can make demands upon the empathizer. As a result, difficult empathy can upset hierarchies otherwise reinscribed by easy empathy. The chapter builds upon Burke’s theory of identification by highlighting how conceptions of the self are always at stake in rhetorical encounters. Because a sense of self is always at stake, and because we feel a need to defend against threats to our identities, any rhetorical encounter that might challenge our sense of self becomes difficult. This difficulty is experienced when we empathize with those qualities in others that we would rather not recognize in ourselves, or when we see in others favorable qualities that we would rather keep for ourselves. A key site of analysis is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “A Muscular Empathy.” In that essay Coates prompts us to consider our own non-exceptionalism by empathizing with history’s non-heroes, those who were the bystanders and perpetuators of historical injustices, such as racial oppression, just as we may be bystanders to contemporary injustices. As Coates writes, to recognize one’s own mediocrity or potential complicity is hard, but through such acts of difficult empathy we might better understand ourselves and our relationships. Difficult empathy also seeks to identify the humanity of the inhumane and to recognize a shared human potential for cruelty, as is evident in Werner Herzog’s film Into the Abyss in its attention to suffering and the destabilization of categories of victim and victimizer. The chapter asks us to consider details, situations, luck, and differences in life experiences—especially along lines of race and social position—as well as our shared vulnerabilities and potentials as we work to understand ourselves and others. The chapter raises questions about how difficult empathy itself is socially constructed so that some people are more difficult to empathize with than others. I analyze Allyn Walker’s research on minor-attracted people, and the forceful backlash to that work, as an example of the social pressures against difficult empathy for despised people. The chapter concludes with consideration of the values supporting difficult empathy. Chapter 4, “The Social Conditions of Empathy,” identifies a key difficulty of empathy as its dependence upon social conditions that exist beyond individual control. A central argument of the chapter is that empathy is located not in our heads so much as in the social situations, discourses, values, and circumstances in which we encounter one another. In other words, empathy is a social event as well as a personal one. The chapter analyzes a series of first-person homeless accounts by Jacobs in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and the resulting reader responses. The analysis highlights the social-rhetorical conditions that support or inhibit empathy. It focuses specifically on assessments of victimhood and recognition of self-other overlap, rhetorical conditions that are largely socially determined. A resulting irony of empathy is that the very social forces that put people at risk and would necessitate a greater extension of empathy also inhibit empathy by increasing social divisions and

12  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? fueling the reluctance of readers to recognize their own vulnerabilities in the lives of others. The chapter expands our understanding of the rhetorical situation and makes rhetorical use of theories from social psychology and moral philosophy, particularly those of Nussbaum. A contention throughout the chapter is that a focus on empathy as an individual experience neglects the social production of empathy, which may be best considered from a rhetorical perspective. People tend to withhold empathy from their opponents, be those in war, politics, sport, or other sites of division. Doing so allows them to focus on their desire to win without concern for others, especially when winning comes at the expense of supposed enemies. One’s desire to win is then also a desire to see one’s opponents lose, and perhaps to suffer as a result, which is easier when those opponents are denied empathy. The fifth chapter identifies the pressures against extending empathy to the enemy. It takes as a key site of analysis Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, in which Hochschild attempts to empathize with rural Tea Party supporters through what she describes as their deep stories. Hochschild tries to transcend the “empathy walls” that inhibit empathizing with supporters of the opposing political party by focusing on their feelings, social positions, vulnerabilities, and experiences. This is difficult because such empathy requires getting closer to worldviews that might feel repellant and because attempting to empathize with the opposition can seem like a betrayal to one’s own side. Such empathy is even more difficult when the opposition is seen as harmful and empathy is considered a gift, as something that should be reserved only for the deserving. Hochschild’s work is analyzed alongside opinion pieces that argued for denying empathy to supporters of Donald Trump following the 2016 election. The general contention was that support for Trump forfeited claims to empathy, even as many Trump supporters were economically disadvantaged people who traditionally had been an empathic focus of progressives wanting to improve social support for the poor and working class. The chapter argues that a primary move in empathizing with the enemy is the need to separate understanding from agreement. It must be possible to understand somebody else without agreeing with them, although this has become increasingly difficult, particularly when disagreement itself is seen as harmful. We are otherwise left with a zero-sum view of empathy in which extending empathy to one’s supposed enemies can seem like a denial of empathy to more deserving others, a theory of empathy that reinforces the social divisions that produce it. Chapter 6 advocates for the practice of critical empathy. Critical empathy pulls together the preceding modes and keeps them accountable through self-reflection, revision, and critique. Critical empathy finds value in efforts to empathize, even as empathy itself is always an approximation and must always be open to questions of who gets to empathize with whom and for what reasons. Critical empathy acknowledges that empathy is experienced in unequal situations and has unequal outcomes, all of which add to the difficulty of empathy. It is important then to question empathy in these regards while

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  13 still retaining hope in the useful work of attempting to empathize. Critical empathy is essential in revealing inequalities in experiences and expectations of empathy, especially along lines of systemic injustices, because empathy demanded of the oppressed can be itself a tool of oppression. The chapter builds upon Min-Zhan Lu’s idea of critical affirmation and education professor Todd DeStigter’s practice of critical empathy as efforts toward solidarity amid recognition of important differences. The chapter demonstrates critical empathy at work in the essays of Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as texts that share stories and invite readers to empathize with others while retaining a necessary awareness of differences in bodies, stories, and social positions and histories. The chapter argues for the centrality of listening and sharing stories as practices of critical empathy while also recognizing the social and historical forces that shape those stories and determine their interpretations and possibilities. Part of the value of critical empathy is that it exposes false and easy empathy. It demands accountability in reflecting upon the motivations, conditions, limitations, and potentials of empathy. The chapter and the book end by arguing for critical empathy as an ongoing and necessary practice to inform, reflect upon, and revise our rhetorical encounters. I conclude with some considerations on the values supporting empathy— generosity, humility, and curiosity—and the potential for teaching for and about empathy. I reiterate that although difficult empathy can be a valuable concept that does meaningful rhetorical and social work, it should never be expected of anybody, and especially not of the oppressed for their oppressors. Difficult empathy is not always the best strategy. It does have potential, however, perhaps particularly in the writing classroom, as a place for encountering others in exchanging stories and in attending to the ways that we tell our stories and understand and respond to the stories of others. Empathy may be difficult to practice critically, but in that difficulty also lie possibilities for learning, reflection, and connection. Who Am I to Write about Empathy? Because empathy is always personal and is always grounded in experiences and cultural values and contexts, it is important that I position myself relative to this topic. I hope to identify some of the many biases—familiarity and proximity foremost among them—that I try to work against in my own efforts toward difficult empathy. As I write now, I am a 42-year-old white, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied man. I am married and have two children, a fouryear-old son and a one-month-old daughter. I live in Austin, Texas, and am an associate professor of English and director of the master’s program in rhetoric and composition at Texas State University, a majority-minority HispanicServing Institution of nearly 40,000 students. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, as a son of two public school teachers. I worked as a hotel pool attendant, a newspaper reporter, and a Peace Corps education volunteer in the Republic

14  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? of Georgia before returning to graduate school and completing my doctorate in English Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. I then worked two years as a Lecturer teaching writing at the University of Denver. More recently, I was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Ljubljana. Why do I tell you all this? I do so because who we are affects how we empathize, the experiences and feelings that resonate with us, and the experiences and feelings that we find unrelatable. However, I am not simply the sum of these experiences, and items above, too much like lines on a CV, do not tell you enough. They do not mention, for example, that my childhood home was a geodesic dome in the desert outside of the city. With few neighbors and multiple school zoning changes, I felt isolated and without many friends. They do not tell you about the times I fear I have let people down, the decisions I look back on as mistakes, and how those personal failures have been lessons in empathy, realized often as a reluctance to judge others for their own failures. They do not tell you what I have learned as a son, brother, boyfriend, husband, father, and friend about what it means to be vulnerable in another, or of how much my life would have changed if my father had died after he told us, when I was 15, that he had been diagnosed with cancer. They do not tell you how much I miss people, dear friends who are far away, still like that boy in the desert. They do tell you something of how fortunate I have been. All this creates spotlights and blind spots of empathy that are difficult and all the more necessary to recognize as best I can. I am sometimes asked how I chose to study empathy. Like so many things, the decision makes more sense in retrospect when I can see how it connects to other interests and decisions I have made. I have long been invested in the social value of writing, in the ways that writing can help stitch together a community. This is informed by my work as a newspaper reporter who imagined himself writing for the whole city, a public created in part by the news itself. One way to define a community is by what it reads together, the discourses it partakes in. I also am interested in ethics and in our obligations to others. I remain convinced that relationships are the most important sites of meaning, in life and in everything, and empathy is all about relationships. When I started studying empathy and rhetoric, I also wanted to better understand how persuasion worked beyond logic-based arguments. Empathy offered a path to consider the connections between reasons and emotions; indeed, empathy troubled the distinction between the two at a time when emotions and non-rational means of persuasion were garnering greater attention. I have been told that I do not seem very emotional, although that is not my experience—I certainly feel emotional—but since I have heard it more than once, I suppose it might be true. (In Mark Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a common assessment for empathy, I score high in empathic concern and perspective-taking, low in emotional distress.) Sometimes people study in depth topics that they have the strongest affinity for, and sometimes they study those that confound them. I am not sure which it is with me and empathy, perhaps both affinity and confoundment.

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  15 I remember speaking with my doctoral advisor, Bronwyn Williams, who has influenced and supported this project in so many ways, and asking his advice early on as I was deciding on a dissertation focus. I said I was considering empathy or memory as areas of inquiry. He suggested empathy, and I am glad he did. Empathy brought together for me attention to relationships, our understanding and responsibilities to others, our understanding of ourselves, reason and emotions, the importance of community, the potential for empathy to mislead, and its potential to inspire good deeds, all grounded in our engagements with stories and texts. I regularly teach a graduate seminar on empathy and writing. Students typically enter the course with a strong positive belief in empathy, its value, the need for more of it, and its appropriate fit for the problems that face us. We begin the course by reading philosophical exchanges about empathy in response to Bloom’s position against empathy. Students often are surprised. They enrolled in the course because they were for empathy, and here we were starting with arguments against it. The typical arc of the course is that students enter loving empathy, then they begin to question it, they might even come to be against it due to its many liabilities, before they typically arrive at the end valuing empathy because of its potential amid its limitations. With this book we start there, where the course often ends, not against empathy or for it in a basic sense, but at that place of recognizing its value among its limitations, understanding empathy better for how it is difficult and how it acts on us and our relationships as we encounter others, in all the ways such encounters can be difficult but worthwhile. Works Cited Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy. HarperCollins, 2016. Bracher, Mark. Literature and Social Justice. University of Texas Press, 2013. Breithaupt, Fritz. The Dark Sides of Empathy. Translated by Andrew B. B. Hamilton, Cornell University Press, 2019. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1969. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “A Muscular Empathy.” The Atlantic, 14 Dec. 2011, https://www. theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/. Coplan, Amy. “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 3–18. Davis, Mark H. “Measuring Individual Differences in Empathy: Evidence for a ­Multidimensional Approach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 1, pp. 113–26. DeStigter, Todd. “Public Displays of Affection: Political Community through Critical Empathy.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 33, no. 3, 1999, pp. 235–44.

16  Introduction: Why Now Empathy? “encounter, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2022, www.oed. com/view/Entry/61781. Accessed 1 February 2023. Gaines, Alisha. Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gruber, David R. “Toward Plural Forms of Rhetorical Identification: On Positive Vulnerability and the Rhetorical Unseen.” Enculturation, no. 30, 2020, http:// enculturation.net/Toward_Plural_Forms_of_Rhetorical_Identification. Herzog, Werner. Into the Abyss. Investigation Discovery, 2011. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hollan, Douglas W., and C. Jason Throop, editors. The Anthropology of Empathy: Experiencing the Lives of Others in Pacific Societies. Berghahn Books, 2011. Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with ­Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Isenstadt, Alex. “McConnell: No ‘empathetic’ Court Pick.” Politico, 9 May 2009, https:// www.politico.com/story/2009/05/mcconnell-no-empathetic-court-pick-022305. Jacobs, Roger. “I Am Frightened.” Las Vegas Sun, 2010, lasvegassun.com/news/2010/ aug/29/i-am-frightened. Jahoda, Gustav. “Theodor Lipps and the Shift from ‘Sympathy’ to ‘Empathy.’” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 41, no. 2, 2005, pp. 151–63. Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2014. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007. Konrath, Sara H., et al. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2011, pp. 180–98. Kulbaga, Theresa A. “Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy.” College English, vol. 70, no. 5, 2008, pp. 506–21. Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lanzoni, Susan. Empathy: A History. Yale University Press, 2018. Leake, Eric. “Empathizer-in-Chief: The Promotion and Performance of Empathy in the Speeches of Barack Obama.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–14. ———. “Teaching Empathy to the ‘Me’ Generation.” Pacific Standard, 18 July 2011, https://psmag.com/social-justice/teaching-the-me-generation-to-care-33824. ———. “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy.” Composition Forum, no. 14, 2016, https:// compositionforum.com/issue/34/empathy.php. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 172–94. Lynch, Dennis A. “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–23. Mirra, Nicole. Educating for Empathy: Literacy Learning and Civic Engagement. Teachers College Press, 2018. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Introduction: Why Now Empathy?  17 Obama, Barack. Obama to Graduates: Cultivate Empathy. https://www.northwestern. edu/newscenter/stories/2006/06/barack.html. 2006 Northwestern Commencement. ———. “Obama’s Remarks on the Resignation of Justice Souter.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 1 May 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/ us/politics/01souter.text.html. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Rogers, Carl. “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 9, no. 2, 1952, pp. 83–88. Shuman, Amy. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. University of Illinois Press, 2005. Slote, Michael. The Ethics of Care and Empathy. Routledge, 2007. Stueber, Karsten. “Empathy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2019, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/empathy/. Teich, Nathaniel. Rogerian Perspectives: Collaborative Rhetoric for Oral and Written Communication. Praeger, 1992. Walker, Allyn. A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. University of California Press, 2021. Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship. Ohio State University Press, 2019.

2

Easy Empathy

This morning, the most popular Instagram post on #empathy is about absorbing energy and picking up the feelings of others. More interesting for the purposes of this book, however, is the second most popular post on #empathy, a picture by Morgan Richard Olivier of a short poem from her new book. The poem is about healing and loving oneself more than hating somebody else. The narrator of the poem realizes they have healed when their newfound love of self is greater than the “old hatred I once felt for you.” Olivier describes herself in her author bio as “Empowering with words of empathy.” This post does not address empathy explicitly, and #empathy is one of 29 hashtags on the post, beginning with #lifelesson and ending with #energywork. There is nothing objectionable about the post; love of self certainly is preferable to hatred of others. I mention the post to open this chapter because it is representative of the meaning of empathy in many of our popular discourses. This is an empathy that is self-focused, feels good, and is more interpersonal (or even intrapersonal) than social. It is an empathy that is reassuring, providing an image of ourselves as we would wish to be seen, ready to be shared on Instagram, an empathy meant to represent good emotional health and care, often presented in the language of therapy. It is an empathy we want recognized by ourselves and others. As in the case of Olivier’s post, it is an empathy aligned with vaguely spiritual and personal growth agendas. This is a relatively easy empathy. Easy empathy is not necessarily a bad thing. Olivier’s example is instructive here, too. She may be read as offering support and encouragement for others who also are trying to learn to love themselves more and to let go of old hate. It is not quite clear exactly why this is #empathy. It might be that Olivier is empathizing with others who have had similar experiences. Perhaps Olivier is asking readers to empathize with her narrator, and in doing so to follow them on a path to a new love of self. Followers might find in the post comfort, understanding, and inspiration for letting go of the past. More likely, I think, is that Olivier is using #empathy as a way of aligning her general message with vaguely positive terms that signal emotional awareness and personal growth and empowerment. The picture on the post is of the poem printed on the page with attributions to Olivier both at the top and beneath DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-2

Easy Empathy  19 the poem, so that she appears as though quoting herself in her book. The post seems designed in the hope that it might go viral, that this could be the kind of positive life quote people share across social media sites. It is a generally positive empathy seemingly mixed with self-promotion, probably doing more help than harm. That all is fine. What almost certainly is not intended in the evocation of #empathy in the post is empathy or understanding for the “you” who was once the object of the “the old hatred I felt.” I do not know what “you” did, what the narrator’s relationship with “you” was like, and I am not saying that “you” is entitled to empathy from Olivier or the narrator. This is a point I will make repeatedly in this book, because it cannot be made too strongly concerning difficult empathy, that victims should never be expected to empathize with their victimizers, that the oppressed should never be expected to empathize with their oppressors. In contrast with easy empathy, however, in this post from Olivier, empathy with the once hated “you” could be quite difficult. Before considering any more examples, it is helpful to define easy empathy and what makes it easy. Easy empathy is often automatic, predominantly affective, non-reflective, and reaffirming of the desirable qualities of the self without challenging the social circumstances and hierarchies that make such empathy easy. In more detail, to say that easy empathy is automatic is to say that it does not require conscious effort. Empathy often is automatic, be those modes of mimicry, such as mirroring another person’s facial expressions; contagion, such as picking up another person’s emotion; or the simple impulse to respond emotionally to another person’s suffering, such as feeling sad when a friend shares sad news. These are not all strictly empathy, depending on how one defines empathy, but they correspond to an automatic response that can be part of an empathic reaction. You do not have to try to empathize in order to empathize automatically, as in the examples above. To say that easy empathy is predominantly affective is to recognize that it is more concerned with feeling than with thinking, as far as the two can be divided. It is felt more than thought. It follows then that easy empathy is nonreflective in that one does not consider the motivations, biases, conditions, possibilities, and limitations of one’s own empathizing. Even in the process of empathizing with another person’s suffering, easy empathy can feel good in the way that it reaffirms the desirable qualities of the self. In empathizing with a person suffering from hunger, for example, the experience of easy empathy can be one in which the empathizer feels good that they are the type of person who cares about another’s suffering. Their sense of empathy for another’s hunger also might reassure them that they are not themself in a position to similarly suffer, that they are secure where others are vulnerable, that they are empathizing from such a point of security. If they donate money to alleviate the other’s suffering, they might also feel good that they have the means to afford to do so. Easy empathy does not interrogate the social conditions that make one person more likely to suffer than another in any particular way, the systems of inequalities that leave one person starving and another

20  Easy Empathy well fed. If anything, it is more likely to reinscribe those conditions, as a stream maintains course, with empathy flowing down from the empathizer to the empathized with, from reaffirmed benevolence to anticipated gratitude. Again, this is not to say that easy empathy is necessarily bad. It is not. There are plenty of worse things than easy empathy, and easy empathy can have some benefits, such as an immediate address of the suffering of another if not the underlying conditions that caused that suffering. This is to say, however, that easy empathy could use some scrutiny, which is my purpose here. In this chapter, I further develop the idea of easy empathy. The concept is useful in describing some of the more common modes of empathy that have their purposes and may be helpful but that do not involve the challenging self-reflection, contextualization, and processes of identification of difficult empathy. I think the comparison is useful. Easy empathy can take a lot of forms. It can be motivated by politics and cultural chauvinism, as will be demonstrated in examples of how women’s rights, false empathy, and savior rhetorics helped solicit support for the U.S-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Easy empathy can take the form of charitable appeals that position would-be donors as feel-good empathizers in relation to those in need of their aid, an empathy closely tied to pity. Easy empathy is readily signaled as a personal virtue, as a badge for the empathizer, especially in social media. Easy empathy also can be coopted in corporate discourses so that leaders of businesses might position themselves as better and more caring leaders, better at understanding the employees they lead, and better at beating the competition and maximizing their value through their supposedly empathic leadership, without ever having to do the difficult work of challenging their conceptions of self. If anything, they are encouraged to burnish further their self-image and reputation as the best and most caring of empathic business leaders. Easy empathy also can be dismissive, used glibly to silence others by attempting to speak in their voice so that their voice is not needed. Easy Empathy as Bad Policy In the build up to the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there was a lot of discussion of rights and the conditions of women in those countries. Some of it was based on widely held ideas of universal human rights. Some discussion was nuanced, considering the possible personal and social consequences of war and occupation. At its worst, however, public discussion in the United States could slide toward an easy empathy in the form of If I were a woman in Afghanistan, I would want the U.S. to liberate me. There are a lot of problems with this kind of easy empathy. First, it takes one’s own supposed desires and projects them onto another person, without considering what that other person might actually want. It ignores social and cultural contexts as well as possible consequences, such as the potential destruction of one’s country and the deaths of one’s friend and family members. The question of a U.S.-led invasion was never only concerned with whether one

Easy Empathy  21 was for or against liberation. We are all for liberation; that is relatively easy. There were questions of continuing governance, social stability, security, and durability. A person might desire increased freedoms but not at the expense of social stability or the possible deaths of loved ones. Such an easy empathy does not pay attention to others, does not seek to ask them what they want in their lives and for their communities, instead assuming that the empathizer can provide those answers for them. Second, this easy empathy can offer cover to ulterior motivations, recognized and unrecognized. Third, it positions the people of one country to take on the generally feel-good role of being the intended saviors for another, a nationwide enactment of the dynamic of the more privileged coming to the rescue of the less so without challenging the fundamental conditions that created that dynamic. Easy empathy can be an act of erasure, substituting oneself for another. Dennis Lynch offers a helpful unpacking of the common metaphor for empathy as stepping into another’s shoes. To step into the shoes of another, he writes, is only possible if those shoes are empty; this desire makes empathy dependent on the physical, bodily displacement of the other. It assumes, in an odd way, that I will only be able to learn something about you once you are gone, out of sight, as though your bodily presence were just a distraction to the rhetorical task at hand. (10) By empathizing with a woman in Afghanistan or Iraq, by imagining if I would want to be liberated, I can excuse myself from having to actually consider women in those countries and the realities of their lives and interests before, during, and after war. Instead, I am able to see myself projected in their place, and I can feel good in wishing to make their place more like mine. Any move to empathy that begins with If I were… is at risk of erasing another through replacement of that other with the self-focused I. This is not to say that If I were cannot be a good starting point in empathic perspective-taking, but it should not stop there. None of this is to say that there were not women suffering in Afghanistan under terribly sexist regimes of control. This is only a critique of a type of easy empathy that fails to acknowledge the fullness of their experiences, the complications of their positions, or to listen to the women themselves. This easy empathy and its good feeling of moral correctness then can be mobilized to further larger political objectives in foreign policy, all under the cover of women’s liberation and empathy with the suffering of the oppressed. As Katherine Viner wrote in The Guardian in the lead up to war, criticizing George W. Bush’s cooption of feminist values for an invasion of Iraq, “Feminists are left with the fact that their own beliefs are being trotted out by world leaders in the name of a cause which does nothing for the women it pretends to protect.” The language of feminism, and the supposed empathy with the plight of the women of Iraq, would continue to be a talking point

22  Easy Empathy of the U.S. war effort and militaristic foreign policies. The same day that the U.S. military invaded Iraq, the U.S. Department of State released a statement titled “Iraqi Women Under Saddam’s Regime: A Population Silenced.” According to the statement, “In Iraq under Saddam, if you are a woman, you could face: beheading…rape…torture…murder.” I think it is not incidental that the statement, on the day of invasion, places the reader in the position of a woman in Iraq, focusing attention to the potential atrocities you could be subjected to under Saddam Hussein, as if you were a woman in Iraq. The feeling here is one of fear, to be relieved with the arrival of U.S. forces. The statement ends with a section pledging “U.S. Support for Iraqi Women.” (I want to add that a critique of the discourses of easy empathy surrounding the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is not meant to be a critique of U.S. service members. It is possible to support the troops and not support the invasions, and that itself can be a practice of difficult empathy.) Empathy can be at its best when it attempts to hold in the mind at once contradictory focuses, that others are like us but at the same time different, that we can imagine ourselves in another’s shoes while also working to understand what it is like for somebody else to be in their own shoes. In the weeks after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Ethan Bronner identified exactly this challenge of empathy in an opinion piece for The New York Times. He recounts his multiple reporting trips to Iraq and explains a challenge of foreign reporters trying to relay stories from abroad: Every journalist abroad wants to tell his readers at home two contradictory things. The first is: “The people here may look and sound strange, but they are no different from you and me. They want security and dignity; they seek a better life for their children. What you share with them far outweighs your differences.” The second message is the opposite: “Yes, people here hunger and hurt and love; yes, they enjoy ice cream and action movies. But if you think that by knowing that, you know them, you are mistaken. These people are very different from you.” (Bronner) Bronner identifies core human commonalities in wanting security, dignity, and a better life for one’s children, and in enjoying ice cream. He also identifies the risks of assuming too much based upon a shared humanity that does not simultaneously recognize important differences. While recognizing Hussien’s brutality, Bronner also relates stories of Iraqis who supported Hussien, identified with him, saw him as a stabilizing force and saw U.S. sanctions as the more serious problem affecting the wellbeing of Iraqis. “Since the start of the current American-led war, it has been widely noted that celebration by Iraqis has been muted,” Bronner writes. Any genuine surprise at a lack of Iraqi celebration at the invasion of U.S. forces is evidence of a lack of empathic imagination. Bronner is writing at a time when the worst consequences of the U.S.-led invasion are still to be realized, when many U.S. commentators

Easy Empathy  23 were still somewhat optimistic about the end results of the invasion and the potential for a new Iraq. I cite his opinion piece here not for his assessment of Iraq in particular but for his framing of a fundamental issue of empathy, and of telling the stories of others, that others are both like you and different. Keeping that in mind—the simultaneous recognition of similarities and differences—is hard. It is much easier to assume that they are like us, that they are simply us in Iraqi shoes, and to let that be our justification to do what we feel good doing, perhaps as much for ourselves as for anybody else. Similar to the contradictory statements Bronner writes that every journalist wants to tell, psychologist Martin Hoffman recommends a double vision in combining self-focused and other-focused empathy. He uses the terms “self-focused role-taking” and “other-focused role-taking” (Hoffman 54). Self-focused role-taking occurs when somebody imagines how they would feel in another’s situation. It has the advantage of being more emotionally powerful, due to its focus on how oneself would feel, as the empathizer’s “response to the victim may be enhanced through association with the emotionally charged memory of those actual or worried-about events” (54). Other-focused role-taking tends to be less emotionally powerful but more accurate, as it is informed by attending to the details of the other person’s life, their values and desires, their situation, and how they are responding. The emphasis on the self and the emotional power of self-focused role-taking leaves it vulnerable to a loss of empathic connection that Hoffman describes as “egoistic drift” (56). In Hoffman’s example, an observer is reminded of their own painful memories upon empathizing with a victim and imagining themselves in the victim’s situation. They then lose sight of the other as they become increasingly concerned with their own emotional response, their own memories, their own imagining of themselves in the other’s situation. As Hoffman describes the process of egoistic drift, “The observer is overwhelmed by the empathic connection with the victim, and the empathic connection is then severed, ironically, because the empathic affect resonates so effectively with the observer’s own needs” (56). This situation is slightly different from that of imagining the plight of Iraqi women, because Hoffman describes a more direct encounter of victim and observer, but the underlying process of self-focused empathy remains the same. In imagining themselves suffering under a sexist authoritarian regime, American empathizers risk becoming so concerned with their own emotions—their risk of being beheaded, raped, tortured, murdered—and the rightness of their moral outrage, that they lose sight of the larger situational interests of Afghan and Iraqi women. As Bronner advised, they are like us, but they also are different. Hoffman’s description of egoistic drift also suggests how that is a relatively easy and automatic process. Without countervailing effort, drift happens. Hoffman’s suggestion is a combination of self-focused and other-focused role-taking, perhaps by shifting back and forth between the two modes or by holding them in mind at the same time, each informing the other as parallel processes. Hoffman expects that this would have the advantage of combining the emotional power of

24  Easy Empathy self-focused role-taking with greater attention to the other in other-focused role-taking. “Indeed, fully mature role-taking might be defined as imagining oneself in the other’s place and integrating the resulting empathic affect with one’s personal information about the other and one’s general knowledge of how people feel in his or her situation,” Hoffman writes (58). An additional intervention would be to question the conditions, political and capital investments, and consequences of easy, feel-good, and selffocused empathies, as Theresa Kulbaga does. Focusing on the self can be more satisfying, more enjoyable in its solipsism, even when it involves unpleasant emotions, because it reaffirms one’s values, importance, moral standing, and power to do something, which often is complicit with neoliberal imperialist agendas. This is what Kulbaga has in mind in her critique of the pleasurable pedagogies associated with the novel Reading Lolita in Tehran, published the same year as the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq. Kulbaga argues that Reading Lolita in Tehran in particular, and the contemporary book club in general, offer “the edifying experience of difference while ultimately promising a lifeaffirming look in the mirror” (510). The empathy evoked by Reading Lolita in Tehran ultimately falls short in her analysis because it is relegated to the individual imagination, the fun of imagining what it would be like to be in somebody else’s shoes without having to actually consider the details, conditions, interests, and meaningful differences in the other person’s life. Kulbaga finds that the memoir offers a “familiar imperialist construction of the veiled woman awaiting Western empathy and rescue” and “invites readers to remain in the realm of the individual imagination, where affect remains divorced from either critical reflection or political action” (517). Kulbaga is not opposed to empathy but highlights the key question, as mentioned earlier, of “Empathy to what end?” (518). A central problem of a feel-good easy empathy is that it ignores the social structures of issues while focusing on empathy between individuals as a solution to suffering and injustices. Empathy often is at its best when it is offered as a way of informing care about issues and as assisting in the discovery of solutions to problems and the collective will to pursue those solutions. When empathy alone is offered as a solution, however, it often is an easy form of empathy that regards simply caring or helping an individual or making an individual donation as solution enough. The kinds of actions that can be motivated by easy empathy can be helpful, sometimes very helpful to individuals who benefit personally, so long as acting on empathy individually and directly does not forestall the greater, more difficult work of coordinated social action. This applies to domestic and international issues. A critique of the ease and pleasure of interpersonal empathy is offered by Alisha Gaines in her analysis of literature that allows white characters to briefly experience the world in Black bodies and then return to their previous lives now supposedly enlightened to the hardships of others. Gaines builds on the work of bell hooks, who defines empathy as “eating the other” in an erotic desire for the experience of difference without lasting change to the self or a loss of one’s

Easy Empathy  25 own social standing (qtd. in Gaines 7). The critiques of hooks and Gaines highlight how interpersonal empathy, when relegated to only the personal, fails to bring about wider, social, more lasting change, particularly when concerned with issues of social and racial injustices. Easy empathy is ripe for critique. This is clear as demonstrated above in criticisms of the facile empathy that allows people to argue for military invasions on behalf of the invaded by coopting feminist rhetorics. We see the tendency to focus on the self and lose sight of the other, a tendency that is all too common and that takes effort to resist, in the idea of egoistic drift. The stories we consume and the pleasure of identifying with others across differences can be meaningful, enlightening, and transformative. Indeed, that is one of the great joys of empathy and one of its means for prompting altruistic action. However, when left unexamined, the pleasures of imagining the lives of others, perhaps in different countries or across racial differences, can reinscribe social hierarchies, now further reinforced through the supposedly good work of empathizing, as Kulbaga and Gaines point out. Such easy empathy can lead to actions that are too narrow, too personal, and used as a substitution for larger social change. Or, when easy empathy does lead to larger political actions, it can leave those actions misinformed, based on what feels good for the self and reinforces one’s own image as a benevolent and just actor, rather than considering the different contexts, desires, and experiences of others, allowing an imperialist rhetoric the cover of empathic biases. Pity and Charitable Appeals If you were to visit the homepage of Compassion International today, the first thing you would see is a prompt to enter your birthday under the question “Do you share a birthday with a child in poverty?” Entering my birthday brings up a list of 150 children waiting for a sponsor, with those waiting the longest at the top. Each child is featured with a photo taken at eye level, as though the viewer is crouched down to meet the child. Each listing includes the child’s name; the country they live in; symbols representing any significant risk factors, such living in an AIDS-affected region or being particularly vulnerable to exploitation; their shared birthday; and a yellow button asking that the potential sponsor “choose me.” There also is a link to “learn more” about each child with a full picture, a list of their hobbies, their family duties, and their school situation. The idea clearly is to build a personal relationship with the sponsored child, one of sponsor and sponsored. The site informs potential sponsors, “When you sponsor a child, you’ll be personally connected with a boy or girl who will know your name and treasure the thought that you care” (Compassion International, Sponsor a Child). The situation of the children is often heartbreaking. I do not mean to write about their plight in such a cold-blooded way; I felt myself being moved to donate. The site features sponsor testimonies and ratings from independent organizations attesting to the good work that Compassion International does in alleviating

26  Easy Empathy child poverty. I feature the homepage of Compassion International here as but one example of appeals to charity based upon personal stories, the power of personal connection and understanding rooted in empathy, and the combined sense of the need to help and the positive feelings of being able to do so. Appeals to charity often are appeals to pity. Visitors to the Compassion International site cannot help but feel for the children a compassion that may be indistinguishable from pity. Compassion International defines compassion as “suffering with another person” and as combining “sympathy with an active response or desire to help” (Compassion International, Who Is Compassion International?). They distinguish compassion from empathy based upon this desire to act, what others, such as psychologist C. Daniel Batson, have directly connected with empathy in the empathy-altruism hypothesis. A key feature of compassion, as experienced on the website of Compassion International but left out of their definition, is the social positioning and potential for action of the compassionate. This is compassion of the fortunate for the less so. It is compassion in the form of individual action, specifically monetary donations. There are no larger political or policy recommendations on the website of Compassion International, no consideration of what causes child poverty and how those larger causes might be addressed beyond individual donations. Because Compassion International is a Christian organization, there are many mentions of God and God’s plan, but that is the extent of recognizing larger systems of inequality, such as they are. Compassion becomes pity when it is unidirectional, when it does not challenge larger systems of inequity, when vulnerabilities are not shared, and when feeling and acting do not challenge the fundamental relationships between the pitier and the pitied. Pity as a rhetorical appeal, based upon social conditions and contextual relationships, is theorized by Aristotle. This is where Aristotle comes closest to considering empathy, which was not then a distinct concept. Aristotle outlines the rhetorical conditions which are most conducive to feeling pity. The first is that we are like those whom we pity, which is Aristotle’s way of recognizing what Hoffman calls the familiarity bias in empathy. In Aristotle’s words, “The people we pity are: those whom we know, if only they are not very closely related to us—in that case we feel about them as if we were in danger ourselves” (103, Rhetoric II.8, 1386b). He adds, “Again, we feel pity when the danger is near ourselves. Also we pity those who are like us in age, character, disposition, social standing, or birth; for in all these cases it appears more likely that the same misfortune may befall us also.” Douglas Walton notes that Aristotle’s concept of pity “is based on a mental attitude related closely to empathy, because it requires that the pitying party be able to see himself (or one of his friends) in the same kind of distressing situation as the pitied party” (51). Like empathy, then, pity requires that we see some continuity or shared possibility in our situations and emotional experiences and those of others. This moves pity closer to empathy, but it is slightly different from the contemporary pity sponsors of children at Compassion International are likely to feel. All people are capable of suffering hunger in

Easy Empathy  27 the sense that all people need to eat. Most of the visitors to the Compassion International site, however, are probably pretty well insulated economically from hunger. They are not likely to share in the vulnerabilities of the children they would sponsor. An important feature of pity is the sense that the person suffering does not deserve it, a feature identified by Aristotle and further developed by Martha Nussbaum. Aristotle writes, Most piteous of all is it when, in such times of trial, the victims are persons of noble character: whenever they are so, our pity is especially excited, because their innocence, as well as the setting of their misfortunes before our eyes, makes their misfortunes seem close to ourselves. (103, Rhetoric II.8, 1386b) Pity—and by extension, many forms of empathy—depends upon a reading of whether somebody deserves their situation, whether they are responsible for their own suffering. This judgment is informed by social values, assignments of responsibility, and considerations of innocence and guilt. People are less likely to feel for those who are seen as causing their own suffering, although such feeling remains possible if we understand people to not be entirely responsible for their own situations and possibilities in life. We do not hold somebody suffering from mental illness, for example, responsible for actions that contribute to their suffering. Questions of responsibility and the extension of empathy therefore are socially and culturally dependent. I address these issues in greater detail in the chapter on the social conditions of empathy. For now, it is worth pointing out the significance that charitable appeals often are made on behalf of those sufferers most likely to be judged innocent of their suffering. Children and animals are key examples. The children featured on the site of Compassion International are not considered responsible for their poverty. I expect that aid to the children also is aid for their parents and family, in one way or another, but it is the children’s suffering that is highlighted and the child who is sponsored. If children are understood to be not responsible for their own poverty, then they necessarily are considered to be without the power to change their conditions and deliver themselves from poverty. Their parents may be just as powerless to deliver themselves and their family from poverty, but they are less likely to be extended that innocence and to pitied in a way that leads to charity. Aristotle continues to outline the rhetorical conditions of pity by emphasizing the importance of personal narratives and details, the sight of bodies and evidence of suffering, and a general proximity to the event and the sufferer in eliciting pity. He writes, since it is when the sufferings of others are close to us that they excite our pity (we cannot remember what disasters happened a hundred centuries ago, nor look forward to what will happen a hundred centuries

28  Easy Empathy hereafter, and therefore feel little pity, if any, for such things): it follows that those who heighten the effect of their words with suitable gestures, tones, dress, and dramatic action generally, are especially successful in exciting pity: they thus put the disasters before our eyes, and make them seem close to us, just coming or just past. Anything that has just happened, or is going to happen soon, is particularly piteous: so too therefore are the tokens and the actions of sufferers—the garments and the like of those who have already suffered; the words and the like of those actually suffering—of those, for instance, who are on the point of death. (103, Rhetoric II.8, 1386b) There is a direct correlation here with evocations of pity or empathy and the ways in which they also depend upon perception of the physical and emotional, the use of personal narratives and details, and proximity both in terms of location (or sight) and in terms of relation or significance. The photos and personal details of the children at Compassion International bring them closer to us. Aristotle’s attention to garments and tokens for eliciting empathy anticipates the material emphasis of empathy in German aesthetic philosophy. As the children’s stories bring them closer to us and enable pity and charitable action, the stories also move beyond the control of the children presented. This is exactly Amy Shuman’s critique of empathy and her attention to how stories travel, the relationships they create, and the work they do. “The central complaint made by people whose stories are appropriated for other contexts is the colonization of personal tragedies to mobilize others in different situations who have not suffered these tragedies,” Shuman writes (8). We should be extra careful about the appropriation of the stories of children. Shuman recognizes that stories have to travel to do work but argues for a critique of empathy in association with those stories, “that empathy be practiced critically,” which is the focus of the penultimate chapter (8). My consideration of Aristotle’s idea of pity and emphasis on personal stories, details, and judgments is not to suggest that Aristotle’s idea of pity and a contemporary understanding of empathy are equivalent. Empathy has a more significant cognitive component and is not restricted to emotions of suffering and sorrow in the way that pity is. If defined as sharing another’s emotional or affective state, empathy may include joy or boredom as well as sorrow. Aristotle’s pity is closer to what we would call compassion as a way of feeling for somebody. Empathy may be a component of compassion, but compassion, like sympathy, requires a different commitment on the part of the one who feels compassion and a different position on the part of one who receives another’s compassion. In our contemporary use of the term, pity has troubling connotations of privilege and benevolence, power and weakness, reflecting differences in social status and who can help whom. Tellingly, there is no charity named Pity International. In her overview of pity in the history of empathy, Lisa Blankenship emphasizes pity’s thoroughly rhetorical, social, and political meaning. She develops a reading of pity in

Easy Empathy  29 the Aristotelian as well as Biblical traditions. As Blankenship writes, “Pity’s signification as feeling for or being somewhat safely removed from an Other often means we remain unchanged; we colonize, we subsume” (40). Many of these troubling questions of pity are shared with empathy—and are part of what makes empathy such a useful lens of investigation—but without the negative connotations of pity. Easy empathy as pity is alluring because it feels good and can be reassuring of oneself and one’s place in the world. When I state that it feels good, I do not mean that anybody enjoys seeing photos of children suffering in poverty. Such sights can be deeply upsetting, but there can be a sense of relief in doing something about them through the action of donating or helping. Even posting on social media, as a form of empathy signaling, in which one broadcasts one’s own qualities as an empathic person, can feel like acting. Much of the potential good feelings of pity come from the reassurances it provides. Although Aristotle argues that pity requires a shared vulnerability, he is speaking more to what we would consider as empathy. Pity as a contemporary feeling of easy empathy depends precisely upon our invulnerability to the suffering shown of others. The geographic and political distance of others can help us pity them and feel safe that we are not likely to suffer as they are because of our greater wealth, assumed political stability, position of global strength, and other advantages. Witnessing the insecurity of others can reassure us of our own security, just as peering over a ledge can reaffirm our own great height and secure footing. When I checked, Compassion International does not offer opportunities to sponsor children in the United States suffering from poverty, and why not? Perhaps because it is more difficult to pity children suffering in one’s own country, children who should be protected by the same national wealth, political stability, and geopolitical power as one’s own children. Seeing poor children in the United States can remind other citizens of the United States of their own vulnerabilities. Distance offers security, the excitement of cultural difference, and well-defined roles for pitier and pitied. Pity, especially when tied with charitable action, also reinforces for the pitier that they are a good person, one with the power to help others and who does so. People would much rather be the pitier than the pitied. In the case of Compassion International, the feelings for the children and the efforts to deliver them from poverty also are tied up with Christian identity. One of the commitments identified by Compassion International is “giving every child in our program a chance to learn about Jesus, respond to the gospel, and develop a lifelong relationship with God,” although the organization states it helps children “without ulterior motive” and “irrespective of caste, creed, class, or religion” (What Makes Us Distinct?). Throughout the site sponsors are positioned to share their Christian faith with the children they sponsor and to view their sponsorship as providing opportunities for children to strengthen their own faith. Compassion International describes its work as a form of ministry. For Christian sponsors, it can feel good to consider oneself as doing God’s work and to be saving children, physically

30  Easy Empathy and spiritually. Sponsors may feel reassured of their own faith, growing in their own relationship to their church. This, of course, raises questions about cultural imperialism of a missionary sort when relief is so thoroughly connected to ministry, and this again highlights the security of the sponsor, as their world and values are being reaffirmed as the right ones, as the ones that should be shared. As with my larger discussion of easy empathy, all of this is not to say that pity and charity are bad. I have no reason not to expect that the work of Compassion International and similar organizations makes a positive difference in the lives of poor children. There are much worse things to do than spend one’s resources trying to relieve the suffering of poor children. I focus on these examples, however, to demonstrate how some forms of empathy are easier than others, and how pity in particular can feel good and reassure the person doing the pitying. Corporate Empathy A search for headlines about empathy will turn up many articles focused on empathy and business leadership, a type of corporate empathy. A recent piece in Forbes, for example, is titled “When Leading a Change, Start with Empathy” (Sterling). The writer has some good advice for readers, such that they “be curious” and ask questions to learn more about the concerns of employees. Curiosity is a strong value for empathy, as will be discussed in the concluding chapter. Ken Sterling then advises readers to follow up with questions because “When you ask questions, people feel that you care about what they had to say. It also will help you tweak a change to make it work well with your team.” I am concerned that the larger goal here may be making people “feel that you care” rather than actually caring. There is not a lot of possibility in the piece for the business leader to reevaluate; focus on employee needs, experiences, and work conditions; or allow themselves, the company’s identity, or the company’s plans to be altered as a result of empathy. The changes that might result from this performance of empathy instead are limited to a “tweak” of a preexisting plan so that it will work better with the team. The article ends with recommending that leaders “remember to show kindness” (Sterling). That too is good advice; however, at the risk of focusing too much on the language of the piece, the emphasis here is on showing kindness rather than being kind in the way of improving working conditions, giving employees greater agency over their working lives, or challenging existing organizational structures in any way. Business leaders instead are informed that “making a kind gesture goes a long way to helping people feel you care about how the change will affect them,” with the emphasis again on making people feel cared for rather than necessarily caring for them. One way to do this, the article suggests, is to buy them lunch when you tell them of the changes you have decided to make, changes they may not like. Corporate empathy is easy empathy because it does not require much of the would-be empathizer, in this case the business leaders. It does not require

Easy Empathy  31 them to reevaluate their relationships with employees or the organizational structures that benefit the business leaders. It does not require them to identify in meaningful ways with their employees except to the extent that such an understanding can help employers tailor their messages to employees, win them over, and enlist them in winning over other employees. This is an instrumental empathy for more effective management of employees rather than the betterment of employees out of concern for the employees’ own wellbeing beyond the company’s interests. Corporate empathy is easy because it empowers employers rather than employees. By asking questions, performing empathic listening, and buying occasional lunches, employers can present themselves as empathic leaders. Their companies, by extension, can be presented as empathic companies. Both employers and their companies then get to enjoy burnished reputations through their association with ideas of empathy and its positive cultural capital. Empathy is then enlisted in furthering the goals of the employers in maintaining corporate hierarchies, distinguishing their leadership and their company as appropriately empathic and, as such pieces suggest, successful and profitable. So as not to pick on the Forbes article, since it makes some fine enough points and is merely representative of larger trends, consider also a similar article from the Harvard Business Review referenced in the Forbes piece. The article, titled “The Secret to Leading Organizational Change Is Empathy,” focuses on communicating organizational change to employees. It opens by identifying a CEO’s interests in “rethinking her company’s strategy so it can better meet customer demands and thrive financially” (Sanchez). There is nothing wrong with this; companies are in the money-making business. The focus, however, again is not on the wellbeing of employees independent from the financial success of the company. The two are tied, of course, in that a company that is not financially viable is of no help to employees, but the emphasis and lack of consideration of employees is important when discussing empathy. The article goes on to state that communicating empathically is critical for effectively implementing corporate change. As Patti Sanchez writes, “If you are a company leader hoping to undertake a successful organizational change, you need to make sure your team is on board and motivated to help make it happen.” Empathy is the recommended tool to do that. Sanchez advises employers create profiles of the employees they will be speaking to, involve employees in telling the story of change, and openly acknowledge fears. One advantage of creating profiles and surveying employees is that some can be enlisted to help persuade their coworkers. As Sanchez writes, “Employees who were excited about the change, for example, received communication that encouraged them to motivate their reluctant peers.” Corporate empathy thus is a strategic communication tool that can enable employers to identify those employees who might best present the employer’s plan to others. As with other forms of easy empathy, this is not to say that all attempts at corporate empathy are necessarily bad. It is good if employers take more

32  Easy Empathy curiosity in the lives and perspectives of employees, it is good to involve employees more in the decisions that affect their work, and it is helpful to show kindness of any kind. These small steps, however, are not a realization of empathy. They are easy in the sense that they most directly serve the interests of the supposed empathizer: the employer and the corporation itself. They do not require any kind of sacrifice, personal change, or challenging of the status quo. They do not require reconsidering the company’s relationship with connected communities and environments. To do that would be difficult. In fact, empathizing as an employer may be even more difficult because of the power differences involved. Research suggests that power inhibits empathy, as the powerful care less about the concerns of the less powerful, perhaps because the concerns of the less powerful do not affect the powerful as much and because concern for the less powerful can get in the way of the decisions the powerful might make in pursuit of their own interests (Hogeveen et al.; van Kleef et al.). Empathy by the powerful for the less so can be an especially difficult form of empathy. Dismissive Empathy and “I Feel Your Pain” The president of the United States sometimes is framed as the CEO of the country. In that respect, the president may be faced with communication challenges similar to those outlined in the previous section, of needing to help the country navigate a change and wanting people to feel cared for and heard. Empathy is a critical rhetorical move for presidents, as politicians and as leaders, communicating and demonstrating understanding and care (Leake). In this section, I focus on a particular political performance of easy empathy, one that is dismissive and requires no empathizing at all. I explore this through the history of the phrase “I feel your pain.” Dismissive empathy is perhaps best understood as not empathy at all but as a performance of empathy to silence others. It uses the language and social value of empathy to avoid empathizing. When people think of politics and empathy, they might picture Bill Clinton, his face focused in an expression of concern, and the associated statement “I feel your pain.” Clinton demonstrated empathy, for example, in his second debate with George H. W. Bush in 1992. When asked by an audience member how the national debt affected the candidates personally and how they could relate to the economic concerns of everyday Americans, Bush seemed not to understand the question. “Help me with the question and I’ll try to answer,” he said, suggesting his remove from the ordinary concerns of typical citizens (Ambinder). When it was his turn to respond, Clinton spoke directly to the woman who asked the question. He asked her if she had been affected by the recession and if she knew people who had lost their homes. Clinton then described what he had seen as governor of a small state, how he related to the concerns of working Americans. “When people lose their jobs, there is a good chance I know them by their name. If the factory closes, I know the people who ran it,” he

Easy Empathy  33 said (Ambinder). In recapping this moment decades later, Marc Ambinder described it as Clinton’s “quintessential ‘I feel your pain’ answer.” It is a very empathic response, one of many that helped establish a sense of connection and understanding between Clinton and voters. Interestingly, however, Clinton did not actually say “I feel your pain” in that debate. He used that phrase earlier in the year during an exchange with AIDS activist Bob Rafsky, who interrupted Clinton during a campaign fundraiser in New York. As recorded in The New York Times, Rafsky asks Clinton, “This is the center of the AIDS epidemic, what are you going to do? Are you going to start a war on AIDS?...We’re dying in this state” (“THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Verbatim; Heckler Stirs Clinton Anger: Excerpts From the Exchange”). Clinton attempts to respond with a performance of empathy, saying, “I know how it hurts. I’ve got friends who’ve died of AIDS.” Rafsky retorts, “Bill, we’re not dying of AIDS as much as we are from 11 years of government neglect.” Clinton and Rafsky then shout over and interrupt each other, with Rafsky accusing Clinton of suffering from ambition while people die of AIDS. Clinton then begins talking about the importance of mutual civility and respect. He demands respect from Rafsky, saying, “I have treated you and all the people who’ve interrupted my rally with a hell of a lot more respect than you’ve treated me, and it’s time you started thinking about that.” It is at this point that Clinton makes his famous “I feel your pain” statement, saying, I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you’re no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don’t agree with me, go support somebody else for president but quit talking to me like that. Clinton finishes the exchange by criticizing Rafsky for attacking him personally, by saying that Rafsky and others know nothing about Clinton and the life he’s lived, and that he’s tired of their “snotty-nose remarks.” He concludes by stating his commitment to fighting AIDS. This episode is telling because while “I feel your pain” is commonly considered a shorthand for empathy, the actual exchange demonstrates how dismissive easy empathy can be. I describe this as an easy empathy because Clinton does not have to feel Rafsky’s pain. He does not seem to feel it at that moment, when Rafsky’s pain at the deaths of friends and a lack of political action moves him to interrupt Clinton’s fundraiser. When he first says that he knows how it hurts and that he has friends who have died of AIDS, Clinton may be attempting to relate to Rafsky, but the larger motivation seems to be to mollify Rafsky, to say that he knows how it is and so Rafsky doesn’t need to press his case. Rafsky rejects Clinton’s performance of empathy, responding that “we aren’t dying of AIDS so much as we are from 11 years of government neglect.” Rafsky does not want an easy performance of shared feeling; he wants the commitment and action that comes from shared pain and

34  Easy Empathy concern. Simply stating feeling can be a way to avoid taking responsibility for an issue. Performing a position of empathy can be much easier than taking a stand on policy, and it is precisely that rhetoric and governmental inaction that Rafsky claims is killing people. After saying “I know how it hurts” and outlining his plans as president, Clinton is interrupted by Rafsky. He tells Rafsky, “Would you just calm down?” Clinton wants Rafsky to stop interrupting the fundraiser and to be satisfied with Clinton’s response, his offering of empathy. Rafsky, however, is not satisfied with Clinton’s response and will not calm down. Clinton then demands respect from Rafsky and says, “I feel your pain,” said not out of genuine empathy so much as frustration that Rafsky is interrupting him. Indeed, Clinton is frustrated at that moment that Rafsky is not more considerate of Clinton’s feelings. In this case, “I feel your pain” is a statement of empathy that attempts to dismiss another’s pain, to quiet dissent and to regain control of the discourse. In his performance of empathy, Clinton in a sense assumes possession of Rafsky’s pain to all the more easily move on from it. If he feels Rafsky’s pain, then Clinton does not need to hear about it from Rafsky himself, and the fundraiser can proceed as planned. To be fair, Clinton does outline some steps for government action, and there is an acknowledgement of another’s emotional state and that there are people and lives at stake when talking about these policies. I do know what Clinton truly was feeling, but it also is fair to question how much he really feels Rafsky’s pain. It is relatively easy to say that one feels another’s pain. It is much more difficult to engage that feeling, realize its depth and limitations, to feel for another while not taking ownership of another’s feelings, and to recognize the commitments that might follow from such an experience of empathy. Such feeling requires attention and listening. Easy empathy, as performed in this example, can work as a way to evade accountability for policies and the commitments that difficult empathy makes upon us. The exchange was productive nevertheless in drawing more attention to AIDS as a campaign issue. Following Rafsky’s interruption of Clinton’s fundraiser, Clinton met with activists to draft an AIDS agenda for his administration. Rafsky died of AIDS the following year. The statement “I feel your pain” as a commonplace in American political rhetoric does not start with Clinton, however. It starts with Jimmy Carter, or at least that is the earliest reference I have found. In his speech at the 1976 Democratic National Convention accepting the party’s nomination for president, Carter said, As I’ve said many times before, we can have an American President who does not govern with negativism and fear of the future, but with vigor and vision and aggressive leadership—a President who’s not isolated from the people, but who feels your pain and shares your dreams and takes his strength and his wisdom and his courage from you. (Our Nation’s Past and Future: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York City)

Easy Empathy  35 Carter is identifying a type of leadership that is not only concerned with making people feel heard but in being genuinely connected with people, sharing their pain and dreams, drawing from them strength and wisdom and courage. This is a leadership based in community. The leadership style Carter identifies here fit his ethos as “the man from Plains,” an ethos similar to one Clinton would adopt as “the man from Hope,” as both were Southern governors running in part upon their connections with everyday people and their concerns. Carter referenced the ideas of his DNC speech again in his so-called malaise speech, although he does not actually refer to “malaise” in the speech. That speech was delivered as a televised address to the nation on July 15, 1979, exactly three years after Carter’s speech accepting the nomination at the DNC. Carter’s administration was then facing challenges of inflation and an oil crisis. He begins the speech by noting the date and the promises of his acceptance speech. “I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you” (Carter, Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: The Malaise Speech). He then details what he has learned in listening to citizens in recent days, as he reads comments that they shared with him. He identifies the core problem facing the nation as a “crisis in confidence” explaining, “We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” He urges Americans to reflect upon their lives and values and identities as Americans; to reject shallow self-indulgences, materialism, and consumerism; and to reaffirm common cause and values. It is a remarkable speech, one that challenges Americans to reconsider their relations with one another, the nation, and the world, a speech that offers no easy solutions and avoids empty promises while instead urging people to choose a “path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.” This is not an easy empathy. It is one based in accountability and hard truths rather than popular feel-good solutions. Sometimes to empathize deeply with others also means holding up one’s own empathy like a mirror, showing others a reflection they might not like to see. Carter outlines at the end of the speech actions his administration would take to address the energy crisis, but he calls on the American public as essential in helping address the larger national crisis of confidence. The speech initially was very well received for its frank address to the American people (Feuerherd). In time, the speech was seen as indicative of larger shortcomings of the Carter administration and its failure to appease voters and decisively address crises, but that assessment has been challenged as the speech continues to attract attention for its clear statement of values, questioning of materialism, and refusal to pander. In their references to “I feel your pain,” Clinton and Carter offer two distinct versions of political empathy; there may be many more. One is to say that you feel the other’s pain as a way of getting the other to calm down and be quiet. The second is to say that listening to the other and feeling their

36  Easy Empathy pain has led you to understand the present challenge differently, not as an issue merely of executive action but of communal action based on a reassessment of values. Empathy is easier and less fulfilling, less likely to lead to new understandings and changes, when it is performed individually for an immediate discursive end. It is more difficult, and potentially more meaningful, when engaged as a process with others, one that can require listening, reassessing, making changes, and the recognition of unappealing truths by all involved. The Limited Uses of Easy Empathy There are times when empathy is easy, automatic, and warranted. I am writing this during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is a lot of posturing online, a lot of performances of empathy, as well as deliberate withholding of empathy from Russians. (It is worth keeping in mind that many of the Russian soldiers are young conscripts pushed into a war they do not desire or understand. To empathize with these soldiers, even as the Russian military commits terrible atrocities, is a difficult empathy indeed.) On Twitter, I see a report by Jeremy Bowen of the BBC telling the story of Iryna Kostenko from a town outside of Kyiv. Iryna shows the reporters the room of her only son, Oleksii, who was killed by Russian soldiers. He was 27 years old. As she cries and shows the reporters her son’s room, since damaged by shelling, Iryna says through the translator, “The pain is so bad. Now I’m all alone” (Bowen, “Desperately Sad Story…”). Iryna shows them where she buried her son in her yard. She is sobbing as she holds up a childhood photo of Oleksii, saying, “This is my love, my sweetheart,” and I am crying in empathy as I witness her pain, thinking of my parents, my young son, and what it could mean to feel so alone amid such a terrible loss. In describing the actions of the Russian soldiers, Bowen says, “It is hard to understand human behaviors like this.” It certainly is difficult; the challenges of understanding such behaviors are a focus of subsequent chapters. Here, however, I am concerned with Iryna’s pain, as is Bowen, the producers of the report, and the respondents on Twitter. In a follow-up post, Bowen reports that they contacted Médecins Sans Frontières, who located Iryna and are helping her however they can (Bowen, “This Is Iryna Kostenko…”). I do not have to try to empathize with Iryna. The most difficult part is not turning away, because her pain is so deep and her story so sad. Her face, her sobs, and the love and deep grief with which she talks about her son and holds up his photo, they all make empathizing automatic and powerful. I am compelled first to recognize how she feels and then to try to imagine it, and that is not hard, at least not in very general terms, given the force of the feeling. I do not know the everyday details of Iryna’s life with Oleksii, and I know nothing of what it is like to live in a town destroyed by war, friends and neighbors killed by soldiers of an invading army. I can only imagine. This is an easy empathy, an automatic movement to share in Iryna’s grief. It prompts

Easy Empathy  37 people to take action, to want to help. One of the viewers of the report tweets in response that they hope somebody at least hugged Iryna, and the camera operator and editor for the report, Lee Durant, replies, “I did... I couldn’t stand there without hugging her, she was so heartbroken... It was awful to leave her on her own.” There is a lot right with this kind of easy empathy. It shines an important spotlight, to use Paul Bloom’s term, on the human suffering of the situation. We understand the terrible events in Ukraine better by also understanding Iryna’s terrible story of losing her son. An easy empathy such as this builds upon fundamental experiences that make us human: love, family, loss, grief. This kind of easy empathy can be an important starting point. It captures attention and communicates feeling. It moves us to want to act. At its best, if we also pair such automatic empathy with greater attention to the situation by reflecting on how and why we are moved and what the empathy tells us beyond an individual story—that is, how it might represent the terrible pains of war across Ukraine as well as elsewhere—then easy empathy can be the beginning of a much fuller empathic accounting. Many critiques of empathy are critiques of what I am calling easy empathy, specifically for those features that make it easy. When Bloom writes that empathy is “a poor moral guide” that “can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions,” among other liabilities, he is referring to the quick, non-reflective, non-challenging, easy empathy detailed in this chapter (2). Empathy is loaded and burdened with biases. Hoffman outlines two general categories of empathic biases: familiarity bias and here-and-now bias (206–13). Familiarity bias describes the tendency to empathize with those most like ourselves; here-and-now biases describes the tendency to empathize with those who are right in front of us, in our proximity, or most easily available. I discuss these biases and ways to work against them in greater detail in the next chapter on difficult empathy. I mention biases here because these biases make easy empathy easy. We do not have to work much in order to empathize with a somebody very much like us. We do not have to try hard to imagine that familiar somebody’s experiences, feelings, and preferences, if they are nearly congruent to our own. Likewise, we do not have to work much in order to notice the person right in front of us, in our neighborhood, or prominently featured in the media. That easily accessible person is much easier to empathize with than is the person who is not in front of us, not in our neighborhood, not prominently featured in the media, and largely out of view and at a distance. We can think of the effort to empathize as like a stretching, reaching out to somebody else, to try to get closer to them and their situation. It requires much less effort to reach for the easily accessible and the familiar, the close at hand. Such a limited empathy is that much easier when we congratulate ourselves on having made the small effort. It is worth noting again that easy empathy feels good; empathy can be a pleasure. This is one of the reasons that we find enjoyment in the immersive, empathic experiences of films and novels, losing ourselves in identifying with characters. We enjoy such narrative empathic escapes, as Suzanne Keen

38  Easy Empathy points out, in part because of the safe space of fictional narratives, that we are allowed to empathize with characters without the difficulties of reflecting upon how such empathic experiences challenge our understanding of ourselves, might move us to challenge social hierarchies, and make commitments upon us to act accordingly. In empathizing with fictional characters, we might escape both our own lives and the push to reflect upon ourselves, our situations, and the situations of others. Escapist literatures—and I do not mean to denigrate such pleasures—can be enjoyable because they offer an easy empathy. The same holds true for our encounters with others in the real world. It can be easy and enjoyable to empathize with real life others in a manner similar to that of characters a fictional narrative, in a way that asks nothing of us other than our own imaginative engagements, because there are no commitments. When there is personal reflection in such an easy empathy, it tends to be flattering, as one may view oneself as being a good empathizer, a caring individual, and one rightfully placed in a position of social privilege so that one might offer empathic feelings of care and benevolence on others, thankful that one is in such a position of security and good fortune. The differences between oneself and those one is empathizing with, in such a moment of easy empathy, are reassuring. There may be a recognition of common humanity, but it is buried in a sense of personal security and the reassurance of insulating differences. These are not differences to be interrogated for their social and historical causes and their false permanence but treasured for their supposed protections. What good then is easy empathy? It is not without value. If easy empathy moves people to act for the betterment of others, even if such acting is motivated in part by self-satisfaction, it seems better than the absence of such action. Good may come of easy empathy. Better yet, perhaps easy empathy can lead to a more difficult empathy. If easy empathy is a short reach, let us hope that it can push people to reach further still to make a more effortful stretch. We might empathize easily at some times so that we can empathize more difficultly at others. The key then is to recognize easy empathy for what it is, as an occasional indulgence, a shallow pleasure, a reassurance, a liability, and a potential starting point. We cannot depend upon easy empathy as a reliable means of making judgments on others and the world, just as we cannot substitute sweets for sustenance or escapist reading for deep reporting. All of those have their places. If we recognize easy empathy for what it is, we can appreciate it without confusing it with more difficult forms of empathy. We do that by acknowledging the limitations and biases of easy empathy, by critically reflecting upon ourselves and the circumstances of our empathic encounters, by listening to the experiences and feelings of others, and by asking who is served by this act of empathy, or, as Kulbaga puts it so well, empathy to what end? In this way easy empathy might coexist with difficult empathy, each with their roles. It is this idea of difficult empathy that we consider next.

Easy Empathy  39 Works Cited Ambinder, Marc. “Feeling Your Pain.” The Week, 5 Oct. 2012, https://theweek.com/ articles/471681/feeling-pain. Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, Dover Publications, 2012. Batson, C. Daniel. Altruism in Humans. Oxford University Press, 2011. Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy. HarperCollins, 2016. Bowen, Jeremy. “Desperately Sad Story from Just Outside Kyiv, about a Woman Called Iryna Whose Son Was Killed by Russian Soldiers. We Were the First Outsiders She’d Seen since the Russians Left Her Village on Friday. Shot and edited by @ leedurant. Produced by @producerkathy Pic.Twitter.Com/VKE1tjL1kf.” Twitter, 3 Apr. 2022, https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1510738861286113282. ———. “This Is Iryna Kostenko, with a Childhood Photo of Her Only Son Oleksii, Shot Dead by Russian Soldiers Age 27 on 10 March. I’ve Already Tweeted Our Report. Better News Is That @producerkathy Told @MSF about Her, and They’ve Found Her. Iryna Needs a Lot of Help Pic.Twitter.Com/1wssZIO9kr.” Twitter, 4 Apr. 2022, https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1510906067567448064. Bronner, Ethan. “To Imagine Iraq After Saddam Hussein, You Must Think Like an Iraqi.” The New York Times, 4 Apr. 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/04/ opinion/editorial-observer-imagine-iraq-after-saddam-hussein-you-must-thinklike-iraqi.html. Carter, Jimmy. Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: The Malaise Speech. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-nation-energyand-national-goals-the-malaise-speech. Accessed 21 Mar. 2022. ———. Our Nation’s Past and Future: Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in New York City. https://www. presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/our-nations-past-and-future-address-acceptingthe-presidential-nomination-the-democratic. Accessed 21 Mar. 2022. Compassion International. Sponsor a Child. https://www.compassion.com/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2022. ———. What Makes Us Distinct? https://www.compassion.com/about/what-makesus-distinct.htm. Accessed 10 Mar. 2022. ———. Who Is Compassion International? https://www.compassion.com/about/ what-is-compassion.htm. Accessed 8 Mar. 2022. Durant, Lee. “I Did... I Couldn’t Stand There without Hugging Her, She Was so Heartbroken... It Was Awful to Leave Her on Her Own.” Twitter, 4 Apr. 2022, https://twitter.com/leedurant/status/1510793982330212353. Feuerherd, Peter. “Jimmy Carter and the Meaning of Malaise.” JSTOR Daily, Jul7 2 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/jimmy-carter-and-the-meaning-of-malaise/. Gaines, Alisha. Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hogeveen, Jeremy, et al. “Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, vol. 143, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 755–62.

40  Easy Empathy Kulbaga, Theresa A. “Pleasurable Pedagogies: Reading Lolita in Tehran and the Rhetoric of Empathy.” College English, vol. 70, no. 5, 2008, pp. 506–21. Leake, Eric. “Empathizer-in-Chief: The Promotion and Performance of Empathy in the Speeches of Barack Obama.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–14. Lynch, Dennis A. “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–23. Olivier, Morgan Richard [modernmorgan]. “There were times of my life….” Instagram, 28 Feb. 2022, www.instagram.com/p/CahxlX9FoVc. Sanchez, Patti. “The Secret to Leading Organizational Change Is Empathy.” Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/12/the-secret-to-leadingorganizational-change-is-empathy. Shuman, Amy. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of ­Empathy. University of Illinois Press, 2005. Sterling, Ken. “When Leading a Change, Start with Empathy.” Forbes Magazine, Feb. 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2022/02/23/ when-leading-a-change-start-with-empathy/. “THE 1992 CAMPAIGN: Verbatim; Heckler Stirs Clinton Anger: Excerpts from the Exchange.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1992, https:// www.nytimes.com/1992/03/28/us/1992-campaign-verbatim-heckler-stirs-clintonanger-excerpts-exchange.html. U.S. Department of State. “Iraqi Women under Saddam’s Regime: A Population Silenced.” 20 Mar. 2003, https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/wi/rls/18877.htm. van Kleef, Gerben A., et al. “Power, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others.” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 12, 2008, pp. 1315–23. Viner, Katharine. “Feminism as Imperialism.” The Guardian, 21 Sept. 2002, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/21/gender.usa. Walton, Douglas N. Appeal to Pity: Argumentum Ad Misericordiam. State University of New York Press, 1997.

3

Difficult Empathy

Werner Herzog’s film Into the Abyss opens with a prologue in which he interviews Rev. Richard Lopez, a death row chaplain who accompanies prisoners prior to and during their execution. Herzog interviews Lopez in a Texas state prison cemetery with the headstones of prisoners, bearing only numbers and no names, behind him amid a verdant field of grass and trees. Herzog asks Lopez to think about the man whose execution he is about to attend. “I really am going there without any expectations. I am going there to experience what God has prepared for me, for him, for all of those involved, and I don’t preconceive anything, not today,” Lopez says. He talks of God’s purpose and then tells of how he loves to be on the golf course with his phone silenced as he takes in nature. “I stop and I acknowledge life. The things that God has created,” Lopez says. He describes looking at the squirrels and the deer and the grass. Herzog then, remarkably, takes the interview in a new direction, saying, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.” Lopez smiles and says, “An encounter with a squirrel,” and begins to describe such an encounter: I was driving the golf cart, and I was on the cart path, and I saw two squirrels. They were chasing each other. As I was getting closer, they were running across the cart path. I put on my brakes, and they stopped in the middle of the cart path and looked at me. And I said, “How about this? If I wouldn’t have stopped, I could have run over one of these squirrels. Their life would have ended.” And that reminds me of the many people that I have been with in their last breath of life. Due to bad choices and mistakes, their life is taken away in that moment. So, life is precious, whether it’s a squirrel or a human being. So I will sometimes meditate on that experience. Make a little noise, and the squirrels will take off and continue their life, but I cannot do that for someone on the gurney. I cannot stop the process for them. But I wish I could. (Herzog, Into the Abyss) As Lopez is reminded of the many people he has been with when they were executed and his inability to save them as he can the squirrels, he stops, his voice falters, and tears well in his eyes. He is so composed throughout the DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-3

42  Difficult Empathy interview, but here his emotions come to the surface. The deep feeling he has not recognized concerning the deaths he has attended becomes apparent, triggered by his meditation on his encounters with squirrels and the fact that “life is precious,” be that of a squirrel or a human being. (The unexpected recognition of deep feeling is echoed later in the film by Fred Allen, a correctional officer who was captain of the “tie down” team that would strap prisoners to the gurney for their executions. Allen estimates that he attended more than 125 executions until one day, hearing of the execution of a prisoner on the news, he began shaking uncontrollably and crying and thinking of that prisoner and of all the executions he had attended. He then quit, despite the resulting forfeiture of his pension.) Lopez’s interview is remarkable for a few reasons. The rupture of feeling and its associations, first with squirrels and then with the preciousness of all life, demonstrates how empathy for the guilty and condemned may at first be repressed. We—that is, society, especially people in the United States, and perhaps even more so those of us in Texas, the state responsible for more executions than any other—are not supposed to empathize with people facing execution. They have been determined guilty of their crimes and are considered monsters, entirely deserving of their fate. Empathy is reserved for the innocent, for the victims. We may, however, feel empathy for animals, given their innocence. The squirrels on the golf course certainly do not deserve to die, and so Lopez can feel for them. It is hard to empathize with a squirrel in any detailed way—how can we know what it is like to be a squirrel living a squirrel life—but there remains a fundamental relatability there, that we want to live, as does the squirrel. The social and economic writer Jeremy Rifkin argues that our shared mortality is the basis of empathy, among people and all living things. “It’s very tough being alive on this planet, whether you’re a human being or a fox navigating the forest,” he says in his lecture on the empathic civilization. Rifkin argues that we first learn to empathize as children who learn that “life is vulnerable and fragile and that every moment is precious and that they have their own unique history.” We then extend that lesson to the plight of others and realize “that other person or other being, could be another creature, has a one and only life, it’s tough to be alive, and the odds are not always good” (Rifkin). Lopez is empathizing as Rifkin describes, first with the squirrels and then with the people facing execution, based on a recognition of the preciousness of life and the desire to keep living. It is easier at first for Lopez to empathize with the squirrels than with the people on death row, highlighting the difficulty of empathy for the guilty and condemned. Herzog’s orientation in the film fundamentally is one of difficult empathy. Empathy is realized not only in moments but in orientations, as ways to approach a being, a person, a people with openness and a respect for the preciousness and challenges of life, even if that person has not shown the same respect to others. Herzog demonstrates such an approach of difficult empathy in his first interview in the film with Michael Perry. Perry was convicted, along with a co-defendant, of murdering three people when he was a teenager

Difficult Empathy  43 in a horrible crime. He was sentenced to death. When interviewed by Herzog, Perry is on death row in Texas, his execution date eight days away. He is 28 years old, and his father has recently died. Herzog’s first interview with Perry occurs at the end of the prologue of the film, balancing the interview with Lopez and serving as a statement of values for the rest of the film. Upon first meeting Perry, sitting on opposite sides of the visitation glass, Herzog says, “Michael Perry, now from all of us, the whole team here, we would like to offer our condolences. Your father passed away.” Herzog here begins by treating Perry as a person, in connection with others, who has lost a family member. It is a recognition of Perry’s humanity, even though he has been convicted of acting so horrifically in the past. In the director’s statement for the film, published on his website, Herzog writes of his approach, that he is against capital punishment, that he is not attempting to determine guilt or innocence, that the film is not an apology for the crimes. He continues, It is also absolutely clear that the crimes of the persons in my films are monstrous, but the perpetrators are not monsters. They are human. For this reason, I treat them with respect, addressing them with Mr. or Mrs. and their full name. Although I am not visible, I wear a formal suit. The balance, the right tone, in the dialogues is essential: there is no activist’s anger from my side, although my position is clear; there is no false sentimentality; there is no commiseration; there is no chumminess; but there is a sense of solidarity with the inmates concerning their appeals and legal battles in order to have their execution delayed or transformed into a life sentence. And, above all, there is a strong sense that these individuals are human beings. (Herzog, “Director’s Statement”) Herzog does not use the word empathy in his statement, but elements of empathy are apparent throughout. He recognizes that the crimes are monstrous but the perpetrators themselves not monster, that they are human beings who have done monstrous things. He expresses solidarity with the inmates based upon his opposition to capital punishment and his recognition of their shared humanity. Although Herzog empathizes with Perry in recognizing his situation, he does not excuse Perry’s actions. Herzog says as much to Perry, telling him at the end of their first interview, I have the feeling that destiny, in a way, has dealt you a very bad deck of cards. It does not exonerate you, and when I talk to you, it does not necessarily mean I have to like you. But I respect you, and you’re a human being, and I do not think human beings should be executed, as simply as that. (Herzog, Into the Abyss) Herzog states clearly principles that underlie difficult empathy. He recognizes Perry’s situation, his story, and that the odds were against him from the start.

44  Difficult Empathy That, however, is not meant to exonerate Perry, only to add to understanding. Herzog separates liking Perry from respecting him as a fellow human being. That last part is the most important, that Herzog recognizes Perry as a human being, even as one capable of doing terrible things, as human beings are when at their worst and in bad situations. The film then moves on to the first chapter and details the crime. Perry was executed eight days later. I open this chapter with an analysis of Into the Abyss because it provides an instructive starting point for considering difficult empathy. The examples detailed from the film are not perfect instances of empathy. It is not clear that Herzog empathizes with Perry, or with Lopez or Allen or the other people detailed in the film, including the families of the victims, to whom the film is dedicated along with other families of victims of violent crime, in the sense that Herzog does not try to feel what Perry and others are feeling. He does, however, try to understand them and how they experience the world, who they are as people, their histories, their places within a system that puts people to death, and the consequences of that system as experienced by the people involved. That effort toward understanding, grounded in a fundamental respect for human beings, is a starting point for difficult empathy. It invites viewers of the film to encounter the interviewees through Herzog’s eyes, to approach them in a similar way, and to recognize their shared humanity. Into the Abyss as a title, one that Herzog has said could apply to many of his films, is appropriate in highlighting one of the features of difficult empathy. The title may be read as a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote, “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you” (89). When you attempt to see yourself in despised others, you may also see despised others in yourself. Difficult empathy requires us to understand ourselves and others in ways we might not want to recognize. It may move us to see the worst of others reflected in ourselves, and to see the best of ourselves also reflected the worst others. Human beings are capable of wonderful acts of love, generosity, selfsacrifice, and the uplift of others; human beings also are capable of the most horrifying acts of hate, greed, self-interest, and the violent oppression and destruction of others. Because all these motivations, in significantly different degrees, are part of the human experience, they all can be sites of empathy, as difficult as those may be. Even if only reflected in the slightest, there may exist alongside the capacity for the worst violence in those considered monsters still some small shreds of human goodness, since nobody is only all one thing; and even those who demonstrate the greatest kindness may also still hold the basic potential for terrible meanness. Difficult empathy is grounded in recognition of a shared humanity. It draws attention to wider contexts; particular situations; and social, familial, and personal histories in determining potential life courses. This is not to say that difficult empathy embraces an entirely deterministic view. It does, however, support the old empathic maxim “there but for the grace of God go I.” Difficult empathy may be understood by what it is not. It is not easy empathy. It does not flatter the empathizer, making us

Difficult Empathy  45 feel entirely deserving of our good fortune and superior in our condemnations of others. It requires humility. Difficult empathy often is unpleasant. Because of its difficulty and lack of flattery, difficult empathy tends to be intentional, meaning it requires effort. The concept of difficult empathy is at the heart of this book. Subsequent chapters will elaborate on specific modes and features of difficult empathy, those being the social conditions of empathy, the challenges of empathy with the enemy, and the importance of practicing critical empathy. This chapter defines and analyzes the central concept of difficult empathy and works through prominent examples, including Ta-Nehisi Coates’s concept of muscular empathy and the pressures against empathizing with people seen as potential victimizers of children, as evident in an analysis of the work of Allyn Walker. These examples demonstrate how difficult empathy can be in challenging our understanding of ourselves and of others. Difficult Empathy in Community, Not Conflation In his director’s statement, Herzog identifies a foundational recognition for difficult empathy: that we are all human. This recognition may sound obvious, but many of the barriers of empathy, specifically those of difficult empathy, are barriers we erect so as not to recognize the shared humanity of people we hate, fear, or despise, those with whom we want to have nothing in common, not even a shared humanity. Instead, we make people into monsters so that we can feel reassured that they are not like us, that they do not share our human capacities for love and generosity and potential for suffering; and so that we can feel reassured that we are not like them, that we do not share their human potential for hate and cruelty. The idea of a shared basic humanity is open to many avenues of critique for ignoring the significance of cultural differences, the effects of context, and the social and developmental importance of ethnicity, gender and sexuality identities, nationality, class, and so on. Those can be enlightening debates, but I hope for some agreement on a baseline humanity, that there are qualities of being that human beings share at some fundamental level, as that may be a starting point for empathy, much as Herzog demonstrates in relating to the men convicted of murder in Into the Abyss. The idea of a shared humanity is essential for many theories of empathy. Philosopher Arne Vetlesen describes empathy as “humankind’s basic emotional faculty” and identifies empathy as allowing people to recognize the human dimension of an issue and thus its moral dimension (8). For Vetlesen, seeing oneself and seeing others as human beings is essential for the moral work of empathy. Most, if not all, definitions of empathy involve some kind of sharing of feelings and taking the perspective of another. Psychologist Jamil Zaki describes experience sharing as foundational to empathy and as “the closest we come to dissolving the boundary between self and other” (179). Sharing experiences requires some sense of a similar potential for experience,

46  Difficult Empathy which is based on a common humanity or, more fundamentally, a common potential for suffering, as when people attempt to empathize with animals, squirrels or otherwise. In recognizing our shared humanity and empathizing with others, it is critical to maintain a self-other differentiation, as stated by Amy Coplan in her definition of empathy discussed in the introduction. Empathizers need to remember that they may share experiences without sharing identities, conflating differences and considering themselves and others as if they were the same. A similar and even greater liability is the erasure of the other and replacement with the self. Dennis Lynch considers this liability of empathy in unpacking the common example of empathy as walking in another’s shoes. As Lynch notes, to walk in another’s shoes we must first displace the other person, remove them from their shoes and the situation, so that their shoes become ours. Empathy then becomes an act of erasure. I consider these examples and liabilities in greater detail elsewhere. For now, it is important to note that difficult empathy requires recognizing similarities in the form of a shared basic humanity, that we all have the potential to suffer and are part of a greater human community, while not building upon that shared humanity shared identities that require the erasure of differences. In his essay “Empathy for the Devil” philosopher Adam Morton identifies a dilemma in how we consider empathy, how we want it to feel, and what we want it to do. As Morton writes, “So we have a dilemma: we want to take empathy as easy, to ease everyday interaction, and we want to take it as difficult, to keep a distance between us and those we despise” (330). This chapter, and much of this book, may be read as exploring this dilemma, its rhetorical functions and contexts, and its significance. Our conflicting expectations for empathy, as Morton argues, leaves us accepting an easy identification with others that may be built upon fundamental misreadings. We can be too quick to accept the ease of empathy and fail to question the facile assumptions it is built upon. These issues are addressed in more detail in the previous chapter on easy empathy. Our desire to keep empathy as difficult, as a means of separating ourselves from others in irreconcilable ways, leaves us poorer in our understanding of others and of ourselves. It also leaves frayed the social fabric that depends upon wider empathic understandings. Morton’s essay is worth further consideration because he does much to unpack the rationale and functions of difficult empathy. This unpacking will help us understand the barriers to difficult empathy and will offer some ways to work through them. The first barrier to difficult empathy that Morton identifies is our perception of our own decency. Morton writes, There is a blinkering effect to decency. Being a morally sensitive person, and having internalized a code of behavior that restricts the range of actions that one takes as live options for oneself, constrains one’s imagination. It becomes harder to identify imaginatively with important parts of human possibility. In particular, it limits one’s capacity to

Difficult Empathy  47 empathize with those who perform atrocious acts. They become alien to one. This is an obstacle to understanding many important, if awful, human actions. (318) Building this barrier is understandable. We do not want to identify in any way with people who do awful things. Closing those avenues of identification, however, means that we are less able to understand some of the important, albeit terrible, things that people do. If we were to make the imaginative effort to identify with those who do awful things, we risk losing our own sense of decency, the precious idea that we are the kind of people who could never do anything of that awful sort, regardless of the circumstances. This is a failure of imagination, of recognition of a shared humanity, and a fear of risking our conception of self. A second barrier to difficult empathy that Morton identifies is our failure to fully consider the importance of context. This is an example of the fundamental attribution error, the tendency of observers to reference a person’s character rather than situational factors in explaining that person’s behavior. However, when explaining one’s own failures, people are more likely to cite situational factors. When we empathize with others, we tend to focus on only a few key details, ignoring those larger contextual factors that are not immediately obvious as part of the event. “As a result,” Morton writes, “we are not used to imagining actions performed in significantly different contexts to those in which we find ourselves. So given a repugnant action performed in different circumstances our simple efforts to imagine it, or gain empathy for the agent, fail” (325). A much more difficult empathy would consider the wider context, cultural values, expectations, personal histories, social pressures, etc. that help produce an action. This is a lot to consider—too much, in fact, in trying to empathize with any particular person at any particular time. So, we give up, and limit our empathic imaginations accordingly. As we attempt to understand others through empathy, we rely upon fundamental although frequently flawed metaphors. We understand the actions of others by thinking of how those actions, how those situations, would be for us. We relate through comparison, trying to build upon similarities. One way to do this is through amplification of feeling and action. It should be difficult to imagine physically assaulting somebody out of anger. If we instead think of a time that we were angry enough at somebody to want to strike out in a way that does not hurt somebody, such as hitting a pillow or simply yelling, then we might imagine the kind of emotional motivation that can lead somebody to angrily strike out at another. A difference is in the degree of response and its direction. Whereas we might be angry enough to smash a plate or slam a door, that same motivation if amplified could be enough to lead somebody to assault somebody else. This is not necessarily an accurate empathy. Actions and motivations are not easily reduced to simple kinds and varying intensities. Intentionally hurting somebody else out of anger is different, I think, than yelling out of anger,

48  Difficult Empathy and not only different in degree. By considering how we are moved to act in different situations, however, we might stretch our empathic imaginations toward better understanding the actions of others and perhaps also better understanding ourselves. The underlying analogy for all empathic imaginations is that you are like me in some fundamental, meaningful ways. If I am trying to imagine what it is like for somebody else in that person’s situation, I might start by assuming that there is some shared way of being that includes me and others, even if that shared way of being is only a shared interest in avoiding suffering and continuing to live, as Rifkin points out, as is changed through personal experience, culture, and circumstance. As the assumption of a shared way of being becomes more detailed, as the analogy that you are like me in some ways is expanded, the opportunities for errors of empathic imagination increase. You may be like me in some basic ways, but you also are not like me in many very important other ways. The analogy that you are like me is not only essential for empathy but also a reason why empathy can be so wrong sometimes. I will address this issue further in the chapter on critical empathy. Morton’s recommendation is that we begin by considering the specific barriers a person had to overcome in order to act as they did. Those may be barriers of values, situational constraints, or other impediments to action. For example, somebody might refrain from shoplifting because they consider stealing to be wrong. If they have no money and need to steal something in order for a loved one to live, however, they may be willing to overcome their objection to shoplifting in order to save a life. Or, perhaps a person has no value-based objection to shoplifting. They refrain from shoplifting because they are afraid of getting caught. If they see that nobody is watching the store and they feel assured that they can get away with it, then they may feel free to shoplift. If we are to empathize accurately with the shoplifter, we need to know what personal barrier they had to overcome in order to act as they did, Morton argues. If we empathize along with stealing in order to save a life, then we may fail to accurately understand the person who steals simply because they can. Morton is concerned with correctly identifying barriers in order to increase empathic accuracy, which is a problem for significant as well as relatively insignificant actions. I am less concerned with accuracy than with the value of the effort of trying to empathize. It does not matter to me so much that we empathize accurately but that we try and are critically aware of our trying. It is important to recognize the potential for inaccuracy and to treat empathic understandings as best guesses, always open to review and revision as we learn more. The motivating assumption that empathizing is possible and worth the effort is a valuable starting place. The act of trying to empathize with another, trying to identify motivations and barriers, trying to come to terms with situational factors in a greater attention to context, all of these are important efforts in challenging our understanding of ourselves and others, even when our efforts to empathize are not entirely accurate.

Difficult Empathy  49 Muscular Empathy and Attention to Context Just as our sense of decency can blinker us to empathizing with those who do terrible things, so too can it make empathizing across differences of time and space all the more challenging. We do not want to empathize with the unenlightened people of the past, those who may be active agents in or simply complicit with some of history’s greatest crimes against humanity. A fuller attention to context—as well as recognition of our own limitations, fallibilities, and susceptibility to the values of our time, for better and worse—can help us empathize across differences in time. This is the challenge posed by Coates in his short essay “A Muscular Empathy.” Coates offers a worthwhile exercise in historical and social empathy as a way of also reconsidering our places in the present. Coates opens his essay by responding to a Twitter post by a writer claiming that if he, the writer, were a poor Black kid in West Philadelphia, he would work hard to be sure that he received good grades in school and made the most of every opportunity, as limited as they may be. Coates is reminded of discussions he heard as a student at Howard University about slavery. He recalls people saying that if they had been enslaved, they would have rebelled, and elsewhere he recalls people in more privileged positions saying that if they had lived as plantation owners in the antebellum South, they would have freed all of the enslaved people on their plantations. Coates identifies these statements as self-aggrandizement, even as these generally are good people making such claims, including the author of the original Twitter post. It makes sense that we would unintentionally self-aggrandize in this way. People are rightly appalled by institutions of slavery in the antebellum South, they would wish to have no part in it, and so when they imagine themselves alive at that time and in a position to act, they imagine themselves actively working to abolish slavery and to free enslaved people. As Coates points out, however, such wishful empathizing fails to acknowledge one’s own limitations, the numerous social constraints against acting as one would hope, and the strong influence of the social norms and values of the time. Coates offers instead what he describes as a muscular empathy that attempts to more fully consider historical context and to come to terms with our own mediocrity as products of our own time, just as others are products of their time. He suggests we need to try harder to empathize with people in the past without automatically thinking ourselves superior. As Coates explains, This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, handholding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity.

50  Difficult Empathy The first rule is this—You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t have and then ask, “Why?” This is an exercise worth trying. It can be hard to imagine that one might be in a position to free enslaved people and that one would not do so. It is a difficult empathic move, but as Coates writes, “This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking ‘Why?’ The fact that we—and I mean all of us, black and white—are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling.” Such imagining challenges us to place ourselves in the position of somebody otherwise considered morally offensive. Coates suggests that we simply start with his offered assumption, that we would not have acted as moral heroes, and go from there. Assuming that I would not have freed the enslaved people I could have freed, why not? I imagine that I might have been afraid of what my family and friends would think of me, that they might have seen me as rejecting our way of life and, by extension, rejecting them. I might have been afraid of losing my sense of community and of being alone. I might have been reluctant to free others because I would not want to lose the financial benefits of enslaved labor. I also might have accepted the dominant social values of the time and place, persuading myself, as others had persuaded themselves, that I knew what was best for the enslaved people whose lives I could determine and that they were better off with my oversight than with their freedom. Perhaps I might have wanted to free others but would have been too afraid to go up against those forces most invested in their enslavement. Or I might simply have told myself that I would get around to it later. I am not a historian of the antebellum South, and I do not know the full circumstances that would need to be considered in addressing these questions. There were so many ways that those who benefitted from enslaved labor were able to persuade themselves that what they were doing was right or okay for now. It is humbling and, more than that, a little depressing to assume that I would not have challenged such a horrible institution. Starting with that assumption, however, I become more aware of how so many people—people who nevertheless loved their families and friends and who likely imagined themselves trying to do the right thing— could be party to historical atrocities. As Coates reminds us, most people did not challenge the institution of slavery, certainly not those people who benefited from it. Since we all together are by definition most people, most of us, if living in that time and not our own, would not have challenged it either. The dominant national narrative of the United States, however appropriate or not, is one based on ideals of freedom and overcoming injustices. It is a heroic national story. To project ourselves backward rather than forward, to imagine the reality of the majority of ordinary people, not fundamentally different from us, and to see ourselves among them and sharing their complicities is to go against the dominant arc of the national story. This empathic exercise changes not only how we might view those historical people who

Difficult Empathy  51 failed to challenge the atrocities of their time, but it also changes how we might view ourselves. It prompts us to ask what injustices we are failing to challenge in our own time, just as people in the past failed to challenge the injustices of their time. What social pressures and norms are we allowing to blind us to atrocities, what self-serving logics are we persuading ourselves of in order to maintain our benefits and our standing as members in our communities? We like to imagine that people in our time, and in particular those of our most closely held communities, such as the political tribes we rally with, have reached a final point of enlightenment, that we have arrived at satisfactory answers to the most important moral questions. The moral questions that we do not think even worth addressing, that we might not think to ask, may be most likely to trouble people in the future. People in every age tend to think that they have arrived at all the appropriate positions, and people in later ages look back on them in moral horror. There is no reason to think our time is different. Empathizing with the Despised: Minor-Attracted People It is hard to identify any group of people more widely and publicly despised than pedophiles. The dictionary definition of a pedophile is somebody who is sexually attracted to children. In common usage, however, pedophile connotes not only attraction but predation, conjuring the image of an adult who sexually abuses children. Questions about how to address pedophilia, how offenders should be punished and treated, how to protect against recidivism, how to balance individual rights to privacy and rehabilitation along with community and parental rights to notification, all in the service of protecting children, these questions speak to the difficulties surrounding issues of pedophilia. There is a particular abhorrence to the sexual abuse of children that makes it unforgivable and offenders, or even potential offenders, undeserving of understanding or empathy. I can log into the Texas Public Sex Offender website and see the names, photos, addresses, offense records, and assessed threat status of all the convicted sexual offenders in my neighborhood. I cannot log into a public database and see the names and addresses of those convicted of other terrible crimes, such as assault or homicide, in my neighborhood. This is due to the understanding that sexual offenders are a greater risk for re-offense and that children in particular deserve additional protections. It also contributes to an especially strong association of pedophilia with criminality, irredeemability, and the forfeiture of any expectation of empathy. In an effort to better understand people who are sexually attracted to minors, Walker, then an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University, wrote A Long, Dark Shadow: MinorAttracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, published by University of California Press, a very reputable academic publisher. Walker, who is trans and queer, makes clear in the book that the purpose of their work is to better

52  Difficult Empathy protect children by better understanding people who are attracted to children. In Walker’s words, from the introduction to the book, “Allow me to be clear: this book does not promote sexual contact between adults and minors”; they later add, “The primary goal of this book is to explore ways of thinking about MAPs that may better protect children from harm,” and then again, “I am therefore writing this book with two main foci—the prevention of child abuse and the promotion of wellbeing among MAPs—because protecting children is important, because MAPs are people who deserve compassion, and because these foci are not contradictory” (8, 12). Walker reiterates this point, that their primary purpose is better protecting children, throughout the book. That repeated emphasis did not spare Walker from being labeled an apologist for pedophiles and as somebody who is putting children at risk. Public attacks against Walker for trying to understand people attracted to minors, and particularly for advocating the term “minor-attracted person” (MAP) rather than “pedophile,” led to Walker’s suspension and eventual resignation from their tenure-track position. In this section, I consider more deeply the significance of how people are labeled and the terms used to define them as those terms relate to extensions of empathy. I analyze Walker’s book for its positioning of the people Walker is studying, for how Walker empathizes with them, and for the stated purposes of that empathy. I also analyze the public backlash against Walker’s work and how Walker was themself denied empathy or understanding through their association with a despised population. I use this analysis to highlight the social pressures against empathizing with those who are widely despised and to argue for the importance of considering empathy as understanding rather than apologia, endorsement, or alignment. My analysis also supports the basic move of difficult empathy as first recognizing the fundamental humanity of others, as demonstrated by Walker and Herzog, extending that human recognition even to those others who are otherwise social pariahs at best, criminal offenders at worst, not least of all because doing so underscores our own humanity and better prepares us to live in a world of encounters with others. I must add my own clear statement about my intentions in analyzing empathy for MAPs, as Walker refers to the people they study. In no way do I mean to understate the terrible significance of sexual abuse of children. Sexual crimes against children are horrible, and we as a society are right to be outraged at them and at those who would commit such crimes. There is something particularly upsetting about the predatory nature of such crimes, that children could be abused by the very adults they have trusted, that children can have so little power against their abusers, and that these crimes can affect children for the rest of their lives. I am not saying anybody needs to empathize with MAPs. In considering the difficult work of empathizing with MAPs as evident in Walker’s work and the response to it, I want to better understand how empathy is extended to a despised group of people, the work and significance of recognizing their humanity in relation to the humanity of others, and the social pressures and consequences of extending such empathy.

Difficult Empathy  53 I use the term MAPs because this is the term used by Walker in their work with this community. It also is the term many people who identify as MAPs prefer. Like Walker, I think the term does well to emphasize the attraction to minors, an attraction I believe nobody asks for, as a defining feature of this identity. This is not empathy for child abusers. Walker’s research included only people who are non-offenders. As I write this, I am reminded of Walker’s account in their introduction of meeting with journalist Luke Malone, who reported on MAPs and their desire for help in a segment for This American Life. Malone gave Walker advice on how to get in touch with MAPs and then warned Walker of the public backlash against telling the story of MAPs, the hate mail that Malone had received in response to the radio segment, and the accusations that “because his This American Life story encouraged empathy toward MAPs, the story was dangerous to minors” (6). Malone’s warning was all too prescient. The backlash for Walker’s empathy toward MAPs would be even worse. So let me state again, I am not arguing for empathy for people who sexually abuse children, and I am not trying to normalize any kind of sexual contact between adults and children. Full stop. For their book, Walker interviewed 42 MAPs, mostly on the phone or over text-based chat. The people Walker interviewed were all over the age of 18, predominantly or only attracted to people under the age of 18, and with no criminal record involving sexual contact with a minor (10). That last criterion is key, as Walker was only researching people who had resisted acting on their attractions, people who were non-offenders. Walker wanted to better understand these people’s experiences and how they coped with and resisted their attractions. The majority of the MAPs interviewed were in their 20s and 30s, half of them lived in the United States, and almost all of them were white men. Although Walker states that their main purpose in the project is the protection of children—they add that many of the research participants agreed to participate because they also wanted to help protect children—Walker also is invested in the wellbeing of MAPs themselves (12). Walker’s approach to the people interviewed is based in a humane recognition of them as people, and especially as people who have been dealt a very bad deck in life, as Herzog might say. As Walker writes in identifying how MAPs are typically viewed in society in relation to how Walker views them, We have been conditioned to see MAPs as criminals or (in the words of multiple research participants in my study) as “ticking time bombs.” But these are real human beings who happen to have attractions that they never asked for, that they typically do not want, and that they cannot get rid of. Their daily struggles include many more than resisting an interest to act on their attractions: MAPs often face futures with no chance of romance, sex, or love, and on top of that, society sends them constant messages telling them that they are monsters for experiencing unwanted attractions. (12)

54  Difficult Empathy There is empathic understanding in this paragraph. I expect the empathy Walker offered the people they interviewed was a significant feature of the research project in helping them understand the people they are studying and receiving their trust. Walker did not approach these people with the predetermination that they were monsters or “ticking time bombs” but instead with the assumption that they were people not completely different from other people. As Walker writes, MAPs “are real human beings who happen to have attractions that they never asked for, that they typically do not want, and that they cannot get rid of.” Walker is arguing that MAPs are themselves victims of their unrequested desires, and in that they are terribly unfortunate. By highlighting that MAPs did not ask for their attractions, Walker also is absolving them of responsibility for those attractions, establishing MAPs as inculpable in that regard. Since they did not ask for their attractions, MAPs are not to be blamed for those attractions they did not ask for. They may be innocent so long as they do not act upon or bolster their attractions in any way. The inability to act without victimizing children means that MAPs face futures without the romantic possibilities others might pursue as part of a meaningful life. Walker’s attention to the dreams and future possibilities of MAPs, relayed in a way that others can relate to as human desires for romantic fulfillment, underscores the humanity of MAPs, which is part of Walker’s purpose. Readers are invited to empathize with MAPs as fellow human beings, as people who have limited or no control over some of the features that determine who they are, and as people with hopes for a good life, concern for others, and dreams for the future. Walker then positions MAPs as further victimized by a society that views them as monsters for their unwanted attractions. To read Walker’s description of MAPs is shocking because MAPs—or as more commonly referenced, pedophiles, and more on that term in a minute—are almost never presented in human terms. The only exception might be when others who are close to MAPs, such as family members, relate to them first as people and family members rather than as predators, but those representations also are a rarity. There is stigma in being associated with MAPs in any way, for family members as well. People do not see MAPs as fellow human beings, only as threats and monsters. The shock of a humane presentation of MAPs is not unrelated to the attacks against Walker for presenting them in such a way. The shock of such a presentation is itself seen as a threat. Addressing the social stigma associated with MAPs is a significant part of Walker’s project. It is a key point for the people they interview, too. The stigma starts with the connotation of the word pedophile. As Walker notes, pedophile traditionally is defined within dictionaries as an attraction to minors. In popular use, however, to be a pedophile is not only to be attracted to minors but to be a sexual predator of minors as one who acts upon those attractions. As Walker writes, “The word ‘pedophile’ conjures several distinct images in the contemporary imagination” (2). We picture strangers luring children into vans, odd figures hanging around the edges of playgrounds,

Difficult Empathy  55 and an adult man operating under the alias of a child in a kids’ online chat room. As an alternative to pedophile and its connotations, Walker uses MAP to refer to people who are attracted to minors. Walker’s attempt to lessen the stigma associated with this population, so long as they are non-offenders, became a cause of public outrage. There is a public desire to retain the stigma of pedophile, for people who are have assaulted children as well as those who have not, so as to refuse empathy to all people attracted to minors even if they have not hurt children. Empathizing with the stigmatized and despised is difficult, for personal and social reasons. There are strong social forces pushing and maintaining stigmas. Even calling out stigmas as stigmas can be a risk because it calls into question the legitimacy of the stigma. One person’s social stigma may be another’s idea of justice. Walker argues that reducing the social stigma facing non-offending MAPs advances the protection of children. Shaming MAPs is a bad strategy, Walker contends, because MAPs cannot change their sexual attractions. Shaming MAPs puts children in greater danger by cutting off avenues of assistance for MAPs working to cope with their attractions, MAPs who need social understanding, family and community support, mental health services, and strategies for resisting their undesired attractions. This support protects children. The first step in the process of countering stigma and offering support and understanding, for the protection of children and the wellbeing of people attracted to children, is the extension of difficult empathy. “If we really want to ‘think about the children,’ it is possible that treating MAPs with empathy is the key,” Walker writes (9). The social stigma against non-offending MAPs is a barrier to protecting children, a barrier to difficult empathy. Walker’s work empathizing with MAPs is grounded in their interviews, in getting to know MAPs personally and as people. It also is grounded in who Walker is. Walker’s background and identity help account for the empathy they extend to the people they are studying; Walker’s identity also helps explain the force of the resulting public condemnation of them. In their consideration of using the term MAPs to describe people attracted to minors and of describing such attraction as a sexual orientation, one that is not chosen, Walker acknowledges concerns that other communities of people with historically marginalized sexual orientations might be subjected to harassment through any associations or comparisons with MAPs. As Walker writes, placing MAPs under a non-normative sexual orientations umbrella with queer communities can present a danger to queer people. Yet it is Walker’s identity as a queer person that provides a foundation for their empathy with MAPs. Walker writes, in consideration of the concern of endangering queer people through any potential association with MAPs, As a queer person myself, this question haunts me. And yet it is perhaps the fact that I am queer that gives me meaningful understanding of others who are treated with suspicion and stigma based upon

56  Difficult Empathy a sexual orientation that cannot be changed. I can’t begrudge other queer individuals who do not want to be associated with a population assumed to be child molesters; however, it is also important to realize that unfounded and reductive historical claims of queer individuals’ supposedly predatory behaviors mirror today’s assumptions about MAPs. (8) Walker’s identity and recognition of the historical stigmatization and mistreatment of queer people provides opportunity for empathy with MAPs. This practice of difficult empathy is rooted in an awareness of how such communities have been treated and a personal understanding of what it means to face suspicion and stigma due to a sexual orientation that is not of one’s choosing and that cannot be changed. It also is noteworthy that Walker does not consider such awareness as necessarily leading to empathy and destigmatization of MAPs. Walker allows that other members of the queer community may not want to be associated with MAPs in any way, given the risks such associations pose and the strong social condemnation against empathizing with MAPs. Walker here also is empathizing with other queer people who do not want to assume the risks of association through acts of difficult empathy. Walker’s efforts to counteract the stigmas facing MAPs, based in Walker’s empathizing with them, led to a strong public backlash against Walker and their university. In November of 2021 Walker gave a video interview on YouTube with the nonprofit Prostasia Foundation as part of its Prostasia Conversations series (Prostasia Foundation). Prostasia describes itself as “the first national child protection organization to promote evidence-based laws and policies for the prevention of child sexual abuse, while insisting that the human and civil rights of all are also upheld” (Frequently Asked Questions). I am not familiar with Prostasia, and so I am focused here on the interview itself. The first question of the interview concerns Walker’s controversial use of the term “MAPs” instead of “pedophiles” in their book’s title and throughout the book. Walker responds by saying first that they think when referring to people, writers should use the terms that those people themselves prefer, and that those in the community they researched prefer MAP to pedophile because of pedophile’s connotations apart from its definition. Walker continues, explaining the preference for the term MAP, “It’s less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile. A lot of people when they hear the term pedophile, they automatically assume that it means a sex offender. And that isn’t true. And it leads to a lot of misconceptions about attractions toward minors” (Prostasia Foundation). Walker goes on to state that they do not see sexual attractions as moral issues because people do not have any control over who they are attracted to, only over how they act in response to those attractions. Walker’s use of the term MAP rather than pedophile became a key point in the right-wing media backlash against them, a media that also tends to distrust academics and universities in general. The online site Western Standard, for example, posted an article under the headline “Trans Professor Defends

Difficult Empathy  57 Pedophiles as ‘Minor-Attracted Persons’” (Oldcorn). The author of the article, Christopher Oldcorn, quotes Walker’s statement from the Prostasia interview concerning the stigmas associated with “pedophile” and the preference for the term “minor-attracted person.” Oldcorn foregrounds Walker’s identity as trans as though that is itself a problem and misgenders Walker throughout the short article. Likewise, in an article for the online site 4W, writer Anna Slatz leads with an implied criticism of Walker for “support of ‘destigmatizing’ pedophilia—or, as she calls it ‘minor attraction’” (Slatz). Slatz then highlights that Walker is “a female-to-male transgender who identifies as non-binary” and uses Walker’s preferred “their” pronoun before reverting to misgendering Walker as “she” for the remainder of the article. I cite these examples of writers highlighting Walker’s transgender identity and then repeatedly misgendering them because I think it evidence of a lack of respect for Walker as a person and an attack on their identity as a way of attacking their work as suspect. 4W is described by its founder and editor, M. K. Fain, as a fourth-wave feminist publication for “today’s feminists who are boldly stepping outside of the mainstream narrative to unapologetically bring you stories about the issues affecting women today” (Fain). Gender identity seems to be a particular concern for Fain and 4W. In her article, Slatz also quotes Walker’s stated rationale in the Prostasia interview for using the term MAP rather than pedophile to refer to people who are sexually attracted to children, seemingly chiding Walker for doing so out of “consideration for pedophile’s feelings.” The clear implication is that pedophiles, or in this case non-offending MAPs, do not deserve to have their feelings considered. Another point of contention in the backlash is that Walker is daring to empathize with people who are attracted to children. As Slatz writes, quoting Walker, “At another point in the interview, Walker states she ‘sort of empathize[s]’ with pedophiles because of identifying as Queer.” Slatz links Walker’s identity as queer, as somebody who has experienced society’s marginalization of queer people, with support for pedophiles, and, by extension, according to the logic of Slatz’s article, an acceptance of the sexual victimization of children, although Walker continually states exactly the opposite intention in their book and their interview. Walker’s ability to empathize with MAPs, based upon Walker’s experiences, is itself a problem, according to how Slatz presents quotes from the interview. The criticism in the articles by Slatz, Oldcorn, and elsewhere is based upon two points: (1) people should not empathize with people who are attracted to minors, because such people are not deserving of empathy; and (2) any efforts to empathize with people attracted to minors is really an effort to normalize sexual crimes against children and to put children at risk, regardless of the stated intentions of such efforts. The fact that Walker identifies as trans and queer is also made to be a problem in the coverage of their work, as evident by Walker’s identity as “trans” and “non-binary” being prominently featured in the headlines. The identities that support Walker’s empathic outreach are themselves suspect. Reactions to Walker’s work—or more accurately, reactions to the outraged

58  Difficult Empathy coverage of Walker’s work—were troubling. Comments on Twitter and in discussion threads posted pictures of people loading guns and suggested violence. An Old Dominion University spokesperson told The Washington Post that there had been death threats against Walker and their family members and that the threats were serious enough that Walker was provided armed security while on campus (Svrluga). Reading coverage of Walker’s work such as that in Western Standard and 4W, I wonder why attempting to empathize with people attracted to minors, in order to better protect minors, is so deeply threatening. Here, it is useful to try to extend some of my own empathy to those denying empathy to MAPs. There may be some general conservative concerns about the discussion around social issues changing, and that concern gets attached to MAPs and Walker’s research. In that sense, the critique might be only partly about Walker and their work and partly about larger social trends that seem threatening. I can understand that, as I also sometimes can feel disoriented as political and social discussions change and realign around me. I certainly understand the motivation to protect children. That is a motivation everybody involved in this story shares, including the MAPs Walker interviews, all of whom are non-offenders. Does recognizing MAPs as human beings risk making child sexual abuse any less horrific? I do not think so. If anything, to me, it is more disturbing that people, not simply monsters, can abuse children in such a way. (It is worth nothing that sexual assault generally can occur for many reasons and is not only an issue of attraction.) I suppose there is a fear of normalizing or at least destigmatizing sexual attraction to minors and, by extension, normalizing acting on those attractions, but the distinction between having attractions that one did not ask for and acting upon those attractions is critical and maintained by Walker throughout their work. The distinction seems important, worth highlighting, so that potential offenders may be supported in every possible way not to offend. Does considering sexual attractions as not chosen, and therefore as not something that somebody should be condemned or celebrated for, put others at risk? I do not have the sense that I chose my own sexual attractions, and I do not expect that critics of Walker think they chose their own attractions. It is odd, then, to vilify some people for their attractions and not others when nobody chooses those attractions, only how they direct or act upon them. This might be part of the barrier to empathy for MAPs. If we do not hold them guilty for their attractions, then we risk not subjecting them to condemnation for those attractions but instead move closer to pitying them, since nobody would want to be burdened with such terrible attractions. MAPs then might be seen themselves as victims, which could risk changing public orientation to them from ostracization and opprobrium to pity or a desire to help. This is part of Walker’s purpose in destigmatizing MAPs, so that they might have better access to help and therefore be better equipped not to act on their desires. In order to want to help them, however, people would need to see them not only as monsters. It is easier to consider them monsters, condemn them, and be done with it all. I can understand that.

Difficult Empathy  59 Sexual abuse of children is such a horrible thought that is seems safer not to think about it at all and to simply shame, shun, and condemn anybody associated, be those MAPs who refrain from acting on their attractions or the researchers trying to understand them in order to better protect children. Empathizing with MAPs may raise too many questions, acknowledge too many, ask for too many distinctions, so that it feels safer not to empathize with them at all. That, however, does not make sexual crimes against children go away. Walker was placed on administrative leave and eventually resigned from Old Dominion University. University statements concerning Walker’s leave and resignation never questioned the legitimacy of their scholarship. Walker’s statements, released through the university, again stated that the purpose of their work was to better protect children. In the initial brief statement by the university, Walker is quoted as saying, I want to be clear: child sexual abuse is morally wrong and an inexcusable crime. As an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice, the goal of my research is to prevent crime. My work is informed by my past experience and advocacy as a social worker counseling victims. I embarked on this research in hopes of gaining understanding of a group that, previously, has not been studied in order to identify ways to protect children. (“Old Dominion University Statement”) Walker makes clear their intentions in their research, just as they did repeatedly in their book and elsewhere, and makes a case for trying to empathize with and understand MAPs in order to protect children. The statement was not enough. Three days later the university put out a second statement, announcing that Walker had been placed on administrative leave for the purpose of campus safety. The university’s president, Brian Hemphill, said in the statement, “I want to state in the strongest terms possible that child sexual abuse is morally wrong and has no place in our society,” as though Walker had ever suggested otherwise (“A Statement from Old Dominion University”). Finally, eight days later, as protests and media outrage concerning Walker continued, the university announced Walker’s resignation, with Walker remaining on leave until the end of their contract. In the statement, Walker thanks those at the university, in their research community, and elsewhere who have supported them. Walker states again that the purpose of their research is to prevent child sexual abuse. “That research was mischaracterized by some in the media and online, partly on the basis of my trans identity,” Walker says (“A Joint Statement from Old Dominion University and Dr. Allyn Walker”). After Walker’s contract with Old Dominion University ended in May 2022, they were hired to a postdoctoral fellow position at Johns Hopkins University’s Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. I do not know any more about Walker’s treatment by the university and the factors that led to their resignation other than what was reported in

60  Difficult Empathy the media and released in university statements. Based on those materials, however, Walker’s willingness to consider MAPs as people first, rather than as monsters or “ticking time bombs,” particularly in Walker’s refusal to call MAPs pedophiles due to the criminal connotations of the term and the community preferences of MAPs, seems to have led to the threats against Walker and Walker’s eventual resignation. This is despite Walker’s repeated statements that their work was intended to help protect children by better understanding MAPs and how best to support them in resisting acting upon their attractions. I detail Walker’s case at length because at its core is the practice—and social condemnation—of difficult empathy. Walker announces early in their book their intention of extending empathy to MAPs and the pressures against doing so. “It’s standard to treat empathy toward MAPs and the safety of children as if the two concepts oppose each other so profoundly that they cannot both exist,” Walker writes (6). This is also the case when empathizing with the enemy, in which empathy is seen as zero-sum or as a gift that should not be given to the undeserving when it could be given to somebody else. (I will develop this idea further in the fifth chapter, “Empathy with the Enemy.”) Walker continues, refuting the idea that empathy for MAPs puts children at risk, writing, Common logic seems to dictate that if we treat MAPs with empathy and compassion, we are somehow condoning sexual abuse against children. Therefore, the argument that we should ‘think about the children’ reveals a philosophy that to keep children safe, MAPs need to be shamed for their attractions. (6) Walker argues that the truth likely is just the opposite. “If we really want to ‘think about the children,’ it is possible that treating MAPs with empathy is the key,” they write, because empathizing with MAPs is a starting point to support them in remaining non-offenders (9). At multiple points in the book, Walker comments upon the lack of media representations of non-offending MAPs. Somebody coming to terms with the terrible understanding that they are themselves attracted to minors does not have publicly available models, characters, or stories to help them see a positive future for themselves and others. As non-offenders, they feel erased, unseen, unrecognized as part of society, and unavailable for empathy. The people Walker interviews describe feeling despised, seeing no positive nonoffending representations of MAPs in the media, and hearing instead only hatred, such as in comments by colleagues and friends that all pedophiles should be tortured and killed (79). When people wear shirts that say “kill all pedophiles”—as I have seen—who would not be afraid to be identified with that label for attractions they never asked for or acted upon? Attention to the lack of stories of non-offending MAPs highlights the importance of stories for empathy broadly, and the diminished potential of empathy when there

Difficult Empathy  61 is a lack of available stories. Walker’s book also includes stories from MAPs themselves, and in that it is an example of difficult empathy in practice. It is one thing to recognize conceptually that, yes, MAPs are human beings. It is another to read the accounts of the people Walker interviews, to read of Jeremy coming out to his parents as attracted to minors and telling them of his plans to end his life (43), or to read Mason’s comment that, “I know that the world hates me, and I feel that heavily. So, I don’t, I don’t know what to do about it” (78). By including the voices and stories of MAPs and their struggles and successes, Walker demonstrates the kind of empathy they advocate. The empathy is not Walker’s alone. The people Walker interviews also employ empathy as a way to resist acting on their attractions. They empathize with children who might suffer sexual abuse, the family members of child sexual abuse victims, and even with themselves as children who could have been victims of abuse. These acts of empathy, of imaging children not as means of fulfilling sexual attractions but as people who would be terribly hurt, helps MAPs in the study resist acting on their attractions. Empathy then is identified in Walker’s work as a means of protecting children both in the challenges of empathizing with MAPs and as employed by MAPs to resist victimizing others. Walker ends their book with a statement of empathy for the sake of MAPs themselves and as a way to support them as non-offenders. Walker writes in the conclusion, “In each interview I asked participants what they would say to a MAP who was just beginning to realize they were attracted to minors. Far and away, the most common response was ‘You are not a monster’” (170). A key message of the book is the importance of recognizing the basic humanity of MAPs. Walker does that in paying attention to the details of their lives. Walker writes, While the MAPs I spoke to in the course of my research often had experienced many struggles, many were able to find happiness, understanding, and the dignity they had been searching for. They found this dignity through the ability to be seen by others and to have their wellbeing recognized as important, through the knowledge that there were other people out there like them, and through validation that they were not destined to become monsters just because of their attractions. It is my hope that books will be written in the future that can focus on these MAPs—stories that do not focus excessively on MAPs’ struggles and instead on their successes. These successes exist, and they deserve to be heard. (171) This is a relatively positive, optimistic note to end a book focused on the experiences of people attracted to minors. I take this to be Walker’s point. In doing the difficult work of empathizing with an otherwise despised group of people, Walker is helping them reclaim some human dignity, their right to be seen as people, and their right to tell stories in which they are not monsters and in

62  Difficult Empathy which they also have opportunities for success and happiness. These are not the stories typically told of MAPs, and that may have driven much of the opposition against Walker and their project, despite their stated positive intentions. The Values Supporting Difficult Empathy In this chapter, I have analyzed examples of difficult empathy in order to demonstrate its function and values. One way to recognize difficult empathy is to look at those places, at those people, where empathy is most often denied. The examples considered in this chapter include convicted murderers, people who historically enslaved people, and people who are attracted to minors. Difficult empathy is highly contingent, and people who may be difficult to empathize with in one context may be less difficult to empathize with in another. The possibilities for difficult empathy may vary individually based upon personal experiences, values, and communities, as Walker was able to empathize with people who many others were not. At the same time, empathy is not only a personal effect but a social one, and the difficulty of empathizing with any particular person or group often depends upon the values and beliefs of those who would empathize. The social conditions of empathy are the focus of the next chapter. We also may recognize difficult empathy because of how it feels, what it takes to empathize, and the results of such works of empathy. Difficult empathy is unsettling. It pushes us to see ourselves differently in light of others, and to see others differently in light of ourselves. Because people who are the objects of difficult empathy tend to be those despised by society, any troubling of the strong distinction between their despicableness and our comparative commendability is uncomfortable. The work of difficult empathy requires us to recognize the fundamental humanity of others, to reflect upon the importance of social and historical contexts, to accept our own historical contingency and mediocrities, and to go against social pressures that would consider empathy for the despised as a threat. In my own teaching about empathy, and difficult empathy in particular, I highlight three values that support empathy: curiosity, humility, and generosity. These are values that inform our rhetorical encounters and understanding of others as well as of ourselves, and these values are evident in the examples analyzed in this chapter. I consider these values in more detail in the conclusion, but they are worth reviewing here in connection to the examples of difficult empathy in the chapter. I see curiosity in Coates’s approach to considering the past and wondering why people acted the way they did in failing to challenge terrible injustices. I also see curiosity in Herzog’s approach to the men on death row and to those who are part of the death row system, wondering what it is like to be them, how they came to be where they are, and what their experiences might tell us about our shared humanity. Curiosity is clear in Walker’s work and in their interviews with MAPs, their attention to their stories, and their desire to learn more about how they resist their attractions in the course of living their lives.

Difficult Empathy  63 Humility is obvious in Coates’s admonition that a failure to recognize our own mediocrity is at the heart of our failure to understand racial injustices. To do as Coates suggests, to ask the more interesting–more curious–question in assuming that we would not have challenged slavery and then to ask ourselves why not, is a humbling and troubling thing to do. It requires humility based on an understanding that, were we born in a different place and time, under different conditions, we might have been on the side of injustice, as we might be so now, in our own time. Or, had we been born into a different family in a difficult situation, and had we made the wrong friends, we might have a different relationship with the law. As Herzog tells Perry, destiny deals some people a very bad deck of cards, and we are lucky if we are dealt better. Humility does not negate agency or responsibility, but it does recognize that we are not the sole reason for our good standing in life. Finally, there is generosity in approaching others—in life and films and texts and research—first as human beings, to assume that they might have a story worth hearing, a perspective worth sharing, futures worth dreaming. To encounter others in this way is generous first because it gives them the benefit of the doubt when others would deny them that. It offers them empathy that they are usually denied. Moreover, difficult empathy is generous because it does not come without cost. As is clear in Walker’s case, difficult empathy risks not only one’s own sense of comfort and moral superiority but it also risks public backlash, questioning of motivations, social standing, and security. Difficult empathy generally receives little in terms of comfort or respect in return, especially because the respect of the despised does not carry much social value. Difficult empathy costs time and emotional and cognitive effort. It does not typically feel good. Those who extend difficult empathy do so out of respect and recognition of our shared humanity, because that means something. More fundamentally, they may extend difficult empathy even beyond other people in recognition of the desire of other living things to avoid suffering and to flourish as best they can, as mentioned by Rifkin. That desire to live and have a meaningful life is as good a foundation for empathy as any other, supporting even the challenging work of difficult empathy. Works Cited “A Joint Statement from Old Dominion University and Dr. Allyn Walker.” Old Dominion University, https://www.odu.edu/news/2021/11/a_statement_from_old_ dominion_university. Accessed 8 July 2022. “A Statement from Old Dominion University.” Old Dominion University, https:// www.odu.edu/news/2021/11/a_statement_from_old. Accessed 8 July 2022. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “A Muscular Empathy.” The Atlantic, 14 Dec. 2011, https://www. theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/. Coplan, Amy. “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 3–18. Fain, M. K. About 4W. https://4w.pub/about/. Accessed 8 July 2022.

64  Difficult Empathy Frequently Asked Questions. https://prostasia.org/faq/. Accessed 8 July 2022. Herzog, Werner. “Director’s Statement.” Werner Herzog Films, 2015, https://www. wernerherzog.com/main/de/html/films/films_details/brief_survey.php?film_id=68. ———. Into the Abyss. Investigation Discovery, 2011. Lynch, Dennis A. “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–23. Morton, Adam. “Empathy for the Devil.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 318–30. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, 1989. Oldcorn, Christopher. Trans Professor Defends Pedophiles as “Minor-Attracted Persons.” https://www.westernstandard.news/news/trans-professor-defends-pedophiles-asminor-attracted-persons/article_75d7ef08-d538-11ec-b747-b375eb980565.html. Accessed 23 June 2022. “Old Dominion University Statement.” Old Dominion University, https://www.odu. edu/news/2021/11/old_dominion_univers. Accessed 8 July 2022. Prostasia Foundation. Prostasia Conversations: Allyn Walker. Youtube, 8 Nov. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Bax5uQEVs. Rifkin, Jeremy. RSA ANIMATE: The Empathic Civilisation. YouTube, 6 May 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7AWnfFRc7g. Slatz, Anna. “Non-Binary” University Instructor Calls To “Destigmatize” Pedophilia. https://4w.pub/old-dominion-university-assistant-professor-comes-out-in-supportof-destigmatizing-pedophilia/. Accessed 23 June 2022. Svrluga, Susan. “ODU Professor Placed on Leave amid Uproar over Research into ‘Minor-Attracted Persons.’” The Washington Post, 17 Nov. 2021, https://www. washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/17/old-dominion-professor-allyn-walker/. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance. Penn State University Press, 1993. Walker, Allyn. A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. University of California Press, 2021. Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. ­Illustrated edition, Crown, 2019.

4

The Social Conditions of Empathy1

Late in the summer of 2010, freelance writer Rodger Jacobs was running out of time and options. He had moved from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to care for his ailing mother, who had since died. He and his girlfriend, Lela Michael, were about to be evicted from their rented home. He did not know where they would go or how they would manage. To express his frustration, Jacobs wrote a letter to the editors of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper. The editors replied by contracting Jacobs to write a first-person series of articles titled “The New Homeless: My Story.” At that time Las Vegas, once among the nation’s greatest growing economies, was the national leader in foreclosures and unemployment. A year earlier, the Las Vegas Sun had won a Pulitzer Prize for public service reporting, so a series focusing upon the plight of the new and nearly homeless corresponded well with the paper’s mission. An editor’s note to open the series explains part of the intent, relating Jacobs’s situation to readers by stating, “the Great Recession has created the new homeless, people with good work histories who are victims of unemployment and foreclosures. We won’t necessarily find them sleeping on a downtown sidewalk. We asked Rodger Jacobs to tell his story, in his own words.” The contrast of “new” and supposedly “old” homeless is troubling and speaks to the social issues involved in who is considered a victim worthy of empathy and who is granted space to tell their stories. Still, the series effectively highlights the economic uncertainties facing much of the population and amplifies the voice of one of those affected. As the series developed in three parts over four months, Jacobs chronicled his experiences as he and Michael walked the fine social and economic lines dividing those who have homes from those who do not. The Las Vegas Sun series is notable for how it highlights the social conditions upon which empathy is determined and contested. These are evident in the nearly seven hundred and fifty reader comments the articles attracted, including responses by Jacobs, Michael, and the series editor. Each article is accompanied by a documentary video. The first article in the series is titled simply “I Am Frightened.” It serves to introduce Jacobs and to explain how he came to be on the verge of homelessness. The second, published a month later, is titled “Hostile toward Homelessness” and updates Jacobs’s situation as he and Michael were now living in a Budget Suites of America extended-stay DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-4

66  The Social Conditions of Empathy hotel. Much of the second article is concerned with reader reactions to the first. That trend continues with the third article, titled “Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech,” in which Jacobs responds to his critical readers and tells of his plans to move back to Los Angeles, saying goodbye to a community that he feels has turned its back on him. Jacobs began writing the series to describe his difficult situation, but as it progresses, he becomes increasingly concerned with hurtful reader responses and how people in the community understand one another. I analyze Jacobs’s series to highlight the social conditions that help determine empathy. Empathy often is presented as something somebody has, as though it were located inside an individual’s head. I demonstrate instead how empathy is a social phenomenon, created through the social conditions that inform our encounters and the ways we understand and respond to one another. These social conditions are evident in my analysis of the Las Vegas Sun series, especially those conditions related to the assessment of suffering and responsibility and our places in relation to others in a community. (Disclosure: I worked at the Las Vegas Sun prior to the series being published.) I read the series with attention to how Jacobs is positioned socially, how he is read and how he writes. Since empathy is unevenly distributed, some members of a community are granted greater access to social empathy than others. My analysis follows the social logics and values enacted in what Daniel Gross describes as a “contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others” (3). I continue a rhetorical approach that understands emotions as socially and historically constituted (Gross, Micciche). A rhetorical perspective makes clearer the contingencies of empathy and, through that approach, allows for a critique of the ways and conditions that determine empathy. I begin with a further review of rhetorical work and theories of empathy for how they help establish empathy as a socially determined rhetorical phenomenon. I include a reading of Lloyd Bitzer’s theory of the rhetorical situation for how it may be understood to inform empathy as a rhetorical device, appeal, and effect open to constraints. I then consider two key social conditions of empathy: assessment of victim status and responsibility; and recognition of the self-other overlap that acknowledges the significance one person holds for another as members of a community with shared vulnerabilities. These conditions—how they are defined, the value placed upon them, and who is entitled to them—are key determinants in expressions and extensions of empathy. Victim status, communal membership, and shared vulnerabilities depend on social values and positions. Evident in the series and my analysis are competing ideologies and discourses that work to support or inhibit empathy. A resulting irony of empathy is that the very social forces that put people at risk and would necessitate a greater extension of empathy also inhibit empathy by increasing social divisions and fueling the reluctance of readers to recognize their own vulnerabilities in the lives of others. During times of widening social inequalities and fraying community

The Social Conditions of Empathy  67 relations, empathy itself is imperiled, as is clear in Jacobs’s series. I conclude by surveying wider media responses to Jacobs’s series and the dismay of writers who read the series as indicating a breakdown in community connection during times of economic distress. This chapter identifies a key difficulty in accounting for and effecting empathy as its dependence upon social conditions that exist beyond individual control. The chapter expands our understanding of the rhetorical situation and makes rhetorical use of theories from social psychology and moral philosophy, particularly those of philosopher Martha Nussbaum. A contention throughout the chapter is that a focus on empathy as an individual experience neglects the social production of empathy, which may be best considered from a rhetorical perspective. Theories of Empathy within and beyond Rhetoric Empathy has long been a rhetorical concern. It traditionally is aligned with emotional appeals and identification. In much of this literature, empathy is evoked as a discrete personal event. However, as Ann Jurecic reminds us, “Affects such as empathy—as well as love, shame, disgust, terror, and happiness—are more than personal” (11). Empathy is more than personal. This understanding of empathy is in line with the work of theorists such as Gross and Sara Ahmed, who have pushed for a rhetorical understanding of emotions as not merely personal or neurological phenomena but as occurring in socio-historical spaces. Following philosopher Amy Coplan, I understand empathy as a simultaneously cognitive and affective event that allows us to attempt to understand “what it is like to be another person” (6). But whereas Coplan emphasizes the constitutive psychological processes of empathy—affective matching, other-oriented perspective-taking, and selfother differentiation—here, I emphasize the conditions that work to determine empathy as a social and rhetorical phenomenon. A cognitive as well as affective understanding of empathy also is favored by Kristie Fleckenstein, who writes, “As a complicated mixture of affect and rationality, empathy lends itself to deliberative discourse—to negotiation, debate, and persuasion—in the public sphere and serves as the foundation for social justice” (707). Fleckenstein builds upon the work of psychologist Martin Hoffman, as well as on Nussbaum’s theory of compassion, in an attempt to see empathy as mediated through language as a force for prosocial cohesion. Understanding empathy as language-mediated, combining affect and cognition, and as a key element in building communities, highlights empathy’s value as a rhetorical concept. Perhaps the most significant rhetorical work related to empathy is Kenneth Burke’s concept of identification. For Burke, identification is not a single rhetorical event but a process of repetitions and iterations, “a general body of identifications” (24). That general body of identifications contributes to the rhetorical situation that determines the possibilities for empathy. Diane Davis has expanded on Burke’s concept of identification. Reading Burke’s treatment

68  The Social Conditions of Empathy of identification alongside Freud, Davis collapses the distance between self and other to present identification as working through “an a priori affectability or persuadability that precedes and exceeds symbolic intervention” (125). Davis supports her argument by citing advances in neuroscience, namely the discovery of mirror neurons, to move identification beyond individuals and symbolic mediation to include a state of being and potential for identifying together. While an emphasis on mirror neurons risks distracting from the social conditions of empathy, Davis uses this work and Freud’s to argue for a persuadability that exists prior to and in excess of intentional argument. This makes persuasion always part of the rhetorical situation. We are already to a degree identified or not identified with others prior to our encounters. In this sense, the conditions of empathy are determined significantly by social and situational conditions even before one person meets another. More recent rhetorical studies of empathy have focused on intercultural communication and the use of empathy in the advancement of social justice. Lisa Blankenship offers a theory of rhetorical empathy that builds upon Burke’s identification and Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening. “I define rhetorical empathy as both a topos and a trope, a choice and habit of mind that invents and invites discourse informed by deep listening and its resulting emotion, characterized by narratives based on personal experience,” Blankenship writes (5). She adds that she does not intend to treat rhetorical empathy “as if empathy is something located solely in the individual, an emotional connection unrelated to social codes and beliefs constructed, circulated, and maintained through language systems” (7). Peiling Zhao examines the functions of empathy in rhetorical borderlands where both the empathizer and the empathizee might challenge each other’s understanding and subjectivity. As Zhao explains, An intersubjective rhetoric of empathy asks readers in intercultural encounters to position each other as subjects, to engage each other’s emotions; not through identification either with other’s emotions or pure rational reasoning, but through mutual and simultaneous recognition of difference and commonality. (70) Dennis Lynch uses the metaphor of proximity to theorize how writers can invite readers to identify with them while also purposefully frustrating readers in that identification, a strategy writers may use to inhibit easy empathy and instead promote the difficult work of trying to understand other people. Lynch finds that such texts “seduce us into ambiguous social spaces—by using the very obstacles to empathy we have been discussing—and by using those obstacles as possibilities for social exchange rather than as reasons for refusing interaction” (11). Empathy then becomes the reason for and field on which more nuanced exchanges might happen, with fuller discursive considerations of both commonalities and differences. My analysis of Jacobs’s series

The Social Conditions of Empathy  69 draws on this work by extending the rhetorical study of empathy to identify and analyze key social conditions that help determine empathic encounters. The significance of empathy, especially to whom and by whom it is extended, often is as much a situational effect as an interpersonal one: it varies due to social positions, values, commitments, and means of encounter. Like Zhao, I incorporate psychological concepts of empathy to better capture complex empathic interactions, and I place these in conversation with rhetorical and philosophical theories of empathy. Useful for the rhetorical study of empathy is Nussbaum’s theory of compassion, grounded in Aristotelian moral philosophy. Nussbaum arrives at three elements in the cognitive structure of compassion: (1) the “belief or appraisal that the suffering is serious rather than trivial;” (2) “the belief that the person does not deserve the suffering;” and (3) “the belief that the possibilities of the person who experiences the emotion are similar to those of the sufferer” (306). The third condition adds to the idea of “eudaimonistic judgment” in which “the person must consider the suffering of another as a significant part of his or her own scheme of goals and ends. In effect, she must make herself vulnerable in the person of another” (Nussbaum, 319). I view shared vulnerability to suffering and eudaimonistic judgment as working in tandem with the related and broader condition of a “self-other overlap,” as proposed by Adam Galinsky and others for the creation of social bonds. These elements together produce a social condition of empathy that includes shared possibilities, vulnerabilities, recognition of a common humanity, and a sense of mutual significance in one another’s lives. In drawing on Nussbaum’s cognitive elements of compassion, I do not mean to give the impression that compassion and empathy are interchangeable, although the borders between the two concepts can shift depending upon who is working with them. Nussbaum views empathy as related to and supporting compassion, writing, “If empathy is not clearly necessary for compassion, it is a prominent route to it” (332). For her, empathy leads to and influences moral judgments but does not depend on congruence of judgment, as compassion tends to. In feeling compassion, we generally take up a moral position in direct support of another, but one can empathize with somebody one does not necessarily support. Nussbaum is concerned with the role of emotions in forming judgments and appraisals of others. Others, such as psychologist Paul Bloom, position compassion as less emotionally and affectively engaged than empathy, more general and detached. Bloom’s idea of compassion lacks empathy’s biases but also the motive force and power of empathy that Hoffman, for example, locates in its affective qualities. I follow Nussbaum’s lead in attending to how appraisals are socially determined, how the ways we feel about and judge others are based upon social positions and our conceptions of community. Two of the most important social conditions of empathy arise where responsibility and the self-other overlap are determined. The more readily we see somebody as a victim the more easily we might empathize with them. A greater challenge is to empathize with those whom

70  The Social Conditions of Empathy we do not see as victims, perhaps because we view them as at fault for their fate. The appraisal of fault often is a question of context, history, ideology, and social conditions. Those who understand one’s life conditions to be primarily a result of social and historical forces largely beyond one’s control may be more apt to empathize with people who are victims of those forces (Bracher, Literature and Social Justice). Those who view one’s life conditions to be largely a result of one’s own decisions may be more likely to assign responsibility and resist empathizing with the victims of social forces. These attitudes inform the social conditions that underlie appraisals of innocence or responsibility, appraisals that support or inhibit empathy. In Literature and Social Justice, Mark Bracher defines these ways of considering others as faulty person-schemas of autonomism versus a more correct schema of situationism. Those schemas broadly align with George Lakoff’s theories of moral categories in political thinking, with the conservative “strict father” morality favoring autonomism in connection with responsibility and selfreliance, while the liberal “nuturing mother” morality emphasizes care and makes empathy itself a priority (162–67). Dominant political logics, personschemas, economic forces, and other social conditions can be understood as doing much of the work in producing possibilities for empathic encounters. Although questions of responsibility overlap with political morality, the assessment of responsibility remains a critical social condition for the contestation of empathy. As will be clear in Jacobs’s series, assessments of responsibility and victim status are much disputed. Empathy and the Rhetorical Situation With “The Rhetorical Situation,” Bitzer refocused rhetorical analysis from the rhetor to the situation. The important question for rhetorical understanding then was not which speech or rhetorical strategy the rhetor chose to employ, but how that choice was defined and limited by the situation that prompted the rhetorical event. Bitzer identified three constituent features of any rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. These features are worth considering more deeply in connection to how they determine the roles and possibilities of empathy in a rhetorical encounter. Acknowledging the influence of the rhetorical situation in questions of rhetoric and empathy—in how empathy is defined, to whom it is extended, to whom denied, the reasons for its extensions and denials, and the significance that empathy holds in any situation—helps shift attention from empathy as an individual event to a socially determined one. This is not to say that the situation is entirely determinant of the role and possibilities of empathy in a rhetorical encounter—the role of the individual certainly does matter—but so much discourse around empathy focuses on individuals, it is helpful here to refocus on social conditions and the rhetorical situation. Bitzer’s first constituent of the rhetorical situation is exigence, which Bitzer defines as “an imperfection marked by an urgency” (6). An exigence is a

The Social Conditions of Empathy  71 question, a problem, something needing to be addressed or done. There can be many exigences, and not all are rhetorical. An exigence is rhetorical if it can be addressed through rhetorical action, according to Bitzer. In the case of Jacobs’s series in the Las Vegas Sun, the exigence may be read as the Great Recession and the people who were the “new homeless” as a result. The Great Recession was tearing apart the social fabric of the community, leaving formerly housed people without housing, and threatening further social, economic, and personal distress. The series is attempting to address this distress by helping members of the community understand one another. Jacobs’s hope is that that understanding might also allow greater empathy among community members, particularly among the housed and the unhoused, so that the community might better support those who are most suffering under the Great Recession. The second constituent in Bitzer’s rhetorical situation is audience. He is narrow in his definition, not extending the class of audience to just any reader or hearer. For Bitzer, “properly speaking, a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (7). Bitzer’s theory allows for other kinds of audiences, such as scientific audiences capable of receiving information and poetic audiences capable of experiencing the art of poetry. These are different from rhetorical audiences, which should be able to bring about the change desired through the discourse. This is a limited view of audience, that they must be in a position to bring about change, and that a scientific audience capable of receiving knowledge is not rhetorical because the transmittance of knowledge is not itself enough of a change. I do think, however, that there is a social change called for in Jacobs’s series for the Las Vegas Sun. I do not take him to be wanting simply to inform the readers of who he is or to offer them information. Jacobs is writing to readers so that they might empathize with him; that is his goal. By empathizing with him, they might also help constitute a more supportive community, might offer him direct personal support and a sense of belonging through their comments to the series, so that he and others in his position feel as though they have a home in Las Vegas even if they are among the “new homeless.” Perhaps, as an extension, Jacobs and the Las Vegas Sun may be working toward some changes in social policies, but those are more distant goals. I view the social cohesion, understanding, and empathy sought by Jacobs as a rhetorical project, as a rhetorical address to the exigence of the Great Recession and its felt effects in Las Vegas. Another way of considering the audience for the series is in the problems they, the readers, face in their own experiences of the Great Recession and what they hope reading the series will do for them. This might be another exigence for the series. Readers also are witnessing a community under severe economic and social stress by the Great Recession. They may be seeing houses in their communities foreclosed upon and wondering who is being affected and how likely they are to suffer a similar fate. The assumed questions for many readers are, Who are the “new homeless,” how did they get to be homeless,

72  The Social Conditions of Empathy why should this matter to me and my community, and what should we do about it? The situation also has an implied risk that needs to be addressed, that as more people are losing their homes, how might readers themselves be at risk of losing their homes as well? The series is intended to address these questions, to help readers understand the personal effects of the Great Recession and to better understand people who are directly affected by it. In short, readers have questions and concerns, a lack of personal information, and the series is supposed to address those concerns and gaps in understanding. Bitzer’s third constituent of the rhetorical situation, and the most important in this analysis for the social conditions of empathy, is constraints, which he defines as those elements of the rhetorical situation that have power to constrain decisions, actions, and effects. Bitzer states, Standard sources of constraint include beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives and the like; and when the orator enters the situation, his discourse not only harnesses constraints given by situation but provides additional important constraints—for example his personal character, his logical proofs, and his style. (8) These constraints do much of the work in determining who might be extended empathy, who might be denied empathy, and the significance of that empathy. In the case of Jacobs’s series, we can quickly note a few significant constraints. First, there are the social feelings attached to homeless people. They often are not extended empathy because they are viewed as responsible for their situation due to supposed moral failings, such as laziness, poor money management, addictions, a lack of education, and so on. Of course, blaming the homeless for their lack of housing often is blaming the victim, as homelessness may be rightly viewed as a social failing rather than a personal one. The relationships between empathy and responsibility, or claims and appraisals of victim status, will be analyzed in greater detail later in this chapter. It is worth noting here that social attitudes toward the homeless are a significant constraint against Jacobs’s appeals to empathy, even though the series is intended to push against those attitudes as applied to people such as Jacobs, people who formerly had secure housing. A related social constraint is the libertarian sensibilities, the sense of individual autonomy, that is dominant in much of the Western United States, perhaps especially in Las Vegas. The city is known for its social permissiveness with legal gambling, easy marriages and divorces, and relaxed liquor laws. Although prostitution is not legal in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located, it is legal elsewhere in Nevada, the only state in the country where that is the case. This sense of autonomy can come at a price to social cohesion and solidarity. Because empathy often includes a prosocial motivation, a sense of wanting to act on the felt empathy, the detachment offered by a sense of autonomy, by the idea that each person is on their own, can impede empathy.

The Social Conditions of Empathy  73 A final social constraint, which also will be detailed more extensively later, is the personal requirement or consequence of empathizing with Jacobs. For readers, to empathize with Jacobs may require that they also see themselves and their assumed secure housing differently. In empathizing with Jacobs, they may have to acknowledge the precarity of their own living situation, that they themselves are one medical emergency, one lost job, or one change of a landlord’s mind away from losing their own housing. This is a painful recognition. I argue that some readers may not want to empathize with Jacobs because of their attachment to their sense of their difference from him, specifically their sense of housing security. In the decades since Bitzer’s work, rhetorical scholars have critiqued and built upon his model of the rhetorical situation. A particularly productive line of thinking has been in the area of rhetorical ecologies that challenge, blend, and expand upon the constituents of the rhetorical situation as proposed by Bitzer. In her influential article “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Jenny Edbauer places the rhetorical situation “within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling” and “destabilizes the discrete borders of a rhetorical situation” (5). As Edbauer demonstrates, in order to more fully account for the rhetorical situation and the dynamics at work, one must consider public feelings around a topic, how those feelings are stated, how they are revised and amplified in iterations, and how they circulate. Edbauer writes, “A given rhetoric is not contained by the elements that comprise its rhetorical situation (exigence, rhetor, audience, constraints). Rather, a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field” (14). We need to recall the viral intensities around the Great Recession, foreclosures, homelessness, and responsibility circulating at the time of Jacobs’s series. In reading Jacobs’s series, it helps to try to take ourselves back to the Great Recession, when Las Vegas was a national leader in foreclosures, and when fears of losing one’s job and savings were all too real (and, for many, have remained so). Many people were looking for somebody to blame. The financial institutions and mortgage companies that had benefited from the economic boon and from selling deceptive financial products, such as adjustable-rate mortgages, for short-term gains did not offer much of a target, as the decision-makers in those companies resisted responsibility and were generally able to avoid prosecutions; many of the other employees in those companies also were victims of the companies themselves and of the larger recession they helped trigger. So, some people, looking for somebody to blame, blamed people such as Jacobs, those who suffered directly and whom they considered personally responsible for their own suffering. This is not to say that there is no personal agency in situations in which a person loses their home but that blaming the individual solely or predominantly can miss the social forces at work against them. Similarly, this is not to say that there is no personal agency on the part of the rhetor in trying to evoke or appeal to an audience’s empathy, but the failure or success of such appeals is based on the

74  The Social Conditions of Empathy situation as well as the rhetor, sometimes more so. The influence of rhetoric and situation work both ways. As Nick Turnbull writes in his reappraisal of the rhetorical situation, “Rhetoric is of a social relation but it also makes a social relation; the direction of influence can go either way. The critics have concluded that rhetoric and situation are different but also co-constructed” (120). All of this blurs the boundaries of the constituents of Bitzer’s situation, allowing the influence to go in multiple directions, without undercutting the usefulness of thinking systematically about the sites and moments of rhetorical encounters and their constituent parts. Edbauer’s model acknowledges that “the elements of rhetorical situation simply bleed” as there are no discreet boundaries to contain the feelings, associations, and events that affect rhetorical possibilities and success (9). Rhetoric is embedded in the places, publics, affects, and moments of encounters with others. We encounter not merely a situation, Edbauer concludes: “We encounter rhetoric” (23). The significance of that encounter is in how it affects our understanding of ourselves and others. The possibilities of empathy in our rhetorical encounters depend upon social conditions. In general, the social conditions of empathy are those social forces, values, logics, and possible subject positions that create or inhibit possibilities for empathy prior to the encounter itself. They are conditions that empathy may work with or against. They are often overlooked in theories of empathy that stress the individual experience as individual. Highlighting these social conditions is the work of this analysis of empathy. Two critical conditions focused upon here are (1) the designation of the victim as not at fault for their situation, especially by understanding the influences of history and social conditions upon another’s life situation; and (2), recognition of a self-other overlap through a shared humanity, shared worthiness of concern, and shared potentialities and vulnerabilities. These conditions are made explicit in Jacobs’s series and the reader comments. Awareness of these conditions is important in broadening our rhetorical understanding of empathy because they inform many of our debates over social policies, the plights and positions of others, and how we might and should respond to those. With these social conditions of empathy in mind, I return to Jacobs’s account of his life among the nearly and newly homeless as well as the responses of his readers in the Las Vegas Sun. A Social Condition of Empathy: Reading Responsibility, Victimhood, and Homelessness Empathy with the homeless is fundamentally a question of social positions and values. Homelessness is not something that resides in the individual. Homelessness is a social phenomenon, one determined by conditions of poverty, access to mental health services and healthcare broadly, potential family and community support, and other factors. The fact that Jacobs is introduced in an editorial note as one of the “new homeless,” as one who should

The Social Conditions of Empathy  75 not be blamed for his homelessness because he has a “good work history,” underscores the dominant social logic that homelessness is tied to individual character and responsibility rather than social conditions. Jacobs offers his story to counter that logic. He addresses himself to readers who are assumed to share commonplace logics regarding personal responsibility, success, and failure, while he, a writer on the verge of homelessness, has learned to refuse to deploy those commonplaces. There are clear hierarchies among the homeless as they are generally perceived. Some are considered more deserving of empathy than others. Also at issue are the social positions of the would-be empathizers and how they understand their own vulnerabilities to homelessness and their communal commitments. These social conditions are evident throughout the discussions of responsibility and victimhood in Jacobs’s series. Jacobs writes to strengthen his position as one of the homeless who are entitled to empathy. He is a victim of the economy, of unscrupulous lenders and landlords, and of fate. In “I Am Frightened” Jacobs describes himself and his girlfriend, Michael, as “brutalized by the economy” and as in debt to a “merciless payday lender.” There is the “draconian” property management company, the state bureaucracy he must contend with, and even the “cockroaches and black widow spiders” that Jacobs must pay an exterminator to eradicate. In the second article, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” Jacobs further presents himself as a victim, now of a generally hateful readership and a largely indifferent community. Jacobs describes the day the first article is published. He spends much of that day responding to allegations of “sloth,” “arrogance,” “weak moral and ethical judgment,” “alcoholism,” and more, as readers attack his character in order to assign him responsibility (“Hostile toward Homelessness”). He writes that the pain he felt in reading the comments has been enduring. He first thanks those who have shown him and Michael sympathy and support and then adds, “But any warmth of kindness was lost to judgmental creatures wrapped in their conservative ideology and intoxicated by their own venomous rhetoric” (“Hostile toward Homelessness”). Jacobs is arguing against readers who misunderstood his situation and, more significantly, against a preexisting ideology that has nothing to do with him personally but nevertheless works to undermine the empathic reading he is attempting to evoke. In the third and final article, Jacobs again likens the economy to a malevolent force. Worse for him than the economic pain or the pain in his joints is the hurtful speech generated by the series. He writes of the “meanspirited remarks that have fueled my decision to leave town” (“Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech”). Jacobs thanks those community members who offered assistance and donations, but the suffering he describes is sufficient to compel him to leave. In his telling, he is twice the victim, first to the economic conditions that produced his homelessness and second to the “conservative ideology” and “venomous rhetoric” that fuel the meanspirited comments of readers in response to his story (“Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech”).

76  The Social Conditions of Empathy Many of the commenters voice a strong individualist ideology and argue that Jacobs is responsible for his situation. Here, it is worth noting that at the time of the series the Las Vegas Sun website asked that readers comment through registered accounts but allowed them to register those accounts under any display name they chose. The Las Vegas Sun likely did so in the idea that forcing commenters to register would create more of an online community and, hopefully, lead to higher quality comments. While they are commenting through registered accounts, the commenters can remain anonymous behind usernames. This anonymity seems to further increase the distance and limit the sense of personal, social connection between Jacobs and his readers. With greater interpersonal distance, appeals to empathy can be weakened. The moral obligation that Arne Vetlesen attributes to empathy as a demand placed on the viewer appears diminished when the viewer can act as an anonymous participant. Some commenters are upset that Jacobs does not assume more responsibility. Commenter Area51 writes, “Rodger basically does not want to take responsibility for his actions” and “Oh, please. The ‘they are picking on me’ attitude is wearing thin” (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” posts 124, 172). Area51 sees Jacobs as appealing for status as a victim while denying his own responsibility. In a detailed comment, Thia writes, Tell me sir have you learned and grown as a person from this hardship? Tell me what do you intend to do differently so you do not end up in this position again? What offends so many, sir, is that you are not in as bad of a place as you believe yourself to be in. What offends so many sir is that even with all the kindness you have received you write in a manner that sees only what you do not have and did not get. What offends so many, sir, it that you write in a manner that says I am a victim pity me, and takes no responsibility for your own choices. Not once have I read that you admit you regret anything. Not once have I read that you in anyway are humbled or grateful. You write, sir, like the kindness and generosity of others is your right and due you. (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” post 106) Thia not only denies the validity of Jacobs’s claim to empathy but is offended by the ways in which he portrays himself as a victim of social forces and circumstance. Much of Thia’s comment argues in accord with commonplace conservative beliefs regarding responsibility and victimhood. In this logic, people demonstrate responsibility by taking adverse experiences as opportunities for learning and growth, promising to change, acknowledging their errors, and demonstrating work toward improvement. Thia does not see enough recognition of this logic in Jacobs’s article to warrant empathy. She picks up on an idea frequently stated in the comments, that Jacobs acts as though something is owed to him. Who is granted and who is denied victim status is politically and culturally defined. Those who recognize the determinant power of social forces on another’s station in life are more willing to

The Social Conditions of Empathy  77 see somebody on the verge of homelessness as a victim of the economy and related social forces. Conversely, those who do not see such forces as having a determinant power on one’s station in life are more likely to attribute Jacobs’s situation to a personal failing, such as pride or laziness. Bracher observes as much in his critique of autonomist schemas and their contributions to social injustice (Literature and Social Justice). In these ways ideology rather than individual judgment and experience contributes to empathy in a rhetorical encounter. The commenters who voice a competing logic that does entitle Jacobs to empathy do so by focusing on the role of unexpected events in an individual’s life. They point out that everybody makes mistakes, a way of asserting the self-other overlap, that they too have made mistakes. They contend that it is not the reader’s place to judge Jacobs’s decisions, only to empathize with him. For example, in response to Jacobs’s article “Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech,” TheNextOpinion writes, “As for the people saying that bad decisions contributed to this situation you are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, I’ve never met a person who made perfect decisions every time” (post 103). The intention is not to absolve Jacobs of his responsibility for his situation, but rather to argue that responsibility is not the real issue because everybody makes mistakes. Anybody has made enough good and bad decisions to be celebrated and blamed for any outcome in their life. Similarly, arguing for recognition of circumstances beyond Jacobs’s control, OpinionVegas adds, As I read this unfortunate story, I couldn’t help but think about what our society has become? It seems that many among us have forgotten the importance of helping people less fortunate than ourselves and have developed a sense of denial in concluding that other people’s dire straits are always because of things that they did or did not do with their lives and that they could exert control over all of life’s variables—that simply is not possible. Have those unforgiving souls actually forgotten that many things in life—good or bad—are undeniably influenced by circumstances totally beyond one’s control? (Jacobs, “Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech,” post 15) OpinionVegas views Jacobs’s situation as “unfortunate” and admonishes others for being too quick to judge Jacobs rather than to offer support. Relatedly, psychologist C. Daniel Batson has shown that feelings of empathy can lead to altruistic actions to help others through the empathy-altruism hypothesis. OpinionVegas attributes the rush to judgment to “a sense of denial” because people want to view others as responsible for their own fate so that they will not have to fear the likelihood of a similar misfortune in their own lives. Notably, OpinionVegas finds the fault not with Jacobs but with what society has become, as conditions of empathy have more to do with social values, ideologies, and the uneven distribution of responsibility—weighing

78  The Social Conditions of Empathy most heavily on the homeless themselves—than they do with individual guilt. This view conforms to Bracher’s situationist schema, an understanding that positions in life depend significantly upon social forces that are not under personal control (Literature and Social Justice). Jacobs showcases empathy and a non-judgmental response to the situations of others when he writes in the second article of going for a haircut. “I did get a haircut—from a kind Wal-Mart beautician who was recently homeless with two teenage sons to care for,” he writes, adding, “I did not ask what ‘mistakes’ she made that put her in that perilous position” (“Hostile toward Homelessness”). Here, Jacobs is modeling the type of empathy that he would expect of his readers, of not looking for mistakes and personal failings as primary causes of homelessness. In the article, empathy is acknowledged not by those in reliably higher social positions—those who would look down upon and judge Jacobs as a way of distancing him and his position and vulnerabilities from themselves—but from the perspective of a Wal-Mart beautician who had recently found herself in a similar position of homelessness. The possibility of empathy in this case depends on the likelihood that somebody has been in a similar position or can imagine being so, a move that levels the standing between Jacobs and his respondent. Jacobs notes earlier in the article that a friend had warned him to be prepared for negative reader responses: “People are uncomfortable with and hostile toward the topic of homelessness,” my friend Joseph Mailander cautioned. “More often than not, they want to believe that the homeless got in their situation because of mistakes that they have made rather than confront the uncomfortable truth that fate is often random and undeserved and homelessness could happen to anyone in the blink of an eye.” (“Hostile toward Homelessness”) Jacobs’s series becomes a place for enacting and engaging competing ideologies, those that attribute homelessness largely to the homeless and those that attribute homelessness chiefly to fate and social forces. Perhaps because of this, Jacobs is reluctant to assign himself responsibility as contributing to his situation through any of his own decisions, because doing so might strengthen the position that homelessness is the fault of the homeless. Responsibility is a recurring issue throughout the series and the reader comments. It speaks to how homelessness is assessed and who is considered responsible for their homelessness. For those arguing along the lines of homelessness as an individual product, Jacobs is not a victim. He is instead largely the cause of the situation in which he has found himself. These commenters do not empathize because assigning responsibility allows them to focus on the decisions that Jacobs made, fixating on his failure to acknowledge complicity in this situation rather than considering circumstances that are beyond Jacobs’s control and attending to the ways in which he is now suffering.

The Social Conditions of Empathy  79 It really should not matter whether Jacobs is responsible for his situation, or how much responsibility he bears, when he clearly is suffering and, in that suffering, deserves some empathy, but people generally are reluctant to empathize with suffering they see as self-inflicted, especially if they do not see the sufferer accepting responsibility for their suffering. Numerous commenters focus on factors from Jacobs’s personal life to inform their reading of his deservingness of empathy and his assignment of victim or non-victim status. All details become evidence for granting or denying empathy. Jacobs is seen smoking in a photo accompanying one of the articles and having a beer in one of the videos. In his freelance writing career, Jacobs had done screenwriting for adult films, which is mentioned in the comments. These biographical details are presented as evidence of personal failings and are cited as reasons that Jacobs is not entitled to empathy. Reference to these factors demonstrates the social considerations and moral values that decide claims to being a victim. The empathy that would or would not be extended to Jacobs was determined by his social position and dominant social values before he sat down to write his articles. In arguing for his empathy, he has to argue against these values and beliefs. A Social Condition of Empathy: Reading Self-Other Overlap The empathic social condition of recognizing a self-other overlap is built on simultaneous awareness of commonality and difference. Burke’s concept of identification is useful in this context because of his attention to the necessity of difference in order for identification or any act of communication to take place. Burke writes, “For one need not scrutinize the concept of ‘identification’ very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division. Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall” (23). Burke’s insight is that identification is possible only if there is some difference across which one might identify, some division that gives cause for seeking in rhetoric similarities and understanding. That division is itself a social construction, resulting from identities and positions. There is no need or possibility for empathy if there are no differences for one to empathize across and different individuals to empathize with. There also is no need for empathy if we all are entirely removed from one another with no means of encounter. The possibilities for empathy are determined by the kinds and degrees of division in any social context. I understand empathy as an approximation that depends upon the simultaneous realization of both differences and commonalities, which often are socially constituted. The shared significance in the self-other overlap can be traced back to the Aristotelian idea that pity requires a belief that we and our loved ones have similar vulnerabilities and possibilities for suffering, as must the victims with whom we would empathize. Aristotle supports this understanding of pity, his closest comparable term to empathy. He argues that in order to understand the suffering or emotional conditions of others, we need to be able to

80  The Social Conditions of Empathy relate them to our own capacities and experiences. “Pity may be defined as a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon,” Aristotle writes (101, Rhetoric, II.8, 1385b). “And, generally, we feel pity whenever we are in the condition of remembering that similar misfortunes have happened to us or ours, or expecting them to happen in the future” (102, Rhetoric, II.8, 1385b). Aristotle is arguing that the assignment of personal responsibility inhibits pity because we pity only the undeserving sufferer. More importantly for the condition of self-other overlap, he contends that we need to understand ourselves as having or as capable of having vulnerabilities similar to those of another. If we do not, we will have trouble feeling pity or, I would note, empathy. Finally, Aristotle comments on the importance of personal experience in recognizing a self-other overlap. He also realizes that we recognize that overlap not only through personal experiences and capacities but through family and friends. As Hoffman has argued, this is one way to leverage the familiarity bias—the bias that we most readily empathize with those most like us—as a tool of empathy rather than an obstacle, by imagining those close to us in the situation of a supposed victim, a move he calls “multiple empathizing” (24). Pity differs from empathy because pity depends upon imbalances in social positions, as addressed in the chapter on easy empathy. One typically pities another of lesser social standing, while possibilities for empathy are strengthened through similar social standings. The social condition of self-other overlap also reinforces Nussbaum’s assertion that empathy requires eudaimonistic judgment. This is the requirement that one believes the other person matters, that the life of the other holds significance for one’s own life, and that the other should be included within one’s circle of concern. Eudaimonistic judgment can be based upon an understanding that one and another are members of similar communities, a condition for empathy that exists prior to the encounter itself. It can also build upon attention to the personal and human dimension of an issue. Vetlesen highlights the importance of this attention when he writes, “Missing the human dimension of the situation, I also, and for that very reason, miss its moral dimension” (179). The idea of a shared humanity—that there are some similarities in the human experience and that human concerns transcend difference—contributes to selfother overlap by acknowledging shared vulnerabilities and possibilities. A shared humanity also establishes a common community so that one believes that another’s suffering is one’s own concern. This is akin to psychologist Robert Kegan’s idea of the interindividual form of identity, which Bracher describes when he writes, “When I have an interindividual identity, every other human being is an essential component of my sense of self, such that when anyone else suffers, I suffer, and when anyone else experiences joy or contentment, so do I, through that person” (Social Symptoms of Identity Needs 62).

The Social Conditions of Empathy  81 I do not intend the idea of a common humanity, however important it is as an ideal, to somehow negate important differences, a negation that tends to work in the interests of the more powerful. These are not all-encompassing commonalities. I mean to recognize those differences even while affirming that critical differences do not cancel out the basic potential similarities in human experience or, more importantly, the value of concern for others and for creating the social conditions that would enable such concern, those being hope for a more egalitarian and just world. Acknowledging the significance that another holds for oneself is a powerful social condition that goes a long way in supporting empathy. The social condition of self-other overlap requires one to view another’s life as having some significance for one’s own, such as membership in the same community. Self-other overlap also requires belief in some commonalities in what people experience or may experience. Cultural, historical, social, and personal interpretations and expressions of human experiences differ widely, but to recognize a self-other overlap we need to have some confidence that there is something shared within our experiences of what it means to be human. This is necessary in order to relate one’s experiences to those of another and another’s experiences to one’s own. The self-other overlap as a social condition for empathy is built upon the premise that what happens to somebody else could happen to me or at least is relatable to me through shared human vulnerabilities. If the prospect of being unemployed is not a possibility in my life, if my social position is such that I am sufficiently insulated from all concerns of homelessness, then I likely will find it more difficult to empathize with somebody who has recently lost their job and who is now on the verge of homelessness. My use of self-other overlap is based on Galinsky’s psychological concept in conjunction with Nussbaum’s explanation of eudaimonistic judgment. Within psychology, self-other overlap refers to seeing ourselves in others and others in ourselves, especially through perspective-taking. As Galinsky et al. write, “Through both seeing the self in the other and seeing the other in the self, perspective-takers are able to navigate a complex social world, coordinating their behavior with a diverse set of individuals, and establishing multicultural social bonds” (110–11). The likelihood of seeing ourselves in others depends upon how we and others are socially positioned and defined, making the possibility of self-other overlap, and therefore of empathy, a social product. Nussbaum’s understanding of eudaimonistic judgment does not require perspective-taking but is a process of evaluation in which the suffering of another is deemed personally significant. The overlap here occurs in looking for commonalities, sharing vulnerabilities, and recognizing the importance of our lives to one another. The particulars of human lives differ in all kinds of critical and unequal ways, but to recognize a self-other overlap we need to have some confidence that there is something common within our experiences of what it means to be human and to believe that those experiences matter.

82  The Social Conditions of Empathy When Jacobs writes in support of the condition of self-other overlap, he is essentially arguing for his place in the community and his likeness to other community members. In describing himself and Michael as good, hardworking, community-minded people, for example, Jacobs is making a case for their similarity to an audience of similar people. In “I Am Frightened,” Jacobs writes of himself and Michael, “We have been hardworking people all of our lives, honest and forthright, passionate lovers of art and culture, but soon we may need to learn how to read books and study art under the glare of a streetlamp.” Jacobs is describing himself and Michael in terms that many of his readers would apply to themselves and to other members of their community. He is saying, in essence, we are like you, equal in social standing and worthiness of concern. The editor’s note at the beginning of the series makes a similar argument in describing the “new homeless” as “people with good work histories,” which solidifies Jacobs’s and Michael’s standing by distinguishing them from those homeless who supposedly do not have good work histories. Jacobs adds, that although they are upstanding people, they are in a desperate situation, implying that his readers could just as easily find themselves in a similar spot. If we are like you, then you also are like us. If not for different circumstances, some of the readers could be in a situation very much like that of Jacobs and Michael. Indeed, the entire premise of the series is that the experiences of “The New Homeless” are common in Las Vegas during the Great Recession and that Jacobs and Michael are representative of many people facing uncertain prospects. Jacobs is fond of evoking a sense of community at the end of his articles. At the end of the first and second pieces, he attempts to showcase how his life might intersect with the lives of his readers to demonstrate that they are part of a shared community. For example, he ends his first article with a scenario in which his path crosses those of his readers. And so, in your travels across the Las Vegas Valley, should you encounter a weary-looking man resting against a streetlight, one hand on a wooden cane, the other clutching a dog-eared paperback of a Georges Simenon Inspector Maigret novel—my escapist lit choice of the moment—you will be gazing into the face of one of the new homeless. Give a friendly toot of the horn as you drive by and consider stopping and dropping a fiver or a ten spot into a hand that is mangled and scabbed-over by psoriasis…Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. (Jacobs, “I am Frightened”) Jacobs attempts several things here. By providing details as though he were a character in a scene, he works to engage the readers’ imaginations as if they are encountering him not only on the page but on the street. He tries perhaps a bit too hard, betraying a little social anxiety, to demonstrate his

The Social Conditions of Empathy  83 cultural standing in referencing an escapist literature that likely would be unfamiliar to most readers. Jacobs writes of readers “gazing into the face of one of the new homeless,” which could stand for the rhetorical work of the series as a whole. His request is friendly and personal so that readers might “give a friendly toot,” and he reassures them that they need not worry about catching his psoriasis. He also is putting himself in the place of others, imagining his readers’ travels and concerns. The overall effect is not only to put a friendly face on homelessness, but also to show that Jacobs and his readers are part of the same community and could pass one another on the street. The phrase that resonates most strongly is Jacobs’s “should you encounter,” as it may be read both as a hypothetical and as a question of social obligation. Do readers look Jacobs in the face and allow themselves the risks and obligations of such an encounter, or do they pass him by? Empathy, and the self-other overlap in particular, is directly concerned with ethical obligations and encounters, textual and otherwise. By the second article, Jacobs has started to doubt his invitation to this encounter even as he continues to emphasize the self-other overlap. At the end of “Hostile toward Homelessness,” he notes the size and commonalities of the near homeless community at the extended-stay motel where he is living. He writes, My path converges with the path of the schoolchildren, backpacks and textbooks in tow, their voices loud and cheerful as they scatter across the sprawling grounds of the Budget Suites. So many families live here, so many people struggling as I am, and I cannot help but feel that we are invisible to the community at large. (“Hostile toward Homelessness”) Jacobs demonstrates the self-other overlap in the temporary housing that he and his neighbors are forced to accept as they attempt to maintain somewhat normal lives. He asserts that their lives retain significance to the larger community—that they as a community are there struggling, seeing their children off to school, living at the motel—even if much of the larger community would ignore them. Some readers devalue the idea of community through their arguments that the community does not owe Jacobs anything, as if you can have a community without commitments to others. A more interesting move is that which uses the self-other overlap to shift attention to one’s own experiences. This occurs in comments that leverage empathy as a way of critique. It is similar to what Hoffman describes as “egoistic drift,” when one’s self-focused empathy becomes a focus on the self at the expense of the other (56). These moves demonstrate ways of affirming the value of empathy even while denying Jacobs’s own claim to empathy and, through that, denying the standing of community in general. That denial may be in the form of offering one’s

84  The Social Conditions of Empathy own story as a way to validate one’s judgment of Jacobs. Such an argument is, in effect, that I understand your experience, and because I understand your experience, I can critique it and discount it. For example, Thia writes, I have empathy for you Mr. Jacobs, I know what daily pain is like, I know what it is like to be angry and defiant. I know what it is like to have your body fail you. The thing is no one owes us anything. You, sir, are asking for charity and compassion as if it is your right as if your plight is everyone’s concern and problem. The truth is it is not their problem; the truth is many who are working make it on less money than you have. (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” post 106) Thia bases her empathy on her personal experience in situations supposedly similar to those facing Jacobs. Because she knows what “daily pain” is like and what it is like “to have your body fail you,” she positions herself to assess Jacobs’s claims to suffering and empathy and to find them insufficient. There is a leveraging here, of pain against pain. Although she writes that she has empathy, Thia argues for an understanding of community in which “no one owes us anything.” The self and other that Thia present here do not overlap, a logic that undermines the possibilities of empathy. Thia uses her expression of empathy as a way to negate the social work of empathy. Similar moves are made by other commenters who relate stories of being homeless and how they drew upon their own resources to improve their situations, confirming a “strict father” individualist morality of independence and self-reliance rather than one of care. Arguing against empathy in this mode may be an attractive option for commenters because it allows them to assert their own position as empathic individuals while denying Jacobs’s claim to empathy. This point is important because empathy holds status as a positive social value. Those denying empathy do not want to deny empathy based upon of the value of empathy itself. Instead, they deny empathy based upon questions of entitlement and individual responsibility. They are not against empathy; they are against empathy for Jacobs. Much more common in the comments is affirmation of the self-other overlap. This occurs in the form of quotes and commonplaces, such as when tonyasal4369 writes, “There but for the grace of God go I” (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” post 263). Some comment that Jacobs is not so unlike others in the decisions he has made. Askmrmark responds to criticism of Jacobs and Michael eating at a Denny’s, apparently an unseemly indulgence to some readers, by writing, “Give them a break folks, You would do the exact same thing when you get in this position” (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” post 186). Some commenters validate the social condition of self-other overlap by writing that they understand Jacobs’s situation because they have had similar experiences, further underscoring the argument that Jacobs’s situation is not unique. They use their positions as community members and as readers and commenters to argue that others should see Jacobs

The Social Conditions of Empathy  85 as not so dissimilar from themselves. For example, Kausinkonfusion writes, “You two do not deserve the ridicule that was bestowed upon you in your 1st article (or the articles to come), and I told you face-to-face, I am in similar shoes as you both, and in life you can not possibly always have the ‘right’ choice to be made” (Jacobs, “Hostile toward Homelessness,” post 65). The self-other overlap is a multi-faceted social condition that may be evident in many of the types of statements related to Jacobs’s series: in recognizing one’s place in a community, in arguing for similar possibilities and vulnerabilities to suffering, and in making the case for the significance of one’s own life in relation to the lives and concerns of others. It is at the heart of empathy. At Stake in the Social Conditions of Empathy Jacobs’s series garnered media attention well beyond Las Vegas for what it said about social conditions and the ways that people relate to one another in times of economic distress. The reaction was consistently one of dismay at how the responses of the commenters suggested a further breakdown in community during the Great Recession. For example, Choire Sicha writes in The Awl, The constant reminder of the American lack of empathy is astounding. It’s everywhere...And so it was with great wariness that I approached the comments section at the end of this first-person story by a man in Nevada who, driven into destitution by disability, family medical bills, the current lack of work and shady landlords, will find himself homeless at midnight tomorrow. These comments: well, they did disappoint. They went from awful to judgmental to trashing to witch hunt. The quality of the comments also concerns Susan Bruce at the AFL-CIO’s Working America blog. She writes, “The lack of compassion is troubling— but the level of anger is even more disconcerting. I suspect that the anger some people have for the homeless is fueled by their own fears that they are only a paycheck or two away from being homeless themselves.” It is a denial of personal vulnerability, as otherwise recognized in self-other overlap, that Bruce views as fueling angry reader responses. For Sicha and Bruce, the reader comments begin to eclipse the articles themselves as the most significant rhetorical events within the series due to how the readers argue against empathy and how their comments draw attention to debates concerning our positions and obligations to others. As ethical considerations—and as considerations that have been shown to contribute to altruistic or prosocial action (Batson)—the social conditions of empathy contain rhetorical and practical consequences. Empathy makes demands based upon our memberships in communities. The social conditions of empathy support the position that we are owed something by others, even if only common regard. This is part of being human. Vetlesen argues as much when he writes of the connection between the human and the moral: “The

86  The Social Conditions of Empathy link is such that the perceived human reality of a situation involving the weal and woe of others addresses me, calls upon me, lays a moral obligation on me because I am, see myself as, and wish to be able to continue to see myself as a human being” (10). He adds that such recognition requires a participatory, rather than a detached, attitude. This is what is at stake in the social conditions of empathy. To recognize and support the social conditions of empathy is thus to view oneself as part of that human community—and perhaps also non-human community, if one empathizes more broadly—so that one might succeed or fail in keeping the terms of membership in that community, the first expectation of which is the common regard of others. The consequences are evident in Jacobs’s series. Once one empathizes, it is more difficult simply to continue to the next article and leave Jacobs and others like him to their fates while resting easily and confident that those fates are not shared. Debates over the social conditions of empathy demonstrate how these conditions are reinforced or undermined. Many commenters may be resistant to Jacobs’s claim to empathy because they are afraid to acknowledge their own perilous positions, which points to the demands that empathy makes on us and our relations, even in how we understand ourselves and our own vulnerabilities. Precarious positions can hinder empathy because, as Hoffman writes, people are less likely to empathize when they are themselves in uncomfortable or unstable positions. A precarious society is a less empathic one. Furthermore, as Bracher notes, most people externalize and attack their vulnerabilities or negative attributes in the form of others, so that they can remain “largely ignorant of just how similar they are in the depth of their selves or souls to those they consider to be the dregs of humanity” (Social Symptoms of Identity Needs 55). Identity is among the most fiercely guarded of personal concepts. To open up one’s identity to questioning and to acknowledge vulnerabilities is a frightening prospect, especially for those who are not so secure in their conceptions of self or in their social standing and security. The social conditions of empathy matter because they inform the ways that we understand ourselves and our relations and responsibilities to one another. The importance of context in Jacobs’s series and the disputed nature of empathy suggests we need a greater appreciation of situation in our study of empathy and the conditions upon which it is enabled and suppressed. The setting of Las Vegas also is a significant factor, as it was then the national leader in foreclosures, adding a sense of communal, and not just individual, instability. Jacobs felt that he had to escape this situation if he was to successfully solicit the empathy of his readers and his community. His solution was to move to a different community, one he at least expected would offer greater possibilities for empathy. Jacobs and Michael both left Las Vegas for California, and, I later was sorry to read, both died in 2016 (Mailander). A rhetorical perspective pushes our understanding of empathy in new directions. It demonstrates that empathy is not something contained within our heads so much as something that emerges in our encounters and that

The Social Conditions of Empathy  87 depends upon our social values, positions, beliefs, and how those inform the ways we read and respond to one another. These are the social conditions of empathy, the structures of relation and discourse that support or inhibit empathic responses. A rhetorical perspective reminds us that empathy is unevenly distributed, that some people are considered more entitled to it than are others. Considerations of Jacobs’s status as a victim, his personal responsibility for his situation, and his place within the community are not so much about Jacobs himself as they are about the values attributed to those social positions and what it means to be a member of a community. This rhetorical perspective of empathy shifts our attention from individual appeals to the social conditions that structure and determine the validity of those appeals so that we are able to ask, Who gets to be empathized with? Who gets to empathize? And what are the implications of that empathy or its absence? The unfortunate irony of empathy is that precisely when empathy is most needed, when social divisions and inequalities are greatest, the social conditions that support empathy often are at their weakest. During the Great Recession, for example, the social and economic factors that pushed more people toward homelessness also pushed others to attempt to reassure themselves and imagine that they did not share the vulnerabilities that made their neighbors homeless. This response is of concern during a time of increasing disparities in wealth, opportunities, and exposures to harm, along with growing political partisanship and social division. A rhetorical perspective on empathy foregrounds questions of the relationships between self and others, imbalances in power and positions, and how we might work to bolster the social conditions that enable more empathic encounters. Note 1 A version of this chapter originally was published as “‘Should You Encounter’: The Social Conditions of Empathy.” Poroi, vol. 14, no. 1, 2018, https://doi. org/10.13008/2151–2957.1265.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004. Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, Dover Publications, 2012. Batson, C. Daniel. Altruism in Humans. Oxford University Press, 2011. Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 25, 1992, pp. 1–14. Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Bracher, Mark. Literature and Social Justice. University of Texas Press, 2013. ———. Social Symptoms of Identity Needs. Karnac Books, 2009. Bruce, Susan. “Two Paychecks Away from Homelessness.” Main Street, Working America, Community Affiliate of the AFL-CIO, 2010, accessed 3 Feb. 2011. Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1950.

88  The Social Conditions of Empathy Davis, Diane. “Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, pp. 123–47. Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, Sept. 2005, pp. 5–24. Fleckenstein, Kristie. “Once Again with Feeling: Empathy in Deliberative Discourse.” JAC, vol. 27, 2007, pp. 701–16. Galinsky, Adam, et al. “Perspective-Taking and Self-Other Overlap: Fostering Social Bonds and Facilitating Social Coordination.” Group Processes & Intergroup ­Relations: GPIR, vol. 8, no. 2, Apr. 2005, pp. 109–24. Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to ­Modern Brain Science. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hoffman, Martin. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jacobs, Rodger. “Homelessness and the Indignity of Hurtful Speech.” Las Vegas Sun, 2010, lasvegassun.com/news/2010/dec/05/indignity-hurtful-speech. ———. “Hostile toward Homelessness.” Las Vegas Sun, 2010, lasvegassun.com/ news/2010/sep/26/hostile-toward-homelessness ———. “I Am Frightened.” Las Vegas Sun, 2010, lasvegassun.com/news/2010/ aug/29/i-am-frightened. Jurecic, Ann. “Empathy and the Critic.” College English, vol. 74, no. 1, 2011, pp. 10–27. Lakoff, George. Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd ed. University of Chicago Press, 2002. Lynch, Dennis A. “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–23. Mailander, Joseph. “Barely Legit: Rodger Jacobs, 1959–2016.” Minor Literatures, 2016, minorliteratures.com/2016/11/21/barely-legit-rodger-jacobs-1959–2016joseph-f-mailander. Micciche, Laura. Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching. Heinemann, 2007. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 195–224. Sicha, Choire. “Why is American Selfishness so Widespread Now?” The Awl, 2010, www.theawl.com/2010/08/why-is-american-selfishness-so-widespread-now/ Turnbull, Nick. “Political Rhetoric and Its Relationship to Context: A New Theory of the Rhetorical Situation, the Rhetorical and the Political.” Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 115–31. Vetlesen, Arne Johan. Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance. Penn State University Press, 1993. Zhao, Peiling. “Toward an Intersubjective Rhetoric of Empathy in Intercultural Communication: A Rereading of Morris Young’s Minor Re/Visions.” Rhetoric ­Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 60–77.

5 Empathy with the Enemy

In June of 2022, a few months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the journalist and political commentator Andrew Sullivan hosted the writer Robert Wright on his podcast to talk about the crisis in Ukraine. Early in the interview, Sullivan asks Wright what he thinks caused the war. Wright replies with a note of caution. “I think it’s important to say at the outset that we should be able to have an honest discussion about the causes of war without the fear that that discussion will remove the blame from Putin’s shoulders,” he says. The fear is that attempting to understand Vladimir Putin’s perspective and motivations will cause one to be labeled a Putin apologist. Wright underscores that there is no doubt that Putin violated international laws and that he holds greatest responsibility for the death and destruction of the war. Sullivan follows up by asking how we might understand Russia’s actions regarding the war. Wright’s response highlights the need for and difficulty of empathy with the enemy: You have to put yourself in Putin’s shoes. And again, this is kind of a triggering phrase for some people, when you start talking about putting yourself in the shoes of somebody who has done something like this, they think you want to feel their pain and stuff. I don’t want to feel his pain; I don’t care about his pain. But I do want to understand what he’s up to, what he’s likely to do. In other words, I want to exercise cognitive empathy but not necessarily emotional empathy. There is a lot happening in Wright’s comment on empathizing with Putin, or putting yourself in Putin’s shoes. Wright notes that it is triggering for people. We are comfortable putting ourselves in the shoes of some people but not the shoes of others, and this applies not only to our own exercises in empathy but also to the empathy we see others exercising as well. We do not want to put ourselves in Putin’s shoes, and we do not want to hear others do so either. As I will develop throughout this chapter, there are many reasons we may not want to put ourselves in the shoes of somebody like Putin. We might think of empathy as like a gift, a perspective or feeling that we should only share with the deserving, as a limited resource of goodwill that Putin has forfeited. We might find Putin’s position so repugnant that we do not want to entertain it, DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-5

90  Empathy with the Enemy even momentarily, because doing so would be so uncomfortable, unpleasant, or might risk contaminating us. We also might not want to entertain Putin’s perspective because doing so could risk the clarity of our hatred for him and our certainty in the moral superiority of those opposed to him. Finally, as Wright warns, trying to understand Putin’s perspective could risk our own acceptance within the opposition to Putin, have us labeled a Putin apologist, and jeopardize our position in communities where support for Ukraine and opposition to Russia is ubiquitous. Lest I make the mistake Wright is warning us of, let me add that everything I have read about the Russian invasion of Ukraine firmly places the responsibility, and the resulting terrible suffering and loss of life and destruction, on the shoulders of Putin and the Russian leadership and military. The courage and fortitude of the Ukrainian people has been inspiring, and the atrocities committed in the war have been sickening; they demand justice. I do find it upsetting, however, when calls for that justice take the form of celebrating videos showing drone bombs falling upon wounded Russian soldiers. Our empathy with the people of Ukraine should not inhibit us entirely from recognizing the suffering of others in the war and their families, even those others serving on the side of the invading military. Empathizing with the enemy can be a very difficult empathy, and it can be a perverse one when imagining the enemy’s pain brings us joy. Wright makes some important distinctions in his comment. He says that he does not want to feel Putin’s pain but does want to understand what Putin is up to. Wright makes a distinction between emotional empathy and cognitive empathy, which is more focused on perspectives without their emotional components. This can be a useful distinction, but I take it more as a difference in emphasis. As reviewed with Amy Coplan’s definition of empathy, definitions of empathy can disagree over the necessity of empathy being both emotional and cognitive or one or the other. There should not be too hard a distinction between understanding another’s feelings and another’s perspective or motivations, since feelings, perspectives, and motivations all inform one another. The fullest form of empathy tries to account for feelings, perspectives, and motivations and attempts to reflect upon the relationships among those. I do take Wright’s point, however, that he is not trying to empathize with Putin in order to share or validate Putin’s feelings as a way of expressing concern for Putin himself. To the degree that there is emotional attunement in the empathy with Putin that Wright advocates, it is in the service of understanding the other areas of empathy, Putin’s perspective and his motivations, which adds to a wider understanding of the crisis in Ukraine and offers strategic value in considering what to do in response. Wright emphasizes the strategic value of empathy, particularly in global politics, when he adds a moment later in the interview, If I can just say one more thing about this cognitive empathy thing, it may seem to people like there are more urgent things to do right

Empathy with the Enemy  91 now than revisit the question of whether we made mistakes leading up to this, and there certainly are. But what concerns me is I think the generic mistake we made was not putting ourselves in Putin’s shoes, in the shoes of the Russian people, understanding how they view the world, understanding what would be viewed as a threat or an unacceptable slight or a show of disrespect. I think we failed at doing that. I think we are bad at doing that. I think America is bad at that generally, and I don’t think we can afford to keep being bad at it. Wright is commenting upon the strategic value of empathy in attempting to understand how others see the world. I do not want to reduce empathy to strictly strategic uses, since that negates the moral significance of empathy and empathy’s potential to build connections and relationships, especially through the sharing of emotion and concern for the wellbeing of others as members of larger communities. When empathy is seen as strategically important, its use raises questions of whose interests are being served, those of the empathizer or the empathizee. This is a fundamental question in empathy, that of whose interests are being served. Leslie Jamison puts it well in her essay “The Empathy Exams” when she writes “empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion” (5). Whatever the balance of interests served, the strategic value that Wright highlights is important and may be better supported by empathy when the goal is a shared peace, which can accommodate the welfare of others rather than disregarding it. To not entertain the viewpoints of others, to not try to understand how they see the world, leaves one with a very self-centered and inherently limited perspective. Wright says that America generally is bad at considering the perspectives of others in the world. The disregard of the views of others can be a consequence of power, as the more powerful do not have to consider the views of the less powerful since the less powerful have fewer means to affect the more powerful. Studies have shown on a personal scale that more powerful individuals tend to focus on their goals and ignore less powerful individuals, while less powerful individuals have to consider the perspectives of the more powerful since they are more likely at the more powerful’s whim (Hogeveen et al.). This dynamic may also play out at the international level, with the United States as the more powerful actor. Wright is not the first to consider the potential use of empathy in international relations. His comments remind me of Carl Rogers’s essay on communication in which he advocates for empathic listening, restatement, and understanding. Rogers begins by noting some of the most significant barriers to empathy, specifically that listening with the purpose of understanding rather than making evaluative judgments requires courage, because we ourselves might be changed in the process. As Rogers writes, “If you really understand another person this way, if you are willing to enter his private world and see the way life appears to him, without any attempt to make evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself” (86). This

92  Empathy with the Enemy is one of the features that makes empathy difficult, the risk of being changed in the process, the feeling of opening up one’s identity in exposure to another. The second challenge Rogers identifies is the emotional charge of empathy, which may be part of the reason Wright suggests putting emotional empathy aside in trying to understand Putin’s perspective. As Rogers writes, “It is just when emotions are strongest that it is most difficult to achieve the frame of reference of the other person or group. Yet it is the time the attitude is most needed” (86). We certainly see this in attempting to understand Putin’s perspective, that because we are so appalled and angered by Putin’s actions, we have a harder time trying to entertain his view of the world. I am tempted to add here some further condemnation of Putin’s perspective, but that would be reasserting the evaluative judgments Rogers warns us against. I do not take Rogers to be saying that we should not judge at all but that if we want to come closer to truly understanding, then we must try to put our judgments aside, at least for a moment, even if only to pick them up again later. Later in his essay, Rogers offers that his empathic listening approach could be applied not only to individuals but to large groups at the international level “to increase the amount of listening with, and to decrease the amount of evaluation about” (87). He is writing during the Cold War and imagines if a “therapeutically oriented international group went to the Russian leaders” and offered to summarize and restate their views to the satisfaction of the Russian leaders, and then to do the same with the leaders of the United States, so as to move the two nations closer to mutual understanding (87). It might not be perfect, he admits, but it could be progress. Rogers ends his essay by wishing that his breakthroughs in person-centered therapeutic understanding and empathy might be employed on larger scales, despite the many challenges. “Can we take this small scale answer, investigate it further, refine it, develop it and apply it to the tragic and wellnigh fatal failures of communication which threaten the very existence of our modern world?” he asks (88). His question is just as pressing now as it ever was, and it applies at the local as well as national and international level. Rogers and Wright both contend that this is difficult and something we in the United States may be particularly bad at. As elaborated in the chapter on easy empathy, it is relatively simple to imagine the perspective of distant others in a self-serving way that makes one feel superior and gives one permission to do what one already wants to do, whether that is invading a country to liberate people one imagines are waiting for foreign liberators, or to punish a foreign aggressor whose own imperial malevolence and moral depravity are considered the sole causes of war. Trying to recognize our own positions and interests while also seeing others as they see themselves and, perhaps even more challenging, to attempt to see ourselves as others might see us, is much more difficult, especially when used to inform actions. That also is much more enlightening as part of a larger process of mutual understanding and with a goal of successfully addressing national and international problems. I take Wright’s request to be similar to that of Rogers, that we should attempt to

Empathy with the Enemy  93 understand the perspectives of even those we consider in some form to be our enemies so that we might better understand how to effectively engage them in ways that benefit all, such as avoiding war. I open this chapter with an in-depth consideration of Wright’s comments on Russia, and place those in conversation with Rogers’s Cold War-era suggestions of empathic understanding in the service of global security, because they highlight the challenges and, often, the necessity of empathizing with the enemy. For the remainder of this chapter, I distinguish empathy with the enemy as a particular mode of difficult empathy. I consider the challenges against empathy with the enemy by analyzing pieces arguing against empathizing with supporters of Donald Trump after his election to the presidency, even though many of those supporters fit the demographic—working class people without the benefits of a social safety net and post-secondary education—traditionally championed by Democrats. I then analyze Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right for Hochschild’s more successful, though no less difficult, attempts at empathizing with people otherwise viewed as political opposition. Finally, I discuss the importance of empathizing with one’s perceived political enemies in a democracy by reviewing such empathic efforts in the form of Shui-yin Sharon Yam’s concept of “deliberative empathy,” Lisa Blankenship’s “rhetorical empathy” and its quality of yielding to others through exchanging stories, and the practice of “deep canvassing” for building political coalitions. My purpose throughout the chapter is to identify the barriers to empathy and to note its possibilities, benefits, and importance at a time of significant polarization, when one’s own group member status is defined in part by who one’s enemies are. Empathy with the Enemy amid Election Fallout I do not want to overemphasize the “enemy” part of empathy with the enemy. By “enemy” I mean somebody or a group of somebodies that are seen as oppositional, with that opposition being a key feature determining the relationship one has with them. The position of the enemy does not have to be somebody against whom one is literally fighting but, more importantly, somebody whose success in a particular area is seen as coming at one’s own expense. Winner-take-all political contests are a good example. Empathy with the enemy could just as easily be called empathy with the opposition, but that does not have the same ring to it, nor does it speak to the heightened stakes that can be at play. Empathy with the enemy, even more so than empathy with the opposition, can be notably difficult. The concept of empathy with the enemy describes a mode of rhetorical engagement that is primarily social, as determined by group memberships rather than personal relationships; that is defined by oppositions, so that we know who belongs to our group partly by who is opposed to our opposition; and that typically incorporates a zero-sum view both of success and of empathy itself. Empathy with

94  Empathy with the Enemy the enemy comes at the assumed expense of empathizing with others considered more deserving of that empathy or even as a betrayal of one’s own side, if empathy itself is seen as signaling alignment or agreement, as it often is. Empathy with the enemy risks one being considered a traitor, although empathy with the enemy often is necessary if one is looking for the best possible outcome for all parties, not only to destroy the enemy, or if one is looking to move past a relationship defined by oppositions. That is to say, we need empathy with the enemy if we are to have any hope of living in one another’s company. Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, the question of how to appropriately understand and relate to Trump supporters became a heated issue in the media. The debate over empathy for Trump supporters is a useful example of what is at stake in empathy with the enemy. To place this debate in context, it is important to remember the extremely emotional atmosphere of the 2016 presidential election; the prevailing assumption going into the election, especially on the left, that Trump would lose; and the mendacious, bullying, insulting campaign that Trump had run. Those who were afraid for themselves and their neighbors to be soon living under a Trump presidency had good reason. For some, this fear was expressed in condemnation of Trump voters, all 62 million of them. Writing in Slate one week after the election, political commentator Jamelle Bouie argued that Trump voters forfeited any right to empathy with their support of Trump. As the subtitle for the article reads, “People voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes. They don’t deserve your empathy.” The title is even more provocative, reading, “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter.” I do not know that Bouie wrote the title, but it does reflect the sentiment in the article, in which Bouie presents a zero-sum view of empathy that reduces the moral regard of people to their political candidate support and who is most likely to be a victim of a Trump administration. I do not in any way mean to mitigate the threats that Trump posed or the hateful, bullying rhetoric he employed in targeting vulnerable people based upon their identities. This is not any kind of excuse for Trump. I mean to demonstrate that empathy for perceived enemies is difficult because empathy is so often treated in these zero-sum terms, as something that somebody has to earn, and as a betrayal if it is offered to one’s opposition rather than one’s allies, even when the opposition represents around half of a country of more than 320 million people. A zero-sum view of empathy is evident in Bouie’s essay when he presents a choice of empathizing with Trump supporters or empathizing with the expected victims of a Trump administration. Bouie writes, Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and empathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans.

Empathy with the Enemy  95 There is not much to argue against here; certainly, people facing the threat of state-sanctioned violence are deserving of empathy. My objection is to the idea that only they deserve empathy and that any empathy for the suffering or attention to the perspectives of Trump voters comes at the expense, and perhaps further victimization, of those who are most vulnerable under a Trump administration. Bouie makes a point similar to the one above when he writes toward the end of the essay that Trump voters are morally responsible for the consequences of a Trump administration, which is expected to be hostile to millions of Americans the administration views as not welcome: To face those facts and then demand empathy for the people who made them a reality—who backed racist demagoguery, whatever their reasons—is to declare Trump’s victims less worthy of attention than his enablers. To insist Trump’s backers are good people is to treat their inner lives with more weight than the actual lives on the line under a Trump administration. At best, it’s myopic and solipsistic. At worst, it’s morally grotesque. Here again, we see Trump’s enablers and Trump’s anticipated victims as defined through their opposition, so that they are seen as discrete groups. Are they such easily sorted populations, or might not some of Trump’s enablers also suffer under his administration, or might some of those opposed to Trump personally benefit from his presidency? The nation as a whole might suffer under a Trump presidency. I do not mean to suggest that only an individual’s personal fortune matters but rather to question whether the country’s total population should be so neatly divided in terms of support and moral standing. Bouie also presents a view of an individual’s moral worth that is reduced to a person’s vote for a particular candidate in a national election. Voting certainly is a moral act, especially when confronted with a candidate as vile as Trump, but people are much more complicated than that in terms of their standing as human beings worthy of moral consideration. As considered in the previous chapter on the social conditions of empathy, responsibility and empathy often are positioned as at odds, so that only innocent victims are entitled to empathy, but it need not be that way, especially if we allow a larger, more situational, and I would argue more accurate view that considers people’s actions as determined in part by the situations in which they are acting. In that respect, Trump supporters may not be simply enablers of a victimizer, but they may simultaneously be victims themselves in other ways, as so many people are to varying degrees. A view that would allow Trump supporters to also be considered worthy of empathy, while supporting political candidates that would deny empathy to others and would punish already disadvantaged communities, corresponds to a stronger situational awareness of what determines people’s actions. A person’s decision to vote for Trump may not be wholly the product of circumstances under that person’s control. Psychologist Marianne LaFrance reminds us of the actor-observer effect, also known as the fundamental attribution error, in

96  Empathy with the Enemy which people explaining their own actions are much more likely to point to the influence of situational factors, while people explaining the actions of others are more likely to point to the actor’s personal qualities, such as personality and motivation. LaFrance reviews research that demonstrates that an observer’s empathy with an actor in considering that person’s feelings and perspective helps correct for the attribution error. Mark Bracher, in his pedagogy of teaching literature for social justice, likewise advocates for empathic perspective-taking as a way to correct the attribution error in its failure to account adequately for situational factors. I understand Bouie to be writing in anger, fear, and moral outrage at what Trump’s election means for those who might suffer most under his administration. He asks us to keep our attention on those anticipated victims, which is indeed important, although I do not think we need to stop there. I also see Bouie as arguing against the demand that people empathize with Trump supporters, and here I agree. Empathy can be hard; upsetting; and requiring of effort, emotional and otherwise. I do not think anybody should demand empathy of anybody else, and those in positions of relative power certainly should not demand empathy of those in positions of relatively less power. In the worst cases, victims should not be demanded to empathize with their victimizers, which can inflict additional suffering on victims. This point cannot be made too forcefully: empathy should not be demanded of others, and the oppressed should never be pushed to empathize with their oppressors. Victims of a Trump administration should not be expected to empathize with Trump. At other times, we may write in support of the effort to empathize without demanding it. Bouie presents his article as a response to political activist and rabbi Michael Lerner, who had written in the immediate aftermath of the election a New York Times opinion piece titled “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters.” In the piece Lerner faults the left for shaming Trump voters, particularly for their race and religion, and for upholding a classist view of meritocracy that blames the poor for poverty. The left is right to be concerned about the defense of immigrants and minorities, Lerner writes, but it is wrong to discount the pain of predominantly rural, white, religious Americans, who also suffer under an economic system that favors the wealthy. Lerner concludes, Democrats need to become as conscious and articulate about the suffering caused by classism as we are about other forms of suffering. We need to reach out to Trump voters in a spirit of empathy and contrition. Only then can we help working people understand that they do not live in a meritocracy, that their intuition that the system is rigged is correct (but it is not by those whom they had been taught to blame) and that their pain and rage is legitimate. This is a call to empathy that does not look to punish Trump supporters for their votes, as much as that punishment may appeal to those morally outraged

Empathy with the Enemy  97 at support for Trump. To offer empathy for Trump supporters, as Lerner proposes, is not to lose sight of the people most at risk of suffering under a Trump administration. Lerner is not presenting empathy as part of choosing sides. Instead, he is suggesting that empathizing with Trump supporters and recognizing their pain might help them reconsider their understanding of the problem and to look for redress other than following Trump’s suggestion that they blame immigrants and members of minority communities. To shame Trump supporters, as they had been shamed before by the left, is more likely to retrench racial and cultural divisions rather than uniting the poor and working class to challenge the economic status quo. The contrition that Lerner advocates is difficult, as recognizing the pain of a population that had only a day before inflicted a Trump presidency on the rest of the nation. It also should in no way be considered as accepting the racism of those Trump supporters who are racist, and certainly not the racism of Trump himself. As a final entry to the challenges of empathizing with Trump voters following the 2016 election, I want to consider an essay by comedian and writer Baratunde Thurston, published in Vox the week following the election, titled “Empathy Isn’t a Favor I Owe White Trump Voters. It Has to Go Both Ways.” Thurston’s essay is notable for displaying some empathy while also acknowledging the difficulty of empathy, the need for it to be reciprocal, and the desire to create stronger communities through recognition of one another’s pain and collective, creative resistance to those forces that would divide us and further inflict pain. Thurston opens his essay by recognizing his own position and his own feelings, writing, “I’m hurting, and I’m tired, and I’m not surprised.” This recognition allows the reader to understand the feelings that Thurston brings to the essay, that this is a particular person writing this essay, and to appreciate that the recognition of feelings is important to Thurston. Thurston acknowledges those who are most at risk following the election and highlights the corrosive social consequences of a nation, and especially children, watching a bully win through bullying. Thurston then demonstrates some empathy by reflecting on what it feels like to support a candidate who loses a presidential election. “The pain liberals are feeling today is similar to the pain Mitt Romney’s voters felt four years ago. I remember people crying over Romney’s loss, and I remember laughing at their tears. Now I’m the one crying,” he writes, before wondering if we all would have been better off if Romney had won that election and we had avoided a Trump presidency. This is a remarkable move, to recognize amid one’s own pain and disappointment how others felt when they were the political losers and oneself the political winner. Thurston continues, I hear these calls for empathy with the “white working class” that lashed out (notice it is never the black or brown working class we are urged to hear). It is a compassionate and noble request, and it is one I am sympathetic to. I know I was often too busy, occupied with my own pain and those of the people I see, to think too hard about what

98  Empathy with the Enemy happens to white identity in the face of rapid demographic, cultural, technological, and economic change. I know the political parties have failed, and the economic system has failed, and the media has failed, and not just failed “my” people but the great middle of we the people… So I know I could have and can do more to listen, to be compassionate, to operate from a place of love. But more than what I could have done is what white people themselves could do. For this election is in part about white people’s relationship to whiteness and each other. I quote Thurston at length because there is so much that he is doing with empathy in this passage. He hears the calls for empathy and responds first by calling it a “compassionate and noble request.” Empathy is valuable for Thurston—he later writes, “So, yes, more empathy for the people who lashed out. That’s never a bad thing”—but he does not see empathy itself as the point. It is a means to a greater end. Thurston recognizes his own failures to empathize. That is hard to do; it also demonstrates accountability. He then extends that accountability past himself, arguing that there is more white people could have done too in order to prevent the consequences of the election, to more fully address earlier the pain and misdirected anger of other white people. Thurston makes a similar point after saying that empathy is never a bad thing, adding, “But I also have another more pointed reaction to the people I’m supposed to be showing empathy for: Suck it up.” I read this call for accountability, based in one’s own empathy and one’s own sense of accountability, ultimately as an act of love, because Thurston is positioning himself and white voters as members of a larger community; distinct members, with distinct positions and experiences and vulnerabilities, but nevertheless community members who can recognize one another’s pain and can hold one another accountable. Thurston ends his article by arguing that we need more empathy broadly, from all sides. “I know compassion and empathy are hallmarks of the higher road. I also know it’s the harder road to travel because those who lashed out barely acknowledge that road exists. They often don’t need to take the high road because the low road gets them where they need to go,” he writes. He shares that he is both empathetic and angry, seeing those emotions as potentially collaborative rather than mutually exclusive, as they work to drive change. “I get to be both. We all should be able to be both, but as we discuss the need for empathy, let us remember it needs to go both ways,” he writes. “It is not a cross solely to be borne by the oppressed in order not to hurt the oppressor’s feelings.” In calling for the higher road of empathy and compassion, and in calling for everybody to travel that higher road, Thurston also is calling for those in opposing parties to nevertheless see their stories as Americans as woven together. The system is rigged, he writes, but by the wealthy and the entrenched interests against the working class and poor of all races and backgrounds. He calls for a new American story, and for that we need to use our imaginations, listen to one another, and empathize with

Empathy with the Enemy  99 even those we might regard as our political opposition. “We need a new story that starts with who and where we are now and defines where we want to go,” he writes. “A story that includes the immigrant, the incarcerated, the evangelical, and the engineer. A story that redefines what success means for a nation founded imperfectly on near-perfect ideals. A story that encourages us to see sacrifice for each other as gain for us all.” For Thurston, community, accountability, and change starts with imagination, empathy, and storytelling. The stories, however, have to be shared, not stories of opposition but of shared interest, stories that in Martha Nussbaum’s terms also allow us to exercise “eudaimonistic judgment” as we tell of the ways we matter to one another, even making ourselves “vulnerable in the person of another” (319). To do this in the person of a political opponent is a challenge. At stake in calls to withhold or extend empathy to one’s political enemies is the possibility for community. The pain, fear, and anger following the election of Trump to the office of President of the United States were very real and understandable. Trump posed a distinct threat to American democracy, as was clear in his refusal to peacefully transfer power should he lose re-election, a threat that he made good on with the violence of Jan. 6, 2021. He also was seen as posing a threat to individual Americans, many of them the most vulnerable and marginalized in the country, as well as immigrants who aspired to be American citizens and join the country. The anger at Trump supporters for his election absolutely is understandable. However, to deny the possibility of empathizing with Trump supporters, many of them already suffering as losers in an economy aligned against them, does not offer a route to greater social stability and wellbeing for all. Empathizing with the enemy during a time of fear is especially hard since empathy itself is impeded when people feel unsafe. As Martin Hoffman writes, “Observers will empathize with another’s distress when they are in a relatively comfortable state themselves; otherwise they might be too focused on their own needs to be open and responsive to cues signifying another’s distress” (198). Certainly, postelection many voters were much too aware of their own feelings of distress to focus upon the distress that might have led others to support Trump. The lack of empathy for the opposition, however, preceded Trump’s win, as there was a general disdain for members of opposing political parties and increasing political polarization. The resulting denial of empathy suggests continued trends of greater polarization, diminished empathy, starker opposition, and less communal progress. Many people’s lack of contact with supporters of other political parties only adds to this division and lack of empathy. It is easier to deny empathy to poor and working-class white Americans, when one does not know any poor and working-class white Americans, just as it is easy to deny empathy to a Central American immigrant when one does not know any Central American immigrants. Our encounters with the political opposition most commonly occur in representations in social media posts, news feeds, and at similar sites of mediated remove, so that we encounter not so much people but opinions with names attached, real lives seemingly

100  Empathy with the Enemy reduced to oppositional talking points and opportunities for outrage. I hope there is possibility for change, for taking the high road that Thurston advocates and inviting others to join us, perhaps even to meet as real people first rather than as political avatars. This, of course, should go in all directions, in all ways, not only liberals to conservatives, country to city, but for all. Transcending Empathy Walls in Red America Questions of understanding and empathizing with conservative voters—is such empathy possible, in what ways, and can mutual understanding and respect be found?—compelled Hochschild, a sociologist, to spend time with the Tea Party and Trump supporters of Lake Charles, Louisiana. She spent five years compiling more than 4,000 pages of transcripts and notes based on interviews with 60 people, 40 of them dedicated Tea Party supporters (17). Hochschild’s core question, as she frames it, concerns emotional ways of knowing and the possibilities of understanding how other people feel and react to politics. As a sociologist I had a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right—that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes. Trying this, I came upon their ‘deep story,’ a narrative as felt. (xi) For Hochschild then, her methodology principally is an exercise in empathy, in attempting to understand another’s experiences and emotions through their personal story. A major barrier to this type of understanding, as Hochschild describes it, is empathy walls built through our automatic judgments of others, our increased political polarization, our lack of shared experiences and stories, and our inattention to the felt existence of other lives. As Hochschild describes it, An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? (4–5) Opposition itself, categorizing the other as an enemy, may be the most significant empathy wall of all. When we do that, we immediately position them not as somebody to understand but as somebody to defeat, somebody

Empathy with the Enemy  101 who is invested in our own defeat. Understanding becomes useful only insofar as it aids in our defeat of the other, and that kind of strategic understanding is wary of the local values, feelings, experiences, and perspectives that are emphasized in empathy. This kind of instrumental understanding certainly is not self-reflective. It does not push us to consider our own limitations or the possibility that we might be wrong or might need to revise our positions. Hochschild explains empathy walls through another metaphor of depth. It is the surface understanding, the undue attention to the outside, that allows us to quickly settle in support of preexisting conclusions without really approaching understanding of the other at all. To transcend empathy walls, Hochschild urges us to go deeper in our encounters, trying to understand from the inside, to see from another’s eyes, to try to share their feelings. What does it look and feel like to transcend empathy walls? Hochschild demonstrates that work in her descriptions of the people she meets in Lake Charles and her interactions with them. She begins by spending time with people. There is a lot to be said of simply being in another’s company, sharing space with them. Hochschild presents the people she interviews and features in the book not as examples of archetypes but as fully formed people with their own histories, connections to the place, personalities, and concerns, even as many of those end up in line with dominant political views. For example, readers are introduced at the opening of the first chapter to Mike Schaff, “a tall, kindly white man of sixty-four” as he points to the sugarcane fields he used to walk barefoot through as a child on ground that was formerly known as the Armelise Plantation (3). Schaff, driving his red truck along the fields, tells Hochschild and us about growing up in the majorityBlack community of Banderville, the relationships between people as well as nature, and how that world has changed, demonstrating his deep connections to the place. Only after hearing Schaff’s memories do we learn that he is a proud supporter of the Tea Party. Hochschild considers it necessary to understand Schaff as a person before fully understanding his view of things. As she writes, “I’d asked Mike Schaff to show me where he’d grown up because I wanted to understand, if I could, how he saw the world” (5). Hochschild invites us first to meet Schaff the person and to hear more about his story and memories, how he relates to this place, before she gives us a sense of his politics. Even then, Hochschild shows that the politics can be complicated, as Schaff also is an environmental advocate, having seen his beloved bayou destroyed by insufficiently regulated drilling. Hochschild’s curiosity about Schaff, and about the seeming contradiction of his political affiliation and environmental concerns, serves as a central line of inquiry for the book. For Hochschild, and for us as readers, that all starts with meeting Schaff first as a person rather than as a political opponent, as somebody worth being curious about, as perhaps all people are, really, if you approach them first as people with stories to tell. Schaff is not merely an object of curiosity in Hochschild’s telling. He must trust her and that she will listen to the stories he tells. He also is getting to

102  Empathy with the Enemy know her at the same time, hearing her stories as well. Transcending empathy walls in this case requires the trust and engagement of at least two people, as empathy is not an individual effort so much as an interpersonal one. Hochschild comments upon the mutual work of empathizing. She finds the English language deficient to capture this experience in words: The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt. (xiii–xiv) In Hochschild’s account I am reminded again of Jamison’s comment that empathy is always perched between gift and invasion. Part of what makes empathy a gift is that it is welcomed and exchanged, as when an empathizer’s motivations are trusted, when the purpose of empathy is shared understanding and inclusive community building rather than exploitation or a search for reasons to condemn. By first getting to know Schaff, rather than settling for dislike or contempt based upon his political affiliations, Hochschild attempts to overcome the empathy walls that lead to greater polarization. And greater polarization makes transcending those walls even more difficult, as people are less likely to trust an outsider’s empathy; less likely to participate in the exchange of stories; less likely to invite others to visit their home, as Schaff does Hochschild; instead leaving their political position and the possibilities for contempt as the only readily available sites of identification. Empathy then becomes a one-way process, one that relies more on imagination or even preconceptions rather than mutual exchange, an empathy that is not invited, an interest not welcomed, thereby more prone to errors and more likely to be experienced as an invasion. The empathy that Hochschild demonstrates in Strangers in Their Own Land is difficult, requiring reflection and listening, allowing for a possible change in one’s own perception of themselves, of others, and of related social issues. This is the risk of personal change that Rogers identifies. When one listens with understanding and attempts to enter the worldview of another, one may be changed in the process. I see Hochschild’s listening also as an example of Krista Ratcliffe’s idea of rhetorical listening. For Ratcliffe, such listening is not a passive activity but instead requires attunement beyond the statement itself to more fully account for the cultural logics that inform that statement. As Ratcliffe explains, The rhetorical listening that I am promoting is a performance that occurs when listeners invoke both their capacity and their willingness

Empathy with the Enemy  103 (1) to promote an understanding of self and other that informs our culture’s politics and ethics, (2) to proceed from within a responsibility logic, not from within a defensive guilt/blame one, (3) to locate identification in discursive spaces of both commonalities and differences, and (4) to accentuate commonalities and differences not only in claims but in cultural logics within which those claims function. (204) Like Rogers, and as demonstrated by Hochschild, rhetorical listening as put forth by Ratcliffe requires starting not from a place of guilt or blame but one of commitment to another, a “responsibility logic,” as she describes it, based upon an ethics in which encountering an other also means being responsible to that other even if only for recognizing the other’s inherent humanity. Rhetorical listening acknowledges commonalities and differences, making the encounter not entirely about one or the other, but allowing for complexity and multiple simultaneous possibilities for identification. In her tour of the sugarcane fields of Schaff’s childhood, Hochschild allows possibilities for connection and understanding even while she is aware of their different political positions. She neither fully identifies nor fully disidentifies with Schaff, despite their many differences. In getting to know more about Schaff’s home and his personal history, Hochschild is attempting to enter the cultural logics that inform Schaff’s worldview. Ratcliffe suggests that in rhetorical listening we can come to reject a person’s claims even while coming to understand the cultural logics that inform those claims. Hochschild can disagree with Schaff’s support of the Tea Party even while she works to understand how that support makes sense to him in his experiences of the world. Ratcliffe expands upon understanding and what it means as a goal for rhetorical listening. For her, “understanding means listening to discourse not for intent but with intent” to better comprehend not only claims but also the cultural logics that inform them as well as the processes of rhetorical negotiation that make understanding possible (205). “To clarify this process of understanding, we might best invert the term and define understanding as standing under—consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others, while consciously acknowledging all our particular and fluid standpoints,” Ratcliffe writes, emphasizing rhetorical listening as a process of self-reflection, of recognizing one’s own standpoints, as well as attempting to better understand the discourses that determine the standpoints of others (205). Entering those other discourses requires something like surrender, although while retaining one’s own awareness, reflection, and possibilities for rhetorical agency. In order to listen, we need to take a first step out of our own cultural logics and, to the best of our ability, attempt to step into the cultural logics of others. This is difficult. It requires time and attention. As Ratcliffe describes, “Standing under discourses means letting discourses wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics” (205). This is what Hochschild attempts to do when she leaves her home in Berkeley, California, to spend time with Tea Party supporters in rural Louisiana.

104  Empathy with the Enemy Rhetorical listening enables Hochschild to understand the deep story of the Tea Party supporters she meets. That story, similar to the cultural logics that Ratcliffe discusses, are approachable only through attempting to inhabit another’s place, paying attention to the values, histories, experiences, concerns, feelings, and perceptions that inform their understanding and lead to their claims, whether one agrees with those claims or not. As Hochschild writes, “Behind all I was learning about bayou and factory childhoods and the larger context—industry, state, church, regular media, Fox News—of the lives of those I had come to know lay, I realized, a deep story” (135). As she defines deep story: A deep story is a feels-as-if story—it’s the story feelings tell, in the language of symbols. It removes judgment. It removes fact. It tells us how things feel. Such a story permits those on both sides of the political spectrum to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world. (135) Key here is that a deep story is not true or untrue at a factual level; it operates as an emotional truth, describing how something feels. As such, it should not be judged objectively. It is more like reporting on another’s experiences and feelings. We might wish somebody felt differently about things, might wish that they felt in response to different cues and interpretations, but it is hard to argue that what they say feels true to them does not, in fact, feel true to them. Understanding a deep story can offer a starting place of understanding, and our interactions can go from there, which is preferable to an alternative of interactions proceeding without an understanding of the emotions and narratives that people bring with themselves to the encounter. Hochschild offers that there are many kinds of deep stories, operating in different relationships, from the purely interpersonal to the global and political. One common example of deep stories she mentions is lovers learning about one another’s childhood “in order to understand how it feels to be the other person,” further establishing attending to another’s deep story, and offering one’s own, as a practice of empathy (135). The deep story that Hochschild identifies for Tea Party supporters reads like a bad dream. As in a dream, it does not make complete sense, but the feeling is there and can remain regardless of the credibility of the dream itself. I will not go into the details of the deep story other than to say that it is concerned with fairness, belonging, and recognition. Importantly, Hochschild shares her understanding of the deep story with the people she come to Louisiana to understand, to whom she attributes this story. In doing so she is applying Rogers’s restatement principle, the practice of restating the other’s position as you understand it to the other’s satisfaction. One can practice the restatement principle with another by saying, What I hear you saying is this; is that right? If not, one revises one’s understanding of the

Empathy with the Enemy  105 other’s position until the other is satisfied enough to say, Yeah, that’s right. As Hochschild writes, I constructed this deep story to represent—in metaphorical form—the hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety in the lives of those I talked with. Then I tried it out on my Tea Party friends to see if they thought it fit their experience. They did. (135) Doing this not only makes sure that one understands another’s story. It also demonstrates attention, rhetorical listening in action, a belief in understanding as a mutual process, and a desire to get it right. Restatement practices such as this can reveal one’s own biases at work too. The places where we get the other’s story wrong, where we fill in the gaps with our own imagined feeling and details and reasons, can be revealing and are worth addressing. Hochschild’s practice of listening for deep stories starts from a place of curiosity and caring. These are important values for difficult empathy. Hochschild is genuinely curious about how things feel to other people, how they have experienced life, how it is to be them. She tells of growing up as the child of a Foreign Service officer, being exposed to people of different backgrounds, and reaching out to them, and of being reached out to in return. Empathy often is rooted in curiosity, in wanting to hear other people’s stories and to understand better the world according to them. We want to understand the perspectives of others not only for a particular view of the world, although there is that, but because more individual perspectives on the world, more stories of living, also offer a fuller composite view of the world, perhaps allowing us to interpret even our own stories in new ways. In the practice of empathy based in caring and curiosity, I also am reminded of the work of gay rights activist Justin Lee in online exchanges with evangelical Christians. In her book on rhetorical empathy, Blankenship analyzes the exchanges and interviews Lee. His work engaging evangelical Christians is noteworthy given how strongly many evangelicals oppose gay rights and marriage equality. Lee’s rhetorical approach in his exchanges depends first upon his insider status, as he too grew up and continues to identify as an evangelical Christian, allowing him to engage other evangelicals as a fellow community member who understands their values and beliefs, having held the same himself. He does not encounter them as the enemy. As Blankenship summarizes Lee’s approach, He performs rhetorical empathy by sharing his story, identifying with his audience, and assuming good motives for them, and he solicits empathy from them in turn by appealing to his credibility as a fellow believer and to their emotions as they realize he was unfairly stigmatized by people who espouse loving even one’s enemies yet couldn’t love their own. (91)

106  Empathy with the Enemy There is much to observe here, and Blankenship fully details these steps and their significance in her analysis. First, Lee enters the discussions with an understanding of the deep story of the people he is engaging through their shared evangelical background. He prioritizes stories and emotions. Importantly, he also assumes good motivations rather than identifying people solely through their opposition to gay rights and assuming the worst about them. This is difficult to do, particularly because the rights that some of the participants in the discussions oppose are integral to Lee’s ability to live his life. But by assuming good motivations, Lee is able to listen to others and is able to get them to listen to him in return. Explaining further in his interview with Blankenship the importance of assuming good motivations, Lee says, “All of us, on both sides, need to be willing to assume good motives for those we disagree with. We don’t have to agree with each other to make a genuine attempt to understand each other” (96). For Lee, assuming good motivations is part of the work of difficult empathy. Lee continues, A big part of my strategy is putting myself in the other person’s shoes. If I’m going to do that, I need to respond to them in a way that’s consistent with their (usually good) intentions rather than demonizing them based on the negative results of their actions. (Blankenship 97) I take Lee to be saying that we cannot empathize with others if we do not assume that they think they are doing the right thing, that they are acting on good intentions, for what they consider to be good reasons. If we instead attempt to empathize by first assuming that somebody else is a bad actor, we are likely to already be getting it wrong, because most people do not consider themselves to be bad actors. Doing this does not mean excusing the consequences of another person’s actions, and Lee acknowledges that those actions still may have negative results. But to focus first on the results and assume the worst about somebody is to limit the possibilities of empathy, as difficult as it may be, from the start. Through his practice of assuming the best about people, trying to see things through their perspective, and exchanging stories, Lee is able to get to a place where, if nothing else, people may agree to disagree while retaining some contact, some possibility for long-term communication and change, because change can take a long time and can follow encounters in ways we might not predict. All of this is not to say that people never have bad intentions, or that empathy walls always are worth trying to transcend. Sometimes intentions are bad, and sometimes walls are there for good reasons. Choosing not to try to empathize is always an option, sometimes the best one. If the goal is understanding, however, or working amid and across differences without resorting to more destructive means of engagement, then we might give difficult empathy, rhetorical listening, and attending to deep stories a chance, even with those people we view as the opposition.

Empathy with the Enemy  107 Deep Canvassing and the Work of Empathy in a Democracy Empathy, and the difficult work of empathizing with the opposition, is particularly critical in a democracy, and especially in a democracy with as diverse a population as that of the United States. This is clear in the examples detailed above of empathizing across political, social, and other divisions. The answer to these challenges is not simply more empathy. Work in rhetoric and empathy broadly acknowledges the problems of too much identification or too much empathic connection with one’s home communities. At times of social division, the familiarity biases to which empathy is prone may enable people to empathize more with their existing in-group members and less with out-group members, enhancing empathy with allies, and decreasing empathy with perceived enemies. Kenneth Burke notes a similar liability to identification in general when he describes war not as a disease of division but as one of identification due to too much identification with one’s own side, their pains, grievances, and desire to win, at the cost of the other side. “You will understand war much better if you think of it, not simply as strife come to a head, but rather as a disease or perversion of communion,” he writes (22). This circling-the-wagons effect of empathy could lead to increased group conflicts. Possible interventions include focusing on directed empathy between groups, such as empathy with the enemy as detailed in this chapter, and connecting empathy to moral principles that can help guide and motivate it (Zaki and Cikara; Hoffman 216). Blanket calls for more empathy, educationally and socially, must account for the risks of an undirected empathy furthering social division by centering groups upon themselves. Empathizing with in-group members is relatively easy; these are people most like ourselves. Practices of difficult empathy offer a means of hedging against such trends to polarization because difficult empathy goes against biases. Critical empathy, which is detailed in the next chapter, also offers ways to resist polarizing empathy by reflecting upon one’s own empathic positioning, tendencies, and limitations in a situation. Scholars within rhetoric and composition have been studying empathy’s discursive significance as it functions in diverse, mediated societies. In her analysis of the marginalization of transnational people in Hong Kong, and the corresponding efforts to claim communal standing through the strategic sharing of personal narratives. Yam advocates for what she describes as “deliberative empathy”: “Deliberative empathy combines constitutive deliberative acts with the critical cognitive model of empathy that urges interlocutors to examine and redefine their subjectivity in relation to others, and to acknowledge the overlapping interest amidst their shared material context,” Yam writes (37). “Deliberative empathy, in other words, prompts marginalized rhetors to engage with the dominant audiences in a way that does not reify the power difference and existing relationship between them, but assumes that their subjectivities and perceptions are always open to change.” Yam’s analysis highlights possibilities for connection

108  Empathy with the Enemy amid  differences through storytelling that prompts dominant audiences to recognize shared interests with marginalized people and to attach new emotions to marginalized subjects. Storytelling can effectively evoke deliberative empathy, Yam finds, and is less likely to provoke the immediate refutations that arguments can. Yam’s analysis is attentive to differences in power and how groups are set against one another in neoliberal economies, all of which impedes empathy and the advancement of prosocial policies. Yam’s work responds to political scientist Michael Morrell’s call for more discourse analysis “to identify communication that prevents a free flow of information or interferes with empathy” (189). Morrell suggests analysis could consider discourses that demonize others or the ways that certain voices are excluded from consideration. He calls for greater attention to the function of empathy in deliberative discourse as part of an effort to improve the general quality of public discourse. For Morrell, empathy is a necessary component in the functioning of democratic deliberation in which participants need not only exchange information but attend to the ways that issues matter to other people and how they feel about them. “The process of empathy is necessary for democratic legitimacy because it ensures that majorities will make decisions with a better knowledge of what those decisions mean,” Morrell writes (173). “What empathy promotes is not necessarily agreement, but understanding the impacts a decision will have on others.” Placing empathy at the heart of democratic deliberation, as Morrell does, has three implications that he highlights. The first is the need to make empathic deliberation a core focus in civic education. The second implication follows the arguments of Nussbaum and others, that literature, film, and other narrative arts may serve an important role in democratic societies as occasions for practicing and expanding empathy, perhaps especially when paired with discussions or other supportive materials. And, third, we need more scholarly attention to the ways empathy is supported or limited in public discourse in order to improve that discourse. The potential of empathy in promoting inclusive democratic values can be found in research on deep canvassing. As described by the Deep Canvass Institute, a voter outreach organization, deep canvassing prioritizes three key rhetorical practices for canvassers in conversation with voters: “Nonjudgmentally inviting people to open up about their real, conflicted feelings on an issue”; “sharing vulnerably about their own life, and asking curious questions about the voter’s life (specifically the experiences that have shaped how they each feel about the issue)”; and “being open and honest about their own truth and beliefs” (Deep Canvass Institute). Deep canvassing works through story exchange, emotional engagement, trust, and connection. Political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman have field-tested deep canvassing in studies that train canvassers and records voters’ initial attitudes, changes in attitudes, and the persistence of those changes over time. They have studied attitudes in response to at-risk out-group populations, such as unauthorized immigrants and transgender people. Kalla and Broockman

Empathy with the Enemy  109 have found that deep canvassing practices can lead to meaningful and lasting changes in exclusionary attitudes, results in persuasion that are more significant and more lasting than traditional canvassing techniques of presenting a voter with arguments and facts. They credit the success of deep canvassing in part to a reduction in the resistance to persuasion that traditional arguments encounter. Changing one’s mind can threaten one’s sense of self for multiple reasons. We see this when one’s standing as a member of a community is tied to a particular position and when morality is connected to issues in a way that does not allow for changing one’s position without also refuting more deeply held moral values. Blankenship discusses the identity threat of persuasion in her analysis of Lee’s practice of rhetorical empathy. Part of Lee’s strategy is to avoid using “trigger words” that might be seen as an attack on another’s sense of self and community, such as framing the other as a “homophobe, bigot, or hater,” for example (Blankenship 95). Kalla and Broockman likewise argue that rhetorical strategies that vilify others risk increasing resistance to persuasion. They cite, for example, Hillary Clinton’s reference to supporters of Trump as a “basket of deplorables.” As Kalla and Broockman argue, “Such condemnations may backfire, heightening the motivation of potentially persuadable voters to counter-argue and defend their current views” (2). As an alternative, deep canvassing employs a non-judgmental narrative exchange that is not experienced as threatening or as an exercise in zero-sum argumentation, in which one person wins the argument and another loses. Non-judgmental narrative exchange is defined as “a strategy where an individual attempts to persuade another person by providing to or eliciting from them narratives about relevant personal experiences while non-judgmentally listening to the views they express” (Kalla and Broockman 2). The approach Kalla and Broockman employ is based upon two strategies from psychological research: narrative persuasion and high-quality listening. As they explain, people are more open to persuasion by narratives because they do not see narratives as threatening, manipulative, or as necessarily intended to persuade. It is hard to argue against somebody else’s story. Instead, narratives are more likely to be experienced as engaging and immersive, inviting the listener to see the world from the storyteller’s perspective in an act of empathy. Stories can offer alternative perspectives. A listener entertaining another perspective may come to persuade themself of the alternative view in an act of persuasion that is more grounded in self-reflection and perspective-taking rather than succumbing to another’s rhetorical force of argument. Importantly, before sharing alternative stories, canvassers first listen without judgment to the contact person’s perspective and story. Canvassers were instructed to engage by “explicitly expressing interest in understanding individuals’ views and experiences, while also not expressing any negative judgments toward any statements hostile to the outgroup individuals made” (5). They were to make it clear to the contact that they were “not there to judge them” and were “curious about their honest experience, whatever it is” (5). Inviting the

110  Empathy with the Enemy contact person to tell their story, and demonstrating curiosity in listening and trying to understand, creates a feeling of trust. I expect that it also could prompt the contact person to reflect on their own position in relation to their story, since they might not have previously had an occasion to share any stories related to that particular issue, and to take more of an interest in hearing the canvasser’s story in return. Canvassers would prompt the contact person to consider if there were points they could relate to in the canvasser’s story and in additional stories that they would both share around a key value, such as compassion, asking, for example, if the contact person could think of a time when somebody showed them compassion. The canvasser would reciprocate with a story of when they or somebody else similarly experienced compassion, ideally in relation to the issue being addressed, such as unauthorized immigration. The canvasser might tell a story of when an unauthorized immigrant, perhaps themselves or somebody else they know, was shown compassion, connecting it with the contact person’s story of a time when they too were shown compassion. The goal “was for this non-judgmental exchange of narratives to end with individuals self-generating and explicitly stating aloud implications of the narratives that ran contrary to their previously stated exclusionary attitudes. Qualitative debriefs with the canvassers indicate that such ‘self-persuasion’ appeared to be common” (Kalla and Broockman 5). In the practice of non-judgmental listening, seeking to understand, and exchanging stories, deep canvassing shares fundamental features with rhetorical listening, rhetorical empathy, and Rogerian communication. It also is very much like Lee’s rhetorical strategy of engaging evangelical Christians on issues of gay rights, although deep canvassing does not require the exchange to occur among insiders in a community and foregrounds first the canvasser’s role as listener. One of the striking features of deep canvassing, according to Kalla and Broockman’s research, is that it is effective and lasting, much more so than traditional canvassing strategies. They acknowledge that it is challenging to have enough canvassers to talk with enough people on any particular issue to effect large-scale change. Given the closeness of the exchanges, they suggest that deep canvassing may be just as meaningful on a more individual level, writing, “Our findings therefore suggest optimism that individuals seeking to reduce exclusionary attitudes may be able to productively employ this strategy in everyday interpersonal conversations” (13). Although they acknowledge the logistical difficulties of deep canvassing, Kalla and Broockman do not speak to the personal challenges of this form of rhetorical encounter. It may not be easy for somebody who is an unauthorized immigrant to listen without judgment as somebody tells them why they think unauthorized immigrants should be deported, or for somebody who is transgender to listen to a person tell them why transgender people should be denied access to services that correspond to their gender identity. When people are immersed regularly within discourses that target and exclude them, it is hard to listen with curiosity and openness to those same discourses as they

Empathy with the Enemy  111 are stated again by the people they are encountering. One impulse, naturally, may be to call those discourses out for what they are, to judge them harshly indeed, to argue back. Another impulse may be simply to end the encounter or to refuse engagement in the first place, to protect oneself by avoiding the encounter altogether. That rhetorical fight-or-flight response makes sense; arguing back or leaving the encounter may be the best possible response in some situations. In others, however, it may be more productive immediately and in the long term to practice the difficult empathy and rhetorical listening that Kalla and Broockman field tested in deep canvassing. Antagonistic argument can increase antagonism and polarization, and leaving or avoiding an encounter can leave another’s exclusionary perspective unchallenged. I am reminded of Kwame Appiah’s contention that there is value in encounters that do not lead to agreement because conversation itself, exchanging with others, is meaningful. Cosmopolitanism, he writes, “begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (xix). By encountering one another, even with and perhaps especially amid difficulties, we practice coexistence. Possible Consequences of Empathizing with the Enemy A couple of years ago, I received an email from a researcher who had interviewed and written about a war criminal. This was part of her ongoing research into terrorism, genocide, and how people participate in such atrocities. She described her research process as “empathetic listening,” as attempting to see the perpetrator as they see themselves in order to better understand them and the factors that led them to commit such horrendous crimes. The hope was that by better understanding them and how and why they do what they do, we might also better protect against such crimes occurring in the future. The researcher explained that she was being criticized for profiling the war criminal, for trying to understand his perspective, because some people interpreted that as taking his side. They mistook empathy for exculpation, understanding for agreement. She wrote to me regarding a piece I had written on empathy as research methodology (Leake). I take the criticism this researcher faced as similar to the condemnations of Allyn Walker, which led to their resignation from Old Dominion University, for writing about non-offending pedophiles—or minor-attracted people, as such people preferred to be called—in order to better understand them and for the ultimate purpose of better protecting children. (This case is considered in greater detail in the chapter on difficult empathy.) Trying to understand the perspective of a perceived enemy is difficult because it requires one momentarily to suspend judgment, to let go of the defining feature of the other as the enemy, which feels like a threat to one’s sense of self, one’s security, and one’s moral certainties. One fear is that we might be tempted to agree with the enemy, that in entering their worldview we might be unable or unwilling

112  Empathy with the Enemy to leave. Such perceived threats to identity are understandable but contribute  to the increasing polarization we are experiencing. People are more inclined to listen to those views that support their own, not risking the difficulties and discomforts of entertaining opposing perspectives. I think just the opposite is true. Our sense of self, our beliefs and values, can be stronger when challenged through exposures to difference. At least, I think this can be true for the values and beliefs most worth holding. Another distinct challenge of empathizing with the enemy is the resulting criticism that one may receive from one’s own side. Empathy with the enemy may be viewed as taking the opposition’s position, as in the case of the criticisms against the researcher writing about the war criminal. Hochschild faced similar responses in her work to understand conservative Tea Party supporters in Louisiana. She writes in an afterword, following the election of Trump, that the majority of the letters and emails she received were from Trump opponents in shock and questioning the project of the book. “Some despaired of developing empathy for the right; still others distrusted it—didn’t I know this was a war?” (245). Hochschild holds that such views are misguided, “[confusing] talk with surrender and empathy with weakness” (265). As I responded to the war crimes researchers, perhaps because our culture is so focused on division right now, understanding tends to be reserved only for people we already agree with. And then, because it is based on agreement, it seems less an act of understanding and more a projection of one’s own views onto another. Deeper understanding, amid and across differences, is rare and valuable. Trying to understand somebody one profoundly disagrees with—which is an understatement when talking about somebody like a genocidal war criminal—can seem like a gift given to the wrong person. The question then becomes why give such a person that gift of understanding? But we need to understand the perpetrators of atrocities if we are going to prevent future atrocities, even though that understanding is deeply unsettling, difficult, and undeserved. As I have developed the concepts, difficult empathy, as with despised people, and empathy with the enemy, are related but distinct. The distinction lies in how we construct despised others and enemies. There is a particular difficulty in empathizing with people who commit atrocities or who otherwise are seen as morally repugnant. The category of enemy, however, may be much more general, is based upon ideas of opposition, and may be challenged, revised, and perhaps eliminated as we come to understand one another and as social situations develop. People who consider one another the opposition on a particular issue or at a particular time may not consider one another the opposition on other issues and at other times. Indeed, one of the potential benefits of empathy with the enemy is that we might begin to no longer see the other as an enemy at all. We might see them as somebody with whom we disagree on some issues and agree on others, but in other respects as somebody like us, or even as somebody we like. We might see them as a distinct person with their own interests and histories,

Empathy with the Enemy  113 as a fellow citizen, a neighbor, even as a friend, as Hochschild views some of the people she met in Louisiana. There is a form of empathy with the enemy described as “tactical empathy,” a strategy of trying to enter the enemy’s perspective in order to better perceive their weaknesses and acquire advantages over them (Bubandt and Willerslev). My consideration of empathy with the enemy is not that. Its primary purpose is not strategic advantage but deeper understanding and, hopefully, reimagining one’s relationship with the perceived enemy. In this chapter, I have analyzed and outlined some of the ways to do that through non-judgmental listening, exchanging stories, seeing people as individuals with distinct histories and experiences, attending to feelings and deep stories, assuming positive motivations, and looking for commonalities. This takes work, attention, trust, and putting one’s own ego in the background. It is that much harder in an increasingly polarized society in which we tend not to interact with people who have experiences and views different from our own. Many of our interactions are constrained to online environments, which are less than ideal for these types of empathic encounters. As psychologist Jamil Zaki observes, Online, the first thing we encounter about a person is often the thing we’d like least about them, such as an ideology we despise. They are enemies before they have a chance to be people…If you wanted to design a system to break empathy, you could scarcely do better than the society we’ve created. (7–8) We are less familiar with one another in these encounters, making the difficult work of empathy that much more vital if not daunting. I also recognize that the difficult work of empathizing with the enemy is not the only strategy or always the most appropriate strategy. It sometimes makes sense to listen judgmentally, to argue combatively, to attend to those who are most at risk, and to avoid such encounters altogether. This is an important point that cannot be overstated. Empathy, and difficult empathy in particular, is not always the right approach, but it sometimes is, and we can do better with it. One significant step toward the more purposeful and aware practice of difficult empathy is the development of critical empathy, which is the focus of the next chapter. Works Cited Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006. Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Bouie, Jamelle. “There’s No Such Thing as a Good Trump Voter.” Slate, Nov. 2016, slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-good-trumpvoter.html.

114  Empathy with the Enemy Bracher, Mark. Literature and Social Justice. University of Texas Press, 2013. Bubandt, Nils, and Rane Willerslev. “The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 57, no. 1, 2015, pp. 5–34. Coplan, Amy. “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 3–18. Deep Canvass Institute. RESOURCES – Deep Canvass Institute. https://deepcanvass. org/research/. Accessed 16 Nov. 2022. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2016. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Hogeveen, Jeremy, et al. “Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, vol. 143, no. 2, Apr. 2014, pp. 755–62. Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2014. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. “Reducing Exclusionary Attitudes through Interpersonal Conversation: Evidence from Three Field Experiments.” The American Political Science Review, 2020, pp. 1–16. LaFrance, Marianne. “Beyond Pain.” Boston Review, 20 Aug. 2014, https://bostonreview.net/forum_response/marianne-lafrance-response-against-empathy-lafrance/. Leake, Eric. “Empathy as Research Methodology.” Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, edited by Pranee Liamputtong, Springer Singapore, 2019, pp. 237–52. Lerner, Michael. “Stop Shaming Trump Supporters.” The New York Times, 9 Nov. 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/ stop-shaming-trump-supporters. Morrell, Michael E. Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 195–224. Rogers, Carl. “Communication: Its Blocking and Its Facilitation.” ETC; A Review of General Semantics, vol. 9, no. 2, 1952, pp. 83–88. Thurston, Baratunde. Empathy Isn’t a Favor I Owe White Trump Voters. It Has to Go Both Ways. 17 Nov. 2016, https://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/11/17/13642864/ trump-election-empathy-baratunde-thurston. Wright, Robert. Robert Wright on the Ukraine Crisis. Interview by Andrew Sullivan, 3 June 2022, https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/robert-wright-on-theukraine-crisis. Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship. Ohio State University Press, 2019. Zaki, Jamil. The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. Crown, 2019. Zaki, Jamil, and Mina Cikara. “Addressing Empathic Failures.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 24, no. 6, 2015, pp. 471–76.

6 Critical Empathy

In “Devil’s Bait,” the second essay in Leslie Jamison’s collection The ­Empathy Exams, Jamison travels to Austin, Texas, to attend a conference for people who suffer from Morgellons disease. The disease itself is contested. As described by the Mayo Clinic, “Morgellons disease is a condition characterized by a belief that parasites or fibers are emerging from the skin. People with this condition often report feeling as if something is crawling on or stinging their skin” (“Morgellons Disease: Managing an Unexplained Skin Condition”). A key word here is that Morgellons is characterized by “a belief” that things are emerging from the skin, although the resulting suffering from the condition is obvious. As further described by the Mayo Clinic, some health care professionals view Morgellons as a “delusional infestation” and treat it with antidepressants and counseling, while others are open to the possibility that it may be related to some kind of infection or as yet unexplained cause. The contested nature of the disease, and the obvious suffering it causes, places Jamison in a difficult position regarding empathy with the Morgellons sufferers at the conference. Jamison recognizes early in the essay that the interpretation for Morgellons that the sufferers themselves believe, that there are tiny fibers and parasites emerging from their skin, probably is inaccurate based upon the available research. In attending the conference, however, Jamison cannot help but empathize with the pain people clearly feel and even with their need to be believed. Their pain is not only physical but social and psychological as they become isolated and viewed as unreliable narrators of their own experiences. How is one to empathize in this situation, when the recognition of suffering compels one to empathize even though the narratives of the sufferers are not seen as credible? What are the possibilities and risks of such an empathy? Jamison attempts to navigate this difficult empathic path as she works to understand and to feel with the sufferers of Morgellons, while also doubting their understanding of their own affliction. “I tell myself I can agree with a declaration of pain without being certain I agree with the declaration of its cause,” she writes (33). This is one of the fundamental moves of critical empathy, allowing the space for empathizing with another’s feelings and trying to understand another’s perspective and experiences even while not DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-6

116  Critical Empathy necessarily agreeing with those perspectives. Because empathy and belief are difficult to disentangle, critical empathy is a challenge. Jamison recognizes that challenge. “Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source? How do I inhabit someone’s pain without inhabiting their particular understanding of that pain?” she asks (39–40). The entanglement of empathy and belief goes both ways. Just as it can be difficult to empathize without believing, risking empathy can also risk belief. As Jamison tries to empathize with the suffering of people with Morgellons, she begins to worry that she might look too closely at her own skin, feel her own itch, catch the beliefs of those with Morgellons, and begin suffering from the disease herself, a threat that readers might also feel in reading the essay and becoming uncomfortably attuned to their own physical sensations and the hint of an itch. Jamison recognizes the pull of belief from empathy, the fear of contagion: “It’s in these moments of fear, oddly, that I come closest to experiencing Morgellons the way its patients do: its symptoms physical and sinister, its tactics utterly invasive. Inhabiting their perspective only makes me want to protect myself from what they have” (47). She asks then if there are possibilities for a critical empathy that disentangles feeling and belief, or if it must be both or nothing. As she writes, “I wonder if these are the only options available to my crippled organs of compassion: I’m either full of disbelief, or else I’m washing my hands in the bathroom” (47). In the end, Jamison finds compassion to be more important than belief, as she chooses to recognize suffering and leave questions of diagnosis and treatment to health professionals. There is value in understanding another’s pain, and that is something she can do, although the tension remains, especially when those who suffer do not want compassion so much as belief, or when they suffer because of a lack of belief, because they know everybody thinks they are crazy. In that case, compassion without belief risks adding to their suffering. Jamison ends with hope that empathy with suffering might provide a foundation for future relief. The critical empathy Jamison employs, and the tension between understanding feeling and agreeing with beliefs, is an example of the practice of critical empathy. Alexis de Coning attempts to maintain a similar tension in her practice of critical empathy in working with “unsavory” populations. She quotes ethnographic researcher Beatrice Jauregui, who defines critical empathy as the “ability to approximately understand and explain the perceptions and practices of others” while “maintaining a measure of distance that allows—indeed, demands—questioning and critiquing these same perceptions and practices” (quoted in de Coning 8). Although de Coning and Jauregui are concerned with empathizing with populations that might hold toxic or dangerous beliefs, such as the men’s rights activist groups that de Coning researches, the tensions between empathy and belief and the importance of critical empathy remain the same. Critical empathy for de Coning, as well as for Jamison, begins with the recognition of another’s humanity. It requires understanding and feeling with while also holding a critical distance

Critical Empathy  117 that allows for a necessary critiquing of beliefs and actions that might be wrong, dangerous, or harmful to others. As de Coning writes, “One of the dilemmas of critical empathy is the double bind of recognizing our subjects’ humanity while also acknowledging that their beliefs and behaviors may be troubling, toxic, repugnant, dangerous, or dehumanizing toward others” (4). Jamison employs critical empathy throughout The Empathy Exams without labeling it as such. The critical empathy displayed in “Devil’s Bait” in recognizing suffering while being critical of the beliefs related to that suffering is one example of critical empathy. Jamison also displays critical empathy in “Lost Boys” as she considers her response to the story of the West Memphis Three, their trials, years of imprisonment, and eventual release, as depicted in the documentary series Paradise Lost. Jamison is aware of the presentation by the filmmakers of the central characters in the story to elicit empathy at key moments, and she reflects upon her feelings watching the series. “I didn’t enjoy what was happening, but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy,” she writes (173). This is a use of critical empathy that is aware of the desire to empathize, to see oneself as empathic, in the mode of an easy empathy discussed earlier. It also is a critical empathy that recognizes how empathy can be manipulated through narrative devices and rhetorical means. As a final example of Jamison’s critical empathy, there is her discomfort in partaking in a “Gang Tour” through South Central Los Angeles, as described in the essay “Pain Tours (I).” Jamison recognizes her own position as a privileged white woman touring the pains of others who serve as her guides. “You feel uncomfortable. Your discomfort is the point,” she writes (90). “Friction rises from an asymmetry this tour makes plain: the material of your diverting morning is the material of other people’s lives, and their deaths.” Jamison is acknowledging the social position from which she is empathizing, the economic and social imbalances that allow her to be a tourist in the pain of the lives of others, the material poverty and poverty of opportunity that leads people to try to make money by offering tours of their disadvantaged communities as though people are on urban safaris. This critical reflection on empathy, its conditions, and the positions of the people involved, both the empathizers and the people they are empathizing with, follows Lisa Blankenship’s third characteristic of rhetorical empathy, “engaging in reflection and self-critique,” as well as her fourth characteristic of rhetorical empathy, “addressing difference, power, and embodiment” (20). Jamison takes that one important step further. She does not allow the limitations of empathy, its liabilities and inherent imbalances, to foreclose the opportunity of empathy itself, of caring for others and trying to understand their feelings and situations, despite the challenges that undermine the attempt. It could be easier to disregard the pain tour, to ignore its problematic invitation, due to the shame that accompanies one’s privileged witnessing. Jamison finds such a response self-focused. Reflecting on the tour, she writes, “The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing

118  Critical Empathy you can offer in turn. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyway” (90). This is the larger purpose of critical empathy. It is not a rejection of empathy, an unwillingness to try to empathize due to an acceptance of our inability to fully and fairly understand others given the unequal landscapes of our encounters. Instead, critical empathy asks us to recognize to the best of our ability the biases, limitations, and inequalities at play in empathy, the ways that empathy is open to manipulation, and to attempt to empathize anyway, so that we might empathize better and for better ends. In this chapter, I theorize critical empathy as a final mode of difficult empathy. Critical empathy pulls together many of the modes of difficult empathy discussed throughout in this book, including a suspicion of easy empathy, an embrace of the core concept of difficult empathy, an awareness of the social conditions of empathy, and an acceptance of the challenge of empathizing with the enemy. I open with the examples of critical empathy from Jamison’s The Empathy Exams because Jamison demonstrates many of the key uses of critical empathy, without explicitly identifying it as such. I next define critical empathy as a mode of rhetorical encounter that reflects upon the terms, motivations, limitations, and ends of that encounter. I then develop the concept of critical empathy by expanding on its key features: drawing attention to differences in bodies, situations, and desires, as seen in an analysis of Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s essays “Body Language” and “Futurity”; foregrounding social conditions and histories that determine our encounters and possibilities for empathy, as demonstrated in an analysis of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric; and finally searching for possibilities for empathic connection across differences, as outlined in the work of Todd DeStigter, Min-Zhan Lu, and Cornel West. I conclude the chapter by emphasizing the necessity of a critical practice of empathy that keeps empathy accountable, reflecting upon and questioning the conditions of empathy, while also finding value in the always incomplete work of empathizing itself. Critical Empathy as Rhetorical Encounter As I define it, critical empathy is maintaining a reflective awareness of the conditions, limitations, and outcomes of an empathic encounter while also holding open the possibilities of that encounter. Critical empathy requires one to reflect upon one’s own position as a participant in an empathic encounter, even if only as a witness. It is a recursive process as one’s critical reflection informs how one empathizes, which then becomes subject to further critical reflection that informs that attempt and future attempts at empathizing. Critical empathy keeps empathy and the empathizer accountable. It hedges against the worst liabilities of empathic biases, which otherwise can undermine the value of empathy. Critical empathy helps shift the focus from empathy to empathizing, foregrounding the ongoing work of empathy as always in process and open to revision. It finds value in the work of empathizing itself.

Critical Empathy  119 The strongest rhetorical critiques of theories of empathy have noted their tendency to assume that people encounter one another from equal positions, ignoring the many inequalities that determine an encounter. Rogerian rhetoric, for example, built as it was upon empathic engagements and non-judgmental listening practices, was criticized for potentially positioning already marginalized people as having to attend to the concerns of the powerful as if those concerns were not already centered in the discourse. The resulting worst-case scenario is one in which the oppressed could be expected to empathize with their oppressors, treating social justice as though it were simply an interpersonal rather than a social issue, and pushing for a mutual exchange of perspectives and feelings without acknowledging the systems of injustice that determine those perspectives and feelings. As Dennis Lynch effectively summarizes, “Asking people to empathize usually locates the obstacles to empathy—to listening and to being heard—solely in the minds and habits of individual participants, and so obscures or ignores the political and economic and bodily dimensions of social struggles” (6). Blankenship also provides a useful review of prominent criticisms of Rogerian rhetoric and how rhetorical empathy can address those by centering the personal, including bodies, and by emphasizing principles rather than formulas. Critiques of Rogerian rhetoric and related theories in rhetoric and composition, such as so-called expressivism, often do not fully acknowledge attempts to account for the social in these theories (Leake). Nevertheless, these critiques are important in highlighting the significance of bodies, social conditions and values, and context in determining the limitations and possibilities of empathy. There remains a risk that those promoting empathy as a means of social engagement oversell it and ignore empathy’s potential for entrenching biases and replacing the voices of others with one’s own in an act of ventriloquism disguised as mutual exchange. Critical empathy responds to the shortcomings of empathy by always acknowledging the bodies, personal histories, social positions, and values that we bring to an empathic encounter. It questions how and why we empathize and who is involved, at what costs and what potential benefits. By questioning the process of empathy while engaged in that process, critical empathy attempts to enact corrections to empathy and to be aware of its limitations. This helps make empathy more effective and raises useful questions about how we understand and feel with others in all our encounters, the explicitly rhetorical and the everyday. Critical empathy as reflection is necessary to address empathy’s many biases. As mentioned in the chapter on easy empathy, Martin Hoffman has identified two primary forms of empathic bias: familiarity bias and here-andnow bias, also known as proximity bias (206–13). Familiarity bias describes the tendency to most readily and accurately empathize with those most like us. It is not hard to relate to an experience much like one’s own. Proximity bias describes the tendency to empathize with those who are most visible, who are right in front of us, or most prominently featured in the media. It is more difficult to empathize with somebody who is out of view and at a

120  Critical Empathy remove. Critical empathy requires constant questioning of these biases. In practicing critical empathy, we might ask, why am I empathizing with this person in particular? Who am I failing to empathize with and why? Why is one person’s story being highlighted rather than another’s? How else might empathic biases be at play in this encounter? In her work on critical empathy, de Coning recommends researchers reflect upon their own emotional responses as part of their process. She prompts us to consider the challenges of insufficient empathy with some populations as well as the liabilities of too much empathy with others when empathy comes too easily. “Recognizing that scholars’ emotional experiences do not exist in a vacuum helps us consider how and why our empathy may be evoked more easily for some participants than others,” de Coning writes (6). “Consequently, we must be aware that our empathy may reify structural inequalities that implicitly position some people as ‘inherently’ more deserving of our compassion and patience.” A rhetorical practice of critical empathy can take this one step further by also assuming as its purpose an interrogation of the conditions that create the structural inequalities that position some people as more and others less deserving of empathy. A final purpose for critical empathy is to question the social positioning of empathy itself. Empathy often is presented as an unquestioned positive, which allows many of its biases and liabilities to operate unchecked, because who could be opposed to empathy? Critics such as Paul Bloom have responded to that challenge by presenting their opposition to empathy, although that opposition often depends on how empathy is defined and the uses to which it is applied. Rhetorical study can take up questions of why empathy is at the center of such debates, why and how it is valued and devalued in those discussions, and why interest in empathy is resurgent now and in particular contexts. This too is the work of a critical empathy, to question how empathy itself is positioned, valued, discussed, and contested, a line of questioning I have attempted to maintain throughout this book. Critical Awareness: Of Bodies in Empathy In their essays “Body Language” and “Futurity,” Marzano-Lesnevich theorizes and narrates what they describe as “a genderqueer story.” Experiences of bodies are central to those stories. Readers are invited to better understand Marzano-Lesnevich’s experience with the foregrounded awareness that experiences in bodies differ, that the experience they are reading may not correspond with their own, and that that is part of the point. Bodies often are taken for granted. When we are healthy, and our bodies correspond with our experiences, in a world that is built for bodies such as our own in the ways we use them, we may be largely unaware of our bodies at all. Sara Ahmed writes of feelings of comfort and discomfort in accordance with the social spaces our bodies occupy, the ways they interact with and are impressed upon by the world, those feelings telling us as much about

Critical Empathy  121 the world as about ourselves. Similarly, in his meditation upon infirmity and how pain can foreground an awareness of the body, philosopher Kieran Setiya observes that we often experience the world through our bodies without an experience of our bodies at all, as we are “directly aware of the objects and people with whom we interact, barely conscious of the intricate physical means by which we do so” (30). He continues, “The paradox is that, as we relax into our bodies, they disappear, becoming a transparent interface— a phenomenon that invites us to think of ourselves as something other than our bodies, an immaterial who-knows-what.” Marzano-Lesnevich returns our attention to bodies and in doing so invites a reading through critical empathy that allows us to better understand their experience while also being more aware of how bodies are implicated in that understanding and in experiences generally. While bodies may be transparent in many people’s interactions with the world and even more so in narratives of those interactions, bodies are a focus in the work of Marzano-Lesnevich. To begin, for Marzano-Lesnevich, bodies are not merely conduits of meaning, relaying impressions of the world, but are themselves sites of meaning, often contested. Recalling their experiences from the age of eight, MarzanoLesnevich reflects on the girl they used to be and on the significance of bodies. “A body is a record or a body is freedom or a body is a battleground. Already, at eight, she knows it to be all three,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes (“Body Language” 39). Part of the purpose of the essay is to tell a story that includes bodies and how people relate to and through them. Marzano-Lesnevich is genderqueer and is attempting to find in bodies and language possibilities for that way of being. As they write at the end of the essay, We’ve never had a narrative for who I am, but I am trying now, trying with language, trying to tell this story in a way I and others can understand, a way that figures the middle as the destination. I thought back to the child I was, the one who knew that girl didn’t quite fit, who liked the look of boy and couldn’t yet know that that wouldn’t quite fit either, the child who didn’t have the language and would need to write and live and feel a way into it, wait for society to invent the very words that would allow them to be seen. (“Body Language” 45) As they describe the purpose of the essay, it is to tell a story of being genderqueer in a way that they and others can understand. I take that reference to others to include not only those who also are genderqueer and in need of stories in which they can see and feel their own ways of being, but also those who are not genderqueer, who have not had the feeling of their body in misalignment with their identity, who have not had to create narratives that feel appropriate because the narratives that broadly match their bodies and identities are so widely available. By spending time in the language and felt bodily experiences of Marzano-Lesnevich, readers who are not themselves

122  Critical Empathy genderqueer are able to begin to understand more of the genderqueer experience, not least of all in the ways that it differs from their own experiences. This is a critical form of empathy that acknowledges the difficulties of relating and feeling into different bodily experiences—as Marzano-Lesnevich writes, they had to wait for society to invent the language necessary to do so—yet still holds open the possibilities of getting closer to that understanding of bodily and identity difference through the stories we tell and the language we use. The feelings of being genderqueer in a body that does not correspond with one’s identity as socially perceived are described throughout “Body Language.” They describe the “flush” of freedom—or is it recognition—they feel as a girl seeing a family home video of themselves playing a boy in a school play. “Usually there is this stranger on the screen, this girl with her pastel clothing, and I am supposed to pretend that she is me. And she is, I know she is, but also she isn’t,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes (“Body Language” 39). The feeling of anticipation, embarrassment, or perhaps pride in seeing oneself in a family home video as a child is relatable, but fewer people have the feeling that Marzano-Lesnevich describes because they do not fully recognize themselves as the gender presented. Marzano-Lesnevich then describes the first time they had an awareness that their identity did not match their perception of their body. In the third grade I’ll be asked to draw a self-portrait in art class, and for years into the future, when I try to understand when this feeling began—this feeling of not having words to explain what my body is, to explain who I am—I’ll remember my shock as I placed my drawing next to my classmates’. (“Body Language” 39) The other children had drawn typical stick figures “with round heads and blond curls or crew cuts” and with families and dogs under yellow circle suns. “I had drawn a swirl,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes (“Body Language” 40). This too is relatable: the grade school art class assignment and the expectation of comparing one’s own drawing with those of one’s classmates, perhaps the resulting feeling of being different. Much less common is the detail of drawing oneself as a swirl. These moments accumulate over the course of the essay and during Marzano-Lesnevich’s life in ways familiar to readers but also distinctly different to most. “All my life, I have felt ungainly—wrong sized and wrong shaped,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes (“Body Language” 40). When their twin brother is granted permission for activities Marzano-Lesnevich and their sister are denied, and the reason given is because their twin brother is a boy, Marzano-Lesnevich describes their feeling in response: “rage choked me with tears. That was grief, I think now, the grief of being misunderstood” (“Body Language” 40). The feelings are recognizable, although for readers who have not struggled with gender and identity, the causes of those feelings may be unfamiliar, prompting a searching of one’s own emotional memories

Critical Empathy  123 and an awareness of the different experiences between reader and narrator with their bodies in the world. The emotions detailed are not all negative. Marzano-Lesnevich describes the thrill of discovering longing, fulfillment, compatibility, and recognition through intimacy and contact with other bodies. They describe a rendezvous at a motel with a lover, a reconnection after a breakup, and feeling sufficiently emboldened in their lover’s embrace to say that they do not think they are a woman, and their lover telling them that they know, they could tell by the way their body responded. This too is relatable, the feelings of clarity and escape in contact with others, but in Marzano-Lesnevich’s story those feelings culminate in a statement about gender identity and the great relief of being recognized as one understands oneself to be through one’s body. “After that night in the motel, we invented language of our own, stories spun from our bodies in bed,” Marzano-Lesnevich writes (“Body Language” 43). “What she saw helped me see myself.” Marzano-Lesnevich meets their lover in New Orleans where they have moved as a graduate student to try to come to a better understanding of themself. “I moved to figure out something I could not articulate even to myself, but that on some quiet level I had been wondering about since I was eight,” they write, and readers may be able to relate to the sense of self-discovery that can drive such moves, although MarzanoLesnevich’s reasons are more directly tied to their body (“Body Language” 40). “My body did not feel like mine. My life did not feel like mine. Was there a self that wouldn’t feel like a costume?” As they further explain later, after beginning to present more masculine but not feeling sure that they wanted to transition and be seen as a man, Marzano-Lesnevich writes, “It wasn’t that man felt right; it was that woman felt wrong, and what could be the alternative?” (“Body Language” 42). Many readers will not have had the experience of a body and identity feeling wrong and searching for an alternative. Marzano-Lesnevich’s description and attention to bodies provides a possibility for such empathic identification with bodies and experiences perhaps unlike one’s own although the associated feelings and memories may be familiar. While “Body Language” excavates memories and sensations in a deeper consideration of bodies and identity, Marzano-Lesnevich’s essay “Futurity” follows questions and fragmentary narratives in order to imagine what the future might be. Bodies, once again, are at the center of the experiences, as readers are invited to share a sense of unfamiliar embodiment while raising all too familiar larger concerns of future uncertainties. At the beginning of the essay Marzano-Lesnevich examines in the bathroom mirror their jawline newly covered in blond fuzz. “I think of change constantly, and the way change implies progression, and now, looking left and looking right, I wonder what I am seeing, what the fuzz is a harbinger of. Will it grow longer? Will I grow a beard?” they write (“Futurity” 115). Their description of the “fuzz so pale as to be nearly invisible,” and their wondering if it will stay like this—“prepubescent even as time goes forward and inscribes lines on my skin?”—takes readers into the body to imagine looking in the mirror, jaw

124  Critical Empathy tilted up so that the fuzz can catch the light, and thinking about how that fuzz exists in narrative time, as part of a change across moments connecting past and future selves (“Futurity” 115). The difference is in the details. MarzanoLesnevich describes a striking contrast of prepubescent fuzz on an age-lined face, puberty and late adulthood presented simultaneously, in details that are familiar in isolation but unfamiliar in combination. Readers may imagine these layers of details on the face, imagine seeing the face in the mirror and trying to recognize it as one’s own, imagine how other people might see it, and consider what it might mean in these moments. Marzano-Lesnevich is attempting to fit their life and body in a narrative. They write of a sense of the future as “The very thing we are all trying to hold onto, as we wait for it to arrive,” marking concern for the future as something we all share, perhaps especially during a pandemic, a time that marks Marzano-Lesnevich’s essay (“Futurity” 117). Yet, Marzano-Lesnevich’s future, their narrative, is beholden to a gender binary and bodily perceptions in ways the futures of others may not be. “Here is how, researchers say, we slot one another into genders with a glance,” they write, noting hairlines, eye sockets, jawlines, chests, hip-to-waist ratios, and smiles (“Futurity” 118). “That instant’s what I keep thinking about. Just an instant—but in it, a whole narrative (my life) unfurls.” Theirs is a narrative dependent upon perceptions of their body in ways that affect all bodies but of which many people are unaware. MarzanoLesnevich’s writing produces a critical awareness of these perceptions, in their life and in the lives of others. They make us consider how identities, experiences, senses of belonging and being seen, narratives, and futures depend upon bodies. “Does everyone carry such felt knowledge of doom inside them, such belief in the impossibility of a future? Or only those of us born into bodies that cast us into a narrative that doesn’t fit” (“Futurity” 124). Empathy often is a work of informed imagination. Marzano-Lesnevich exercises their imagination in their writing and prompts readers to do the same. “At times I try to imagine what I want this country to look like, when all this is over. I try to imagine us taking care of one another,” they write, referencing the pandemic (“Futurity” 121). “I try to imagine 343,593 (today’s count; tomorrow it will be higher) people not dead, so many of them Black and brown, and so many of them economically marginalized,” they continue. “And okay I try to imagine what I want to look like, but I grew up in the same damn binary everyone else did. The same damn America.” There is a sense here of possibility as well as of being trapped. Marzano-Lesnevich is concerned with the future and, through their attempts at imagining what the future might hold, they push readers to imagine other futures as well. But the realities of bodies and the confines of the binary narratives we are born into limit those future possibilities. Marzano-Lesnevich invites readers to empathize with concerns for the future and the possible constructions of a narrative self, but they demonstrate the challenges of these constructions through attention to the details of the body. The body becomes both a site and a barrier to empathy, a tension realized in the practice of critical empathy. A similar move to critical empathy is analyzed in Lynch’s essay and his

Critical Empathy  125 attention to the work of Temple Grandin and Cornel West for how both authors invite and then frustrate empathy by highlighting critical differences in embodied experiences in the world. In Lynch’s analysis, Grandin and West invite us into their stories, not only to secure assent on a particular point, but in order to adjust and readjust the conditions under which we approach one another argumentatively. They ask us to empathize with them; they openly invite empathy; and yet they frustrate it, and by doing so, they call into question the ways we take an interest in one another, and they prepare the way for argumentative conditions that would be more adequate to them and who they are, more adequate, that is, to getting their stories heard. (19) I read Marzano-Lesnevich as employing a similar strategy, one that leverages the empathic imagination and one’s own sense of being as embodied to draw attention to the critical differences in embodied experiences and the narratives and futures made possible through those differences. The result is a broader identification with Marzano-Lesnevich, their concern with the future, along with a sense of the constraints Marzano-Lesnevich in particular feels. Readers are led then to lament with Marzano-Lesnevich the closure of narrative possibilities due being born into “the same damn binary” everybody else was born into, even if our embodied experiences of that binary are quite different. In his consideration of rhetorics of empathy and proximity, Lynch references philosopher Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” to highlight the epistemological challenges of attempting to understand another’s experiences. Nagel’s essay is worth revisiting for how well Nagel poses the problem of trying to understand what it is like to be somebody or some-being else. In trying to imagine what it is like to be a bat, we are limited by our own experiences, which provide the basis for our imagination. Nagel writes, It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications. (439)

126  Critical Empathy The failure of imagination Nagel is describing is similar to the limitations of self-focused empathy, in which I try to imagine what it is like for me to be somebody else. That fails to fully account for what it is like for somebody else to be that somebody else. In the case of imagining what it is like to be a bat, Nagel writes that we would require more facts to direct our imaginations, that we need to try to identify something objective with which to work. “The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if only we knew what they were like,” he writes (139). To focus on what it is like for a bat to be a bat—or, more importantly, what it is like for somebody else to be that somebody else—is a practice in other-focused empathy. That requires attention to details and observation as well as an awareness of differences in embodied experiences, perspectives, histories, and desired futures. For Nagel, the problem is our reliance on empathy itself for understanding others. “At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject,” he writes (449). “This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.” Nagel’s hope is that this new method would be able to relate, however incomplete, “the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences” (449). Doing so might even help us better understand our own experiences through the benefits of more objective descriptions and some more distance from and perspective on the experiences themselves. Subjective experience may offer more possibilities for understanding than it is credited here by Nagel. It does tell me something to imagine what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. It can remind me of how different I am from a bat, how differently we experience the world, and how differently our bodies are related to those experiences. It also might tell me something about our potential relationships as creatures in a shared world. That was naturalist Charles Foster’s experience as he took up Nagel’s question and tried to experience what it is like to be an animal by behaving himself as an animal behaves, as literally as possible. To immerse himself as best he could in the world and experiences of a badger he lived in a hole and ate earthworms, for example. Reflecting on this experience of trying to be a fox and on the limits of understanding other beings, Foster writes, I’ve lived, and I live, with the fox in an embodied, sensual world of wood and earth and bone and semen and cold. We met and we meet in a real place, and there I’ve started to use the words I and thou. The I has grown in the encounters, I can tell you. And if the I has grown, why not the thou? If we grow in the same soil, and in the light beaming from the other, isn’t that a sort of knowledge of the other? (213)

Critical Empathy  127 For Foster, encountering the other in openness, curiosity, and an awareness of profound differences allows for an enlarged understanding both of self and of other. Foster’s project is a somewhat whimsical one, but he takes it seriously and works to avoid the errors of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, which would otherwise view the world through strictly human terms and remake animals in human likeness. He notes the shortcomings of sensation and language, that words cannot describe the world as a fox can smell it, nor can words capture the feeling of a swift in flight. But words can try, and in the attempt they can force us to acknowledge how short they come and how much our imaginations rely upon them. Foster’s project is an exercise in empathy with radically different others. He bases his empathy on a shared environment and on his own curiosity and willingness to attempt the absurd in order to approach a better understanding, even when doing so highlights how such an attempt is destined to come up short. He ends in a place of not knowing what it is like to be an animal but of having greater respect for them, for our shared world, and of feeling invested in their flourishing. “Empathize enough with a swift and you’ll either become one or (which may be the same thing) you’ll be able to rejoice so much with the screeching race around the church tower that you won’t mind not being one yourself,” he writes (216). This also is a valuable outcome of empathy, the not needing to be the other while being invested in the wellbeing and joys of the other, as best as one can understand them. It is a critical empathy in that it is founded on an awareness of differences and a reflection on how those differences matter. Perhaps no differences are more immediately apparent than different potentials of embodied experiences. Attending to those can take us closer to the new method Nagel hopes for in a practice of critical empathy that recognizes the limits of our imagination, embodied as it is. Although Nagel and Foster are writing about understanding an extremely different experience of the world in the being of a non-human animal, the question ultimately is one of understanding others outside ourselves. Understanding other people with different social and embodied experiences obviously is not the same as understanding other beings such as animals. I mean no conflation here of the human and the non-human, only to highlight the challenges in understanding other embodied experiences in the world, of which non-human animals offer an extreme case. Our differences with nonhumans make those challenges striking. Our similarities with other people make it much easier to understand one another, although those similarities also can make it easier to overlook important differences in embodied experiences, social histories, preferences, and so on. I analyze Nagel and Foster’s work alongside other writers in this section on empathy and bodies because, for them, bodies are a fundamental way of understanding ourselves, our assumed similarities, and our critical differences in experiences with others. That understanding prompts reflection on our desires to empathize and our processes for doing so as a basis for further considerations of critical empathy.

128  Critical Empathy Critical Awareness: Of Social Histories and Contexts in Empathy In her award-winning book Citizen, a collection of lyric poems and essays, Rankine also centers bodies as sites of meaning and as possibilities for and barriers to empathy. She extends that by placing bodies within the social contexts and histories that give them meaning, particularly as concerns race. Like Marzano-Lesnevich’s “Futurity,” Citizen is presented in fragments that build through accumulation and association. The fragments, as well as the visual art, video stills, and pictures included in Citizen, disrupt the sense of a unified narrative and delimited narrator. Readers are drawn more immediately into memory and sensation and the challenges of creating a self through encounters with the world. Rankine writes with detailed attention to how it feels to be, particularly in the body of the narrator, but also embodied in general. Her writing is quite visceral, foregrounding an awareness of bodily experience. “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough,” she writes (7). These moments are registered physically in familiar but startling ways. The book is a collection of such moments. Rankine continues, “An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage” (8). The meaning of these feelings may not yet be clear for readers, especially those with experiences different from the narrator’s, but the unpleasant sensation of a “bad egg in your mouth” and puke running down one’s blouse is immediate, felt, and relatable. The vivid description prompts readers to question what caused such a response, how their own emotional and physical reactions to encounters might be a basis, sufficient or insufficient, for understanding the reactions of the narrator. The cumulative effect of such moments is of creating a self in felt, embodied response to the world. The body remembers what the world might want it to forget, Rankine writes. You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world’s had a lot of practice. No one should adhere to the facts that contribute to narrative, the facts that create lives. To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds. Those sensations form a someone. (61) By so vividly describing the feelings that create a someone, Rankine brings that someone before the reader, creating a “you” for the reader to try to feel through, although that “you” also can demonstrate for the reader, particularly a white reader, the critical differences in their experiences and those of Rankine’s narrator. They may hold similar potentials for embodied reactions, similar potential for experiencing the feeling of a “bad egg in your

Critical Empathy  129 mouth,” but the causes, opportunities, and significance of those feelings can be quite different. For Rankine, history is recorded and remembered through bodies and in the ways bodies are felt, experienced, and encountered. “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you,” she writes (63). Readers are faced with the potential for meaning in these bodies and memories through the position of the second-person “you” narrating much of Citizen. The feeling can be jarring and confusing, turning one’s attention back upon one’s own experiences. Citizen opens by recalling associated memories, first of being 12 years old in school and having the girl sitting behind you ask if you could move a bit so that she can copy your exam answers. In this memory, “You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person” (5). For this reader, who also remembers students in school asking if they could cheat off of him, who otherwise easily slipped into the position of “you” by the narrator, the effect of the girl saying you “have features more like a white person” is startling. I am white. I cannot recall a time when somebody ever felt the need to comment upon my features and how they correspond to that person’s reading of my racial identity. I try to imagine how upsetting that could be. I try to put myself in the place of a 12-year-old girl being told this. The many challenges of doing so, of stepping into the “you” that is being described in this moment, highlight for me the differences between my embodied experiences and those of the narrator. I am able to relate to those experiences in some ways, and so this reminder of our critical differences comes as a bit of a shock, immediately showing me the errors in my assumptions about who this “you” is and how they have experienced the world. The differences in lived experiences, in the possibilities inhabited by the narrated “you,” accumulate throughout Citizen as Rankine describes moment after moment of disregard, disrespect, racist assumptions, and failures to accord respect and equal standing. Rankine is able to work with the ambiguities of subjective experience, between self and other, in moments of encounter. The experience exists before it is given significance and assigned ownership. “Each moment is like this—before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen,” Rankine writes (9). “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?” There is a sense of distinctions being confused, assignments misplaced, until the recognition of social context, bodies, and histories snap them back into definition. Rankine offers a friend’s analysis that Americans encounter one another with their historical selves and their self selves, which are in opposition. By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your

130  Critical Empathy white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. (14) We are unable in those moments to escape the meaning history assigns to our bodies. It is interesting that here again Rankine blurs boundaries between selves in noting “her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self,” as though the assigning of race is arbitrary or the sense of self not so sure, until that racial assignment becomes quite definite in the moment with its understood significance. Ralph Clare cites the work of Kamran Javadizadeh in noting the many interpretive possibilities for the “you” of Citizen as it may stand for the narrator and their friends, the reader, a general third person, and other marginalized citizens in collective experience. Citizen’s “you” subverts the lyric form, Clare observes, by replacing the traditional first-person “I” with the second person. “Most pointedly, Rankine’s compelling employment of the second person point-of-view places the reader in the position of the speaker in many a poem or vignette in which ‘you’ directly experience acts of racism,” Clare writes (62). The expectation may be that Citizen positions white readers in particular to experience racism and empathize with their fellow citizens who suffer racism in their everyday experiences and to mourn the murders memorialized in Citizen. Clare argues, however, that Citizen does not allow empathy to be such a straightforward and uncritical solution. “Empathy is thus not some universal quality or action that we can generate more of or activate when we need it, but a culturally relative and contingently mediated behavior,” he writes (64). “In Citizen, affective empathy emerges from the insight that we might gain when we recognize the structural conditions not only of racism and injustice but also, and crucially, of our feelings and empathetic responses to them.” Clare is articulating the practice of what I describe as critical empathy, a practice that employs empathy in order to reflect upon the social and contextual nature of that empathy and the possibilities and limitations of our own efforts to empathize. Citizen places reader efforts to empathize in high relief in order to make readers and empathy itself more accountable. Rankine does suggest that not attempting to empathize is itself a failure. Citizen includes moments where people, white men specifically, fail to see other people for who they are or even to see other people at all. A boy in the subway is knocked over by a man who “did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself” (17). Later, when a man in a drugstore cuts in front of the narrator in line, he says he did not see her. She offers that he must be in a hurry. “No, no, no, I really didn’t see you,” he says (Rankine 77). Clearly, a stunted empathic imagination, a failure to see anybody who is not a reflection of oneself, a failure to see others in general, is not desired. We should not give up on empathy entirely. However, as Rankine suggests, we cannot expect direct personal empathy to offer an immediate solution to challenging social problems. Easy empathy alone

Critical Empathy  131 risks contributing to the problem by settling on a solution that only makes empathizers feel better about themselves. Clare identifies what he calls an affective empathy in his reading of Citizen. As he describes it, affective empathy recognizes that any imagined identification will always come up short against the otherness of the other, that affect’s materiality and transpersonality make it historical, public, and transmissible, and that it is not a matter of feeling for or instead of others but of feeling and mattering alongside them—of putting one’s body on the line, so to speak, when it matters most. An affective empathy, in this sense, would be an empathy based upon relationality and affective relations, which are historical-material productions that go beyond reacting to one’s mere individual, subjective emotions. (78) Some of the important points in Clare’s concept of affective empathy are that it understands empathy as not only a personal event but one produced through social histories and contexts. It prompts people to be aware of the conditions that produce empathy and of the limits of empathy, that the full reality of the experience of another is out of reach, that empathy always is at best an approximation. A hopeful goal of empathy, as Clare develops it, is not intimate or assumed knowledge of another so much as solidarity, the willingness to put one’s body on the line, as Clare describes it, “feeling and mattering alongside them.” This is demonstrated in Citizen when the man knocks over the boy on the subway platform. The mother telling the story says she grabbed the man’s arm and told him to apologize. Then, “The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards…like newly found uncles and brothers” (Rankine 17). The reaction of these men is to place their bodies on the line, to stand in solidarity with the mother and her son. They do not attempt to take her place or act for her but recognize the moment, what had happened, the feelings and histories and bodies involved, and decide to support her. In that moment, they are transformed from strangers to family, like uncles and brothers. Later in Citizen, the narrator describes a scene with a man on a train, an empty seat beside him, and a woman who prefers standing to sitting next to the man, avoiding the seat until another seat is available away from the man, who just stares out the window. This man could be any man in a similar transit situation. Rankine writes, “You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in priority to, adjacent to, alongside, within” (131). The woman who avoids the man is denying him standing as a fellow citizen, as a member of her community, as a person one might sit beside. The narrator’s response is to place her body next to the man’s, to take a position alongside and in solidarity with him, even becoming him in a way, recognizing that they are fundamentally the same, in that they may both be avoided for similar reasons.

132  Critical Empathy This idea of bodies in solidarity and proximity recalls Lynch’s concept of empathy as based upon rhetorics of proximity and the efforts to move closer or further away from one another. The distance between bodies is where the possibilities for empathy exist, as determined through the histories and social conditions that create that space. Toward the end of Citizen, Rankine writes, “The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you. / The opening, between you and you, occupied, / zoned for an encounter, / given the histories of you and you— /And always, who is this you?” (140). I take her to be describing the space between people, “zoned for an encounter,” how it is historically determined, a site of encountering self selves and historical selves, as her friend had said. The encounter between “you and you” is in a space already occupied, since we cannot encounter one another outside of the social and historical contexts that give that encounter meaning. Rankine complicates this further by questioning who is involved in this encounter, referencing “you and you” as though she is singling out two individuals, although the referring “you” is the same, suggesting the distinction is not all that clear or perhaps not always important. Rankine foregrounds the importance of bodies within social contexts and histories. She invites and complicates reader identification, especially that of white readers, through attention to embodied experiences, the accumulation of such experiences within social contexts informed by history and race, and the use of the second-person you that invites and frustrates possibilities for identification in reading and determining the position of the narrator. Citizen is an affecting work, one that attempts to move people closer together while also highlighting the barriers in doing so. As Clare concludes, “Citizen provides a model of an affective empathy that must be negotiated psychologically and materially, culturally and politically, individually and systemically in order for a more just and open community to relate to, and collect with, one another” (78). Relating to, and collecting with, one another requires a practice of critical empathy that reflects upon the conditions, limits, and possibilities of empathy itself, as demonstrated in Citizen. This is reflected in Blankenship’s characteristic of empathy as requiring self-critique and addressing difference, power, and embodiment (20). It is also evident in her first criteria of “yielding to an Other by sharing and listening to personal stories” (20). In these ways, critical empathy creates possibilities for coalitions. Critical Empathy in Coalition Recognizing the social conditions and constraints of empathy is an important step in creating the possibilities for coalitions based upon critical empathy. In this final section of the chapter, I consider how critical empathy can inform our relations with one another and how it may be put in action. My understanding of critical empathy in service of social action is based upon the work of DeStigter, a professor of English and former high school teacher who conducts ethnographic education research. In a speech upon

Critical Empathy  133 receiving a research award in 1998, DeStigter comments on the importance of developing affective community relationships. He uses the term “critical empathy,” which he credits to fellow teacher-scholar Jay Robinson. As DeStigter describes it, critical empathy refers to the process of establishing informed and affective connections with other human beings, of thinking and feeling with them at some emotionally, intellectually, and socially significant level, while always remembering that such connections are complicated by sociohistorical forces that hinder the equitable, just relationships that we presumably seek. (240) For DeStigter, critical empathy necessarily involves thinking and feeling, identifying opportunities for connection while also keeping in mind the limits of the empathic imagination and the significance of differences. The connections of critical empathy DeStigter describes are built upon a concern for the wellbeing of others. Without that investment in another’s wellbeing, there is no purpose for connection, no goal. Critical empathy is not simply felt but informed through one’s attention to another and awareness of differences and the social forces and histories that create barriers for shared experiences and understanding. These forces are similar to those recognized by Rankine, histories and forces that accompany us to any encounter. Yet, DeStigter does not allow those forces to forestall empathy entirely. DeStigter follows his description of critical empathy with the tragic story of a dedicated teacher and community activist. While the story has a sad ending, DeStigter intends for it to demonstrate the potential for connections among educators and students with very different life experiences, which can serve as an example of the potential of critical empathy to build larger social coalitions. In DeStigter’s story, students respond to the care and commitment they see teachers demonstrate. This care and commitment are not based upon the idea that the teachers fully understand the students’ experiences and situations but that they are aware of the limitations of their understanding while still trying to improve that understanding and find opportunities for connection. One way to do so is to recognize that people are not only one thing. We are collections of multiple points of identity, some more mutable than others, undergoing changes over time, with some at the foreground and some in the background in any particular moment and encounter. The multiple points of identity challenge essentialized ideas of the self and present opportunities for building connections. As DeStigter writes, While I think it is fair to say that most descriptions of the public sphere assume people’s coming together as unified essentialized selves around common projects, critical empathy relies on a conception of the self as characterized by multiple, shifting, and highly contextualized identities. (242)

134  Critical Empathy Finding a shared point of identity, a possibility for connection, should never be taken as more than it is and mistaken for the fuller experience of empathy. Because we have some feature of our experience in common, I should not assume that I understand what that experience means for somebody else or that I have significant insight into what it is like to be that person. That point of connection instead may offer a possibility for building more understanding, for more fully considering points of convergence and difference in our experiences. Just as there is a risk of making too many assumptions based upon small similarities, there also is a risk of considering differences in an essentialized way, reducing the complexity of other people to their most salient differences, flattening them to what we take them to represent. Critical empathy would have people identify possibilities for shared connections alongside recognition of differences, holding similarities and differences in tension, not allowing one or the other to determine all that we can understand about another, and all of this within the larger context of caring about the fundamental wellbeing of another. I also see critical empathy in Lu’s reflection of how she reads and responds to the stories of others in composition scholarship. Lu begins her essay “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation” by recognizing literacy, and the work of defining literacy, as a political struggle. She develops the idea of a literate self as part of a larger project of social justice. In Lu’s conception, This ideal literate self uses reading and writing for the following goals: (1) To end oppression rather than to empower a particular form of self, group, or culture; (2) To grapple with one’s privileges as well as one’s experience of exclusion; (3) To approach more respectfully and responsibly those histories and experiences which appear different from what one calls one’s own; and (4) To affirm a yearning for individual agency shared by individuals across social divisions without losing sight of the different material circumstances against which each of us must struggle when enacting such a yearning. (173) There is a lot to unpack in Lu’s description of goals for the ideal literate self. It is worth noting from the start that these goals are based upon literacy practices in the ways that we represent ourselves and relate to and understand others through our encounters in words and texts. This is an important goal for Lu’s idea of the literate self, to pursue social justice in coalition with others. Literacy practices for Lu are not simply in alignment with these goals but are necessary for achieving them. We end oppression through the work of reading and writing and by focusing on the end of oppression itself rather than simply empowering some new group. To grapple with one’s privileges requires a critical reflection made possible through literate practices. By writing, reflecting upon, and revising the self, in relation with others, we are best

Critical Empathy  135 able to recognize our own positioning and to approach more respectfully and responsibly the positionings of others. Lu identifies a striving for individual agency as something people have in common, and this presents an opportunity for building coalitions in pursuit of social justice and human flourishing. In affirming that shared human yearning, however, Lu writes that we must also recognize the different material circumstances, or the different social and historical forces, that create barriers to that yearning. Lu demonstrates in her essay how one might pursue these goals of the literate self. She reconsiders key works of personal narrative in rhetoric and composition and her reactions to those works. She examines her initial response to Richard Miller’s essay “The Nervous System” and grapples with her difficulty recognizing a shared yearning for agency and social justice in the work of writers like Miller, those who have been “historically and socially placed on the side of power” (176). Lu worries that such writers may not give due consideration to the importance of different material and social circumstances that shape and resist our shared yearning for agency, but she also is afraid her suspicion of motivations itself becomes a barrier to actively engaging with such writers to further shared causes. “I am often quicker to spot others’ lack of reflection on the paradox of their privileges than to confront the ways in which the paradox of my own privilege mediates my reaction to their work,” Lu writes (176). Throughout the essay, Lu reflects on her personal experience and social position, in response to Miller’s essay as well as to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s essay “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own.” Lu reflects upon how her experiences and her positioning informs her reactions to others. She provides a powerful example of the type of critical self-reflection that critical empathy calls for. Lu warns that critical reflection must not be used by the powerful to dismiss the concerns of the disadvantaged. As in critical empathy, there is a necessary tension between the individual and the collective, and one must be careful not to replace one with the other, especially when such replacement favors the powerful. “The tension between individual agency and collective goals of ending oppression is at the heart of critical affirmation,” Lu writes (189). “In short, reflections and revisions of one’s privileged social placements must be used to bring to the foreground rather than push back and out of hearing the histories, experiences, and voices of oppressed social groups.” This type of critical reflection is possible for Lu through the work of writing. “In writing this paper, I have maintained that the actual act of writing is an important means for reflecting and revising the paradox of one’s privileges,” she writes (192). “It helps to put one’s self—especially one’s private and day to day thoughts, feelings, and bodily reactions—on the line for personal and public scrutiny.” Lu sets a bold example of the power of writing and what it means to put one’s self on the line. She proves writing to be an essential tool for the type of self-reflection necessary for critical empathy so that we might better hold and consider the tension between individual agency and collective action for social progress.

136  Critical Empathy Lu develops the idea of critical affirmation from West. The concept appears in West’s essay “Nihilism in Black America” published in Race Matters. ­ West is concerned about the threat of nihilism facing the Black community. As he defines it, Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment from others and a selfdestructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others. (13–14) I quote West’s full definition of nihilism because it helps explain the purpose of critical affirmation and the threat it is meant to address. It is important to note, as Lu does, that West is writing out of concern for a particular community, that being the Black community, the threats it faces, and the tools it has developed to address those threats. Concepts such as critical affirmation have use beyond their communities of origin, but those communities of origin are important to keep in mind because they define the concept. The meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness that concern West come from a social context and history that devalues Black lives in particular, although Black lives are not the only lives to face meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness. In West’s view, wellbeing depends upon our loving commitments and attachments to others. This becomes foundational to critical affirmation. “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul,” West writes (18). “This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.” West cites Toni Morrison’s Beloved as an exemplar of the love ethic he advocates. Beloved, he writes, brings together loving yet critical affirmation of black humanity found in the best of black nationalist movements, the perennial hope against hope for transracial coalition in progressive movements, and the painful struggle for self-affirming sanity in a history in which the nihilistic threat seems insurmountable. (18) There is hope in West’s idea of critical affirmation. It is rooted in action and coalitions across difference. It begins with affirmation of the self as well as a critical awareness of the historical conditions that have opposed and

Critical Empathy  137 positioned the self. As a pragmatist, West’s focus is on acknowledging the conditions of people’s existence while also acting together to change those conditions. “A love ethic has nothing to do with sentimental feelings or tribal connections. Rather it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people,” he writes (18). Critical empathy, like critical affirmation, starts with a valuing of oneself and others on some fundamental levels, such as a shared yearning for agency, while also recognizing the different historical, social, and material conditions aligned against equitably relating to one another. Critical empathy, like critical affirmation, works to imagine and create through coalition better conditions for future encounters, seeking ways to improve our understanding and connection even amidst a critical awareness of our limitations. Features of Critical Empathy In this chapter, I have analyzed examples of critical empathy in action in order to theorize what critical empathy is and how it might best be practiced. From these, some key features of critical empathy become clear. Critical empathy (1) is aware of and attempts to account for biases, such as familiarity bias and proximity bias; (2) distinguishes understanding from agreement and seeks ways to understand even while disagreeing about the meaning of that understanding; (3) charges those engaged in an empathic encounter with recognizing the positions, conditions, and experiences from which they and others enter the encounter; (4) is aware of how differences in social positions and relative power may affect the conditions of an empathic encounter; (5) attends to embodied experiences and the significance of their differences; (6) questions who is empathizing with whom and to what end; (7) does not require anybody to empathize with any other particular somebody or group, and especially does not further burden the relatively disempowered with an expectation of empathy; (8) identifies shared human interests and yearnings as opportunities to build coalitions amid recognition of differences; and finally, (9) uses these principles to reflect upon and revise the process of empathizing itself through the application of metacognitive tools such as writing. That final principle adds much value to critical empathy, allowing the process to be reiterative and to improve itself. Critical empathy is necessary in concert with the other modes of empathy considered throughout this book. Critical empathy keeps other forms of empathy accountable. It exposes easy empathy for the ways that it can flatter the empathizer, provide a false sense of understanding, and fail to understand or improve conditions for those who are empathized with. Critical empathy pushes the empathizer to consider not only the target of empathy but also themselves as the subject of empathy in difficult and sometimes troubling ways, looking at their own inclinations to empathize or not empathize with particular people, their own positions and privileges, and perhaps seeing reflected in themselves shared qualities or human potentials that they would rather ignore. In this sense, critical empathy is not flattering or easy. It is

138  Critical Empathy difficult, requiring effort in its reflections on the self in relation to others. Critical empathy acknowledges the social conditions of empathy, those values and social positions that inform empathy. It views empathy as not simply a personal psychological phenomenon but a social one. This understanding includes key rhetorical considerations, such as the audiences of empathy, the context and exigences of any empathic encounter, the constraints working for and against empathy, and the expectations of action and appraisal of self and others that empathy makes upon us. In attempting to disentangle understanding from agreement, and in looking for possibilities for connection and coalition amid differences, critical empathy creates opportunities for empathy even with our enemies. Critical empathy allows us to reflect upon and improve these processes. It asks us to question empathy itself and how it is evoked and employed, to call out the misuses of empathy, including our own, and to champion the purposeful, reflective, affirming, and productive possibilities of empathy, in which we and the empathy we practice might be at our best. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2014. Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy. HarperCollins, 2016. Clare, Ralph. “‘You’ Can’t Feel My Pain: The Limits of Empathy in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.” Rereading Empathy, edited by Emily Johansen and Alissa G. Karl, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 61–82. de Coning, Alexis. “Seven Theses on Critical Empathy: A Methodological Framework for ‘unsavory’ Populations.” Qualitative Research: QR, June 2021, pp. 1–17. DeStigter, Todd. “Public Displays of Affection: Political Community through Critical Empathy.” Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 33, no. 3, 1999, pp. 235–44. Foster, Charles. Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide. Metropolitan Books, 2016. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2014. Leake, Eric. “The (Un)Knowable Self and Others: Critical Empathy and Expressivism.” Critical Expressivism: Theory and Practice in the Composition Classroom, edited by Tara Roeder and Roseanne Gatto, The WAC Clearinghouse / Parlor Press, 2014, pp. 149–60. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 172–94. Lynch, Dennis A. “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1998, pp. 5–23. Marzano-Lesnevich, Alex. “Body Language.” Harper’s, vol. 339, no. 2035, Dec. 2019, pp. 39–45. ———. “Futurity.” Harvard Review, no. 57, June 2021, pp. 114–29.

Critical Empathy  139 Miller, Richard E. “The Nervous System.” College English, vol. 58, no. 3, Mar. 1996, pp. 265–86. “Morgellons Disease: Managing an Unexplained Skin Condition.” Mayo Clinic, 4 May 2022, https://www.mayoclinic.org/morgellons-disease/art-20044996. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 83, no. 4, Oct. 1974, pp. 435–50. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 47, no. 1, Feb. 1996, pp. 29–40. Setiya, Kieran. Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. Riverhead Books, 2022. West, Cornel. Race Matters. 25th anniversary edition, Beacon Press, 2017.

7

Conclusion The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy

I have taught multiple undergraduate and graduate courses on empathy and writing. In those courses, and in all of my courses, I stress the importance of classroom community, that we need to establish a place where people feel comfortable sharing of themselves, because empathy is so often personal. More than once at around the middle of the semester I have had to pause the course and reestablish the values that I see as central to empathy due to course tensions. Students may be stressed in their courses and in their lives, sharing their perspectives and perhaps feeling misunderstood by others. This is part of the work of the course, to develop reflective practices of empathy. During the height of the pandemic, when all courses had been relocated to entirely online environments, we had to pause our discussions in a graduate course I was teaching to reaffirm values associated with empathy. I wrote to the class, Hi everybody, I caught up with the discussion posts this weekend. As usual there were many very insightful, generous, trusting, and supportive responses, and I thank you for the care and attention you have invested in those and all your work in the class. I also want to share some thoughts and best practices that I think are worth keeping in mind as we discuss the texts, read and respond to one another, and work together to better understand empathy and writing. First, these are very challenging times for everybody. Those challenges are borne by some more than others and in ways not immediately apparent. Sometimes people aren’t themselves aware of how much they are affected except in rare moments when they are able to feel more keenly the pressures and loss. Our class is meeting amid so many emotional demands upon people. We all are imperfect in our understanding and practice of empathy in writing and rhetoric. (Indeed, that’s a reason to be in the course, to learn and to improve!) I find learning is best supported through recognizing and encouraging successes rather than highlighting shortcomings DOI: 10.4324/9781003315285-7

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  141 since we all, myself very much included, may misstep in discussing and practicing empathy. Finally, I want to thank you for the personal stories that you all have shared and for your trust in sharing those stories. I very much appreciate that. Discussions of empathy are personal in so many ways. Those discussions can be opportunities to learn about empathy, to learn about one another’s experiences, and to practice the kind of empathic listening for understanding advocated in our readings. You could summarize these as practices in generosity, humility, and curiosity, which I think are deeply connected to empathy. Again, there is so much good work happening in the discussion posts, and I mean this email to help build upon all that great work... (Leake, “A Note on Discussions Responses”) I include this email to illustrate the challenges of empathy, even within spaces dedicated to learning about and practicing empathy. Although we are no longer at the height of the pandemic, things are not easy. People are under considerable pressure for many reasons. Indeed, the pandemic brought increased attention to many of the pressures people had been and continue to be under: suffering the loss of loved ones; feeling a sense of isolation, even amid greater digital connectivity; worrying about the future; contending with one’s health; trying to be there for one’s friends and family and community; and all the while attempting to meet the regularly daily demands of school, work, and life. These challenges were in many ways exacerbated by, but are not unique to, the pandemic. It can be hard to empathize with others when one feels oneself to be suffering and in a vulnerable position, although widespread suffering makes empathy all the more important, an irony of empathy identified earlier. We felt this, and it all affects how we encounter one another, in the classroom and outside of it. Empathy, and failures of empathy, are not always about us. They often are at least as much about the situations in which we encounter one another. We do not know the pressures others are under when they fail to empathize in the ways we might hope, and we do not always recognize the pressures we are under when we fail to do the same. Here, at the conclusion of this book, I want to consider further the values and practices mentioned in the email, empathy in relation to education, and some possibilities of difficult empathy. As the past decade has seen a renewed interest in empathy, I hope coming decades will see greater consideration of the nuances and challenges of empathy. In doing so, we might move away from the generally positive and uncritical popular references to empathy as a vaguely good feeling of personal care. These references can contribute to the kind of easy empathy described earlier in this book, a type of empathy that may stand for positive personal regard but does not address the contexts, motivations, outcomes, and positions of the people involved. I have tried to think through empathy as not merely a personal phenomenon, one

142  Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy occurring within our heads, but as a social phenomenon located in the rich contexts and rhetorical means of our encounters. I have employed an understanding of empathy as a process that creates meaning and persuasion, one that depends upon the elements of the rhetorical situation that inform our encounters. A rhetorical understanding of empathy foregrounds questions about the audiences and purposes of empathy and the ways empathy is used. It allows reflection on the positions of the people involved in an empathic encounter, attention to the means and materials of empathy, and possibilities for revising how we empathically engage others, especially through writing and other forms of composition. I have developed the idea of difficult empathy in order to demonstrate what empathy is and how it functions when it stops flattering the empathizer and challenges our conceptions of self and others, particularly in relationship to social values and ideas of who deserves empathy and who does not. In developing the idea of difficult empathy, I have never meant for it to occupy the place of empathy in general. I want there to be more ways to talk about empathy with more nuance, and I have tried to demonstrate that in this book. Values of Empathy: Generosity, Curiosity, and Humility I told my students I understand empathy as strongly connected to the values of generosity, humility, and curiosity. Those values have continued to inform my understanding and my best attempts at empathy, as I try to employ empathy more purposefully in my teaching and my life. I mentioned these values earlier in the chapter on difficult empathy. Each is worth considering in more detail. Empathy is an act of generosity, which can itself be difficult. It is hard to give of oneself when one feels depleted. It is especially hard to give when one feels one should be the receiver of empathy rather than the giver. This may be a good time to mention a point that I have raised elsewhere and will again, that nobody should feel that they are expected to empathize, that the work of empathy is placed upon them, especially not anybody who would be empathizing from an already disadvantaged situation with those who have enjoyed the advantages, often at the expense of the disadvantaged. Empathy is generous first in that it is giving attention, which is one of the more precious resources we have. Simone Weil often is attributed the quote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (Fitzpatrick, “Generosity and Attention”). Although the quote may be apocryphal, the connection between generosity, attention, and compassion is clear elsewhere in Weil’s work. “Compassion consists in paying attention to an afflicted man and identifying oneself with him in thought. It then follows that one feeds him automatically if he is hungry, just as one feeds oneself. Bread given in this way is the effect and the sign of compassion,” Weil writes in First and Last Notebooks (327). Empathy or compassion for Weil starts with attention and leads to altruistic action, viewing another’s hunger as one’s own, identifying another with oneself. In Gravity and Grace, Weil adds, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  143 It presupposes faith and love” (117). There is indeed a deep generosity, even love, in giving another attention. It presupposes that another is worth attending to, and when we do that, we can make them worthy of attending to simply because we are attending to them. Attention is generous in that it places listening to another’s story before telling one’s own. It also assumes the best. A generous reader is one who looks for possibilities of meaning and success in another’s text before searching for faults. Generosity is extending the benefit of the doubt. It is playing Peter Elbow’s “believing game” and looking for reasons to critically believe something before reasons to tear it down. In her book Generous Thinking, Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that we need more generosity in building more positive relationships within institutions of higher education and extending those into the wider public. In order to do that, she writes, we need to cultivate a greater disposition toward what I am going to call ‘generous thinking,’ a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go. (Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University 12). There are clear resonances here with Krista Ratcliffe’s idea of “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship’s concept of “rhetorical empathy.” Encountering others with empathy, especially difficult empathy, requires generosity. Difficult empathy also depends upon curiosity. At its best, education not only leads to greater knowledge but also greater curiosity, fueling our desire to know more about the world, our ability to ask more questions, our standing in awe of the world’s immensities. This applies to other people and to non-human animals as well. What is it like to be you? What is it like to be where you are from? What is it like to live in your body, with your experiences, your feelings, your desires, and your possible futures? These questions are at the heart of some of the world’s greatest art. Geographer Richard Phillips identifies two types of sociable curiosity: “wondering and finding out about others, which I shall call empathetic curiosity, and being curious (about ideas, things, or others) with them, which I shall call relational curiosity” (3). Curiosity drives our interest in others and in being curious together with them. Curiosity, as Phillips develops it, is not an individual process but a social one. It works through asking and answering questions in discourse with others. It is built upon wonder as well as care. Curiosity is sparked in part through exposure to differences, as occurs in diverse communities. Phillips cautions that curiosity can be exploitative. This is the case when others are placed as if on display to satisfy one’s own curiosity uncoupled from care. As with empathy, people need to be aware of the power differences involved in curiosity. And curiosity can lead to some uncomfortable knowledge about others, Phillips acknowledges.

144  Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy But sociable curiosity also can help build community. As Phillips writes, “I will suggest that, if we get it right, being curious about others can be a way of reaching out to them, forging relationships that can have particular significance in diverse and arguably fragmented societies” (2). Empathy can help focus sociable curiosity in more positive directions. It can direct our processes for learning about others by trying to learn more about their backgrounds, cultural contexts, and situations, by paying closer attention to them in the more accurate mode of other-focused perspective-taking, as described by Martin Hoffman. Curiosity leads to greater awareness of the many, many ways of being in the world, of some of the diversity of human experiences. It helps continually remind us that although there may be basic similarities in what it means to be a human being, the variety of those experiences and their possible meanings far exceeds any one individual. Others are not simply reflections of us, and thankfully not. The more we learn about others the more we may want to learn, renewing our curiosity and supporting our considerations of others with others who are also curious, perhaps about us. The final value I want to discuss in support of empathy generally, and difficult empathy specifically, is humility. What I consider empathic humility starts with the recognition that I do not know what is like to be you. Indeed, it may be impossible for me to know what it is like to be you, so I can hope only to pay attention, to try to empathize, and to make the effort to move closer to understanding. I cannot speak for you or substitute my imagination and assumptions for your experience. Humility requires that we acknowledge that we may be wrong, perhaps in what we know and in what we assign importance. Humility also requires that even when we are not wrong, that we not discount the possibility of others being right. As Leslie Jamison writes, “Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see” (5). I remember listening to a radio interview with Claudia Rankine years ago around the time she published Citizen. She said something about assurances of one’s own moral standing that stuck with me. As I recall—I have not been able to find a transcript of this interview or a citation for this quote, so I may be misremembering—she said, “We are the future’s unenlightened past.” The idea has remained with me. We often look on the past as so unenlightened and so morally compromised, which often was the case, but without turning that same awareness on ourselves, as though we have reached some state of perfect moral standing. It is indeed humbling to think that people in the future may look back on us with moral outrage, perhaps because of climate change, social inequalities, the suffering we impose on industrial farm animals, or for some other moral failing of which we are not yet fully aware. This, by the way, can be a productive idea to pose to a class, to ask them to attempt to look back on us as people from the future might, to undertake this difficult exercise of empathic imagination. The idea that we are the future’s

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  145 unenlightened past is similar to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s exercise in “muscular empathy” with its acknowledgement that most people are by definition not exceptional in terms of challenging the injustices of their time and his recommendation that we keep that humbling thought in mind when we think of people in the past and imagine ourselves one of them. Psychologist Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso found in a study based on selfreport data that “intellectual humility was predictive of more perspective taking, empathetic concern, gratitude, altruism, benevolence, universalism, and less power seeking” (25). Detailing the connections between intellectual humility and empathy, she writes, Qualities of intellectual humility, such as avoiding intellectual overconfidence and respecting others’ viewpoints, may be crucial components of the cognitive processes involved in mirroring the subjective state of another person. This may lead to understanding of the viewpoints of others, and thereby, perhaps, also lead to having greater concern and compassion for others. Similarly, a non-defensive attitude about one’s perspective and openness to other viewpoints may be crucial components in the cognitive processes involved in truly valuing others and experiencing gratitude for them. Thus, intellectual humility might provide the cognitive environment required for experiencing both empathy and gratitude toward others. ­(Krumrei-Mancuso 25) This all makes sense, that avoiding overconfidence in one’s own position can enable one to better understand the positions of others, even to consider the positions of others worth attempting to understand. Unfortunately, many of the discursive environments we encounter one another in seem to work against such humility. Overconfidence and certainty are rewarded in social media posts and other online environments. They may spark disagreements, but the resulting conflict can further draw attention to arrogant posts. In political and social debates participants often are recognized for the forcefulness of their stated positions. Intellectual humility can be seen as weakness or a lack of commitment to a cause. To entertain diverse viewpoints can be seen as betrayal, as was discussed in the chapter on empathizing with the enemy. It can be quite difficult to hold one’s position on an issue and to recognize that other positions might also be valid. Doing so can risk one’s standing in a community and one’s sense of identity. As Krumrei-Mancuso writes, however, practicing intellectual humility also can lead to greater concern, compassion, and gratitude for others. The three values discussed here—generosity, curiosity, and humility—are practiced in connection with others, but they also are important in relation with oneself. Too often people can be generous, curious, and humble in their understanding of others while ungenerous, incurious, and unforgiving of themselves. Psychologist Kristin Neff has done groundbreaking work on the

146  Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy concept of self-compassion. As she defines it, self-compassion has three basic components: 1) extending kindness and understanding to oneself rather than harsh self-criticism and judgment; 2) seeing one’s experiences as part of the larger human experience rather than as separating and isolating; and 3) holding one’s painful thoughts and feelings in balanced awareness rather than over-identifying with them. (Neff 224) Although Neff uses the term “compassion,” the components she identifies also correspond with empathy in being generous, looking for commonalities, and acknowledging that we all have multiple points of identification, including beyond our painful thoughts and feelings. It can be difficult for people to extend empathy to themselves when they are aware of their own failings and their potential to do better. As Neff suggests, one strategy for extending self-compassion is to see one’s shortcomings as shared with others, as in, we all make mistakes despite good intentions. Another strategy is to address oneself as one would a close friend, extending to oneself the same support, care, and compassion. This can be such a useful approach. I expect that practicing empathy with oneself also supports extending empathy to others. As I wrote in the email to my class, these have been challenging times, with the burdens distributed unequally. We ourselves may be unaware of how much we have been affected until we have a moment to attend to the pressure and loss. Granting oneself generosity, curiosity, and humility, at such times, in an exercise of empathy, as one would for a friend, is important, both for oneself and one’s relationships with others. Possibilities of Empathy in Education I have written elsewhere about rationales and strategies for teaching empathy in writing courses (Leake, “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy”). There are a few points I wish to reiterate and that are worth adding to those earlier discussions. First is the importance of pedagogy in general for cultivating empathy. In her excellent work Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen finds that there is not much evidence that exposure to narrative itself cultivates empathy. There is reason to believe, however, that the social contexts, discussions, and pedagogies surrounding engagement with narratives can work to support empathic development. “We ought to take care not to confound the effect of teaching with the effects of reading, when it has been demonstrated that even a simple perspective-taking game can inspire altruism where reading alone does not,” Keen writes (168). If we value empathy, we must attend to the ways that our teaching can support or limit the best practices of empathy. The concepts developed throughout this book are not focused on pedagogy, but they do lend themselves to pedagogical application. They may be employed in designing

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  147 lessons and assignments, in providing students with opportunities to practice and reflect upon empathy, in determining readings and potential forms of response, in guiding discussions, and as key concepts that students might use in their analysis of empathy and its work in rhetorical encounters. Thoughtful, reflective pedagogy is all the more important when working with an idea such as difficult empathy, one that might go against easier moves of empathy and that can pose challenges for the would-be empathizer. It also is worth mentioning again that people, especially students, should not be compelled to empathize in ways that are too troubling. Difficult empathy can be something people need to work up to with proper support and reflective practice. Writing and rhetoric courses are very well suited for cultivating and reflecting upon difficult empathy. Many of our encounters with others happen on the screen or in text through means that are mediated by language and images. Writing and additional modes of composition, such as working with sound and video and images, allows purposeful presentation of self, opportunities for revising that self, and the reflective reading of others in context and in relation with the self. Writing allows us to better observe these processes, slow them down, share them, and improve upon them. Studies in deep canvassing, as discussed earlier in this book, and work such as Blankenship’s concept of rhetorical empathy and Min-Zhan Lu’s application of critical affirmation highlight the importance of sharing personal stories and their potential to effect change. Empathy is well supported when evoked through multiple modes of empathic engagement, when related to experience, when connected with values such as those identified above, and when incorporating diverse stories and perspectives. In his book Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing, John Duffy makes a clear case for the importance of virtue in the teaching of writing, particularly given the current state of public discourse. He identifies “virtues of rhetorical practice” and “virtues of rhetorical interpretation” (Provocations of Virtue 14). Empathy aligns well with the virtues Duffy extolls, and he has advocated for empathy explicitly in other work on the teaching of writing (“Ethical Dispositions: A Discourse for Rhetoric and Composition”). One of the means of teaching virtues in writing as developed by Duffy is to focus on exemplars, an approach I have found useful. In the case of empathy, an instructor might identify a text or public figure they consider an exemplar of empathy. Students could analyze those persons and texts, develop criteria for what makes one an exemplar of empathy, and determine how well the persons and texts meet those criteria and whether they prompt a revision of criteria. Students also could consider how they might apply the lessons of those exemplars to their own lives. Duffy identifies Muhammad Ali as an exemplar of rhetorical virtue for his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, which came at significant personal cost. In the case of difficult empathy, I am reminded of the examples of Clarence Darrow in defending unpopular clients against capital punishment; Hinmatóowyalahtq’it, more popularly known as Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce for his impassioned appeals for

148  Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy peace; Weil for her solidarity with the poor and working class; and Barack Obama for his hopeful vision of people united in the creation of a better shared future; among many others. Accounts of empathic exemplars can be instructive for considering the means and potential of empathy, the forces that would limit it, the ways people find common ground and work to understand one another, and how difficult empathy can change people and their communities. When we empathize, we often draw upon personal experiences for a type of situational empathy. Our ability to empathize with others is informed by our interactions with people from backgrounds other than our own, as we learn from their experiences and identify points of connection. Communityengaged pedagogies and service learning can be excellent approaches to cultivating student empathy. Students also may build their empathic experiences and capacities through their interactions with one another, especially in classrooms where students come from a variety of backgrounds. Writing classrooms work well to expose students to different experiences and to prompt them to reflect upon those experiences. This is critical work if we view the mission of education, and of public institutions in particular, as preparing people to participate in a democracy. The cultivation of empathy and a critical awareness of empathy should be a part of any civic education. As political scientist Michael Morrell writes in arguing for the importance of empathy as a process in deliberative democracy, “Since the public educational system is the primary place in which a society can educate its citizens, it only makes sense that we would want to include empathy training as part of civic education in public schools” (187). Shui-yin Sharon Yam also emphasizes the critical role of empathy in deliberation and consideration of political action. Her concept of “deliberative empathy” builds upon a critical empathy that looks for potentials for building coalition while maintaining awareness of significant differences. The ability to engage in, reflect upon, analyze, and revise these processes of deliberative empathy is appropriate work for the writing classroom. I am aware that the writing classroom already is charged with too much to do in preparing students for rhetorical and literacy work in their education, their professional lives, their personal lives, and the broader civic sphere. However, empathy is a critical component of all of those, as empathy affects how and what students learn, their ability to work with others, their relationships and understanding of others, and their public and civic engagements. Research suggests that empathy is on the decline among traditional college-aged students (Konrath et al.). For these reasons and others, I can think of nothing more important in the writing classroom than teaching for and about empathy in our encounters with others, especially as those encounters are realized in our texts and practices of the literate self. If we are to teach empathy in the writing classroom or in any other classroom, we need to understand empathy not as a personal quality but as a skill, something that can be developed and improved with practice, support, and critical reflection. Research has found that people who believe empathy

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  149 can be developed expend greater efforts empathizing, particularly when empathizing is difficult (Schumann et al.). Part of our teaching for and about empathy should include attention to theories of empathy, how it is used, what it does, and its potential for development. Empathy is something we can choose. Jamison describes empathy as effortful and as meaningful in that effort. “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves,” she writes (23). “This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work.” The idea that empathy should be automatic or easy devalues empathy. It is work, and it can be difficult at times. At those times when empathy is difficult is when it can be most important. With effort we get better at it. Sometimes Empathy Is Not the Best Strategy, and Sometimes It Is Blankenship concludes Changing the Subject with an important acknowledgement that “Rhetorical empathy has limits; it has considerable challenges. It is far from perfect and isn’t always the best choice” (128). This is true of rhetorical empathy, and it may be especially true of difficult empathy. As I have mentioned throughout this book, difficult empathy should never be imposed or expected, and it certainly should not be expected of the relatively disempowered, that they should empathize with the empowered. Sometimes it is best to avoid difficult encounters, if those encounters can be avoided. Empathy requires effort, and sometimes that effort may be better spent elsewhere. At times when so many people are feeling physical, emotional, social, and material stress, they may simply not have the resources to engage in difficult empathy. They also may not want to or be ready to open themselves up to the potentially troubling identifications that difficult empathy can entail. That is all totally understandable. And sometimes the best strategy, and the most empathic one, is to consider other means of engagement, perhaps not based in words. I am reminded of a student in a recent graduate seminar who wrote about the possibilities for empathy in silence, how sometimes the most empathic, and perhaps the most difficult, thing somebody can do is to simply be there, in a space, with somebody else, offering their presence in solidarity, not following the opposing impulses to fill the space or turn away, but to simply remain there in silent communion with another. My point in this book is not to argue that difficult empathy is appropriate for every rhetorical encounter and certainly not that it should be placed as an additional burden on anybody. Rather, my point is that difficult empathy has distinct value in our rhetorical encounters, that it requires work, and that it can alter how we understand ourselves in connection with others in important ways that might, hopefully, create opportunities for positive change. Throughout this book, I also have argued for the value in distinguishing

150  Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy among modes of empathy so that we might talk about empathy with greater detail and finer distinction, moving toward a discussion of empathies. I have presented empathy as not only a personal psychological phenomenon but as a social rhetorical one, dependent on the contexts and cultural values in which we encounter one another, in real life and in texts. Critical empathy is a necessary means for keeping in mind the importance of these factors so that we might look for points of commonality even while remaining aware of our significant differences as well as the uses and limits of empathy. Part of what makes difficult empathy difficult is that it requires risk and vulnerability. It might not work. It might be unsettling, and it might open one up to criticisms that they are empathizing with the wrong people or failing to empathize with the right ones. As I said, it is not always the best strategy, but sometimes it is. Sometimes unsettling can be productive, and the attempt to empathize with people who are considered the wrong people can do more good and lead to greater insights than would shutting down the possibilities of empathy. History teaches us that we should not be so sure that we always know who are the right and who are the wrong people to empathize with. When difficult empathy is a good strategy, it tends to be informed by those values stated earlier: generosity, curiosity, and humility. After I sent the email to the class underscoring those values, during a semester in the midst of a pandemic, when we were limited to interacting with one another on screens, we all returned that following week again to share perspectives, to practice and learn about empathy, to better listen to one another’s stories and to see how those stories might be shared while remaining specific to the sharer. Sometimes our practices of empathy in class went well, sometimes they could have been better, and we learned from them all. We could do worse, the rest of us, than practice and reflect upon our efforts to empathize in our encounters, as we meet through words and on screens, when empathy in those encounters is easy and when it is difficult. Works Cited Blankenship, Lisa. Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. Utah State University Press, 2019. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “A Muscular Empathy.” The Atlantic, 14 Dec. 2011, https://www. theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/. Duffy, John. “Ethical Dispositions: A Discourse for Rhetoric and Composition.” JAC, vol. 34, no. 1–2, 2014, pp. 209–37. ———. Provocations of Virtue: Rhetoric, Ethics, and the Teaching of Writing. Utah State University Press, 2019. Elbow, Peter. “The Believing Game or Methodological Believing.” The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, vol. 14, article 3, 2008, https:// trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/vol14/iss1/3. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Generosity and Attention.” Personal website, 3 June 2018, https://kfitz.info/generosity-and-attention/.

Conclusion: The Values and Possibilities of Difficult Empathy  151 ———. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Hoffman, Martin L. Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams: Essays. Graywolf Press, 2014. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007. Konrath, Sara H., et al. “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis.” Personality and Social Psychology Review: An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, vol. 15, no. 2, May 2011, pp. 180–98. Krumrei-Mancuso, Elizabeth J. “Intellectual Humility and Prosocial Values: Direct and Mediated Effects.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 13–28. Leake, Eric. “A Note on Discussions Responses.” Canvas Course Announcement. 7 March 2021. ———. “Writing Pedagogies of Empathy: As Rhetoric and Disposition.” Composition Forum, no. 14, 2016, https://compositionforum.com/issue/34/empathy.php. Lu, Min-Zhan. “Redefining the Literate Self: The Politics of Critical Affirmation.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 172–94. Morrell, Michael E. Empathy and Democracy: Feeling, Thinking, and Deliberation. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Neff, Kristin D. “The Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure SelfCompassion.” Self and Identity: The Journal of the International Society for Self and Identity, vol. 2, 2003, pp. 223–50. Phillips, Richard. “Curious about Others: Relational and Empathetic Curiosity for Diverse Societies.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, vol. 88, 2016, pp. 123–42. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. Ratcliffe, Krista. “Rhetorical Listening: A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a ‘Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct.’” College Composition and Communication, vol. 51, no. 2, 1999, pp. 195–224. Schumann, Karina, et al. “Addressing the Empathy Deficit: Beliefs about the Malleability of Empathy Predict Effortful Responses When Empathy Is Challenging.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 107, no. 3, 2014, pp. 475–93. Weil, Simone. First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge (Simone Weil: Selected ­ Works). Wipf and Stock, 2015. ———. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2002. Yam, Shui-yin Sharon. Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship. Ohio State University Press, 2019.

Index

aesthetics 3, 5–6 Ahmed, Sara 67 animals 41–2, 125–7, 144 Aristotle 7, 26–9, 79–80 attribution error 95–6 audience 32, 70–3, 107–8 Batson, C. Daniel 77, 85 biases: and critical empathy 118, 137; and critiques of empathy 3, 9, 25; familiarity and proximity 13, 26, 37, 80, 107, 119–20, 137 Bitzer, Lloyd 71–3 Blankenship, Lisa 7, 28–9, 68, 93, 105–6, 109, 117, 119, 132, 143, 147, 149 Bloom, Paul 3–5, 9, 37, 69, 120 bodies 6, 13, 24, 27, 119–32 Bouie, Jamelle 94–6 Bracher, Mark 7, 70, 77, 80, 86, 96 Breithaupt, Fritz 4, 10 Burke, Kenneth 4, 7, 67, 79, 107 capital punishment 41–4 Carter, Jimmy 34–5 charity 25–30, 84 Clare, Ralph 130–2 Clinton, Bill 32–5 coalition 132–7 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 11, 49–51, 62–3, 145 compassion 5, 69, 98, 110, 116, 142, 145; self-compassion 146 Compassion International 25–30 constraints 70, 72–3 Coplan, Amy 5, 46, 67 critical affirmation 134–7 curiosity 30, 49, 62, 105, 127, 141, 143–4

Davis, Diane 67–8 de Coning, Alexis 116–17, 120 deep canvassing 107–11 deep stories 104–5 democracy 99, 107, 148 DeStigter, Todd 13, 132–3 Duffy, John 147 Edbauer, Jenny 73–4 education 108, 140–3, 146–9 egoistic drift 23, 83 Einfühlung 5–6 Elbow, Peter 143 elections: campaigns 32–6; commentators’ views of voters 93–100 emotions 1, 14–15, 66–7, 100–5, 123 empathy: affective empathy 5, 19, 67, 69, 130–1; cognitive empathy 5, 90–1; corporate empathy 30–2; critiques of 3–4, 119; critical empathy 10, 12–13, 115–39; definitions of 2, 5–6, 24, 45; deliberative empathy 7, 93, 107–8, 148; difficult empathy 9–11, 41–64, 149–50; dismissive empathy 32–6; easy empathy 18–40, 141; empathy-altruism hypothesis 26, 77; empathy walls 12, 100–2; history of 5–6; irony of 11–12, 66–7, 87; muscular empathy 11, 49–51; rhetorical empathy 7, 68, 93, 105–6, 117, 149; social conditions of 65–88; tactical empathy 113; with the enemy 89–114 encounter 8–9, 41–2, 74, 82–3, 132, 137

154 Index eudaimonistic judgment 69, 80–1, 99 exigence 70–1 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 142–3 foreign policy 20–5, 89–93 Foster, Charles 126–7 Gaines, Alisha 4, 24–5 Galinsky, Adam 69, 81 gender and sexuality: women’s rights 21–4; gay rights 105–6; genderqueer 120–5; queer 55–7; trans 56–7, 59, 110, 120–5 generosity 62–3, 142–3 Great Recession 65, 71–3, 85–7 grief 36–7, 122 Gross, Daniel M. 1, 6, 66–7 Gruber, David 9 Herzog, Werner 11, 41–5, 62–3 Hochschild, Arlie 93, 100–5, 112 Hoffman, Martin 23–4, 37, 67, 80, 83, 99, 119, 144 homelessness 65–6, 71–87 hooks, bell 24 humility 63, 144–5 identification 7, 11, 67–8, 79, 103, 107, 132 identity 55–7, 112, 122–3, 133; identity threat 109; interindividual 80, 86 Instagram 18–19 Into the Abyss 41–4 Jacobs, Rodger 65–7, 71–87 Jamison, Leslie 9, 91, 102, 115–18, 144, 149 Kalla, Joshua and David Broockman 108–11 Keen, Suzanne 37–8, 146 Kulbaga, Theresa 6, 24, 38 Lakoff, George 3, 70 Lanzoni, Susan 5 Las Vegas 13, 65–6, 71–3, 82–3, 86 Las Vegas Sun 65–6, 71, 76 Lee, Justin 105–6 Lerner, Michael 96–7 literature 24, 38, 70, 108 Lu, Min-Zhan 13, 134–5, 147 Lynch, Dennis 6–8, 21, 46, 68, 119, 124–5, 132

marriage equality 105–6 Marzano-Lesnevich, Alex 120–5 McConnell, Mitch 3 minor-attracted people 51–62 mirror neurons 6, 68 morality 3–4, 45, 50–1, 69–70, 80, 84–6, 95, 109, 144 Morrell, Michael 108, 148 Morton, Adam 46–8 Morgellons disease 115–17 multiple empathizing 80 Nagel, Thomas 125–7 Nussbaum, Martha 6, 69, 80–1, 99, 108 Obama, Barack 1–3, 148 personal stories 7, 28, 132, 141, 147 perspective-taking 14, 21, 96, 146; other-focused 23–4, 67, 126, 144; self-focused 23–4, 83, 126 pity 5, 26–30, 79–80 polarization 99–100, 102 poverty 25–7, 29, 74, 96, 117 Putin, Vladimir 89–92 race 4, 9, 24, 49–51, 98, 117, 128–32, 136–7 Rafsky, Bob 33–4 Ratcliffe, Krista 68, 102–4, 143 religion 26, 29–30, 105–6 rhetoric 6; rhetorical ecologies 73–4; rhetorical listening 102–4; rhetorical situation 70–3 Rifkin, Jeremy 42 Rogers, Carl 7–8, 91–3, 104 schemas, autonomism and situationism 70, 77–8 self-other differentiation 5, 46 self-other overlap 69, 74, 79–81 shame 59–60, 97, 105 Shuman, Amy 4, 28 Supreme Court 2–3 sympathy 5 Thurston, Baratunde 97–100 Trump, Donald 12, 94–100, 112 Twitter 36, 49 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 45, 76, 80, 85–6 victimhood 74–9 vulnerability 29, 69, 85

Index  155 Walker, Allyn 51–63, 111 war: in Afghanistan 20–2; in Iraq 20–4; in Ukraine 36–7, 89–90; as perversion of communion 4, 107 Weil, Simone 142–3, 148 West, Cornel 136–7

Wright, Robert 89–93 writing 134–5, 137, 140, 142, 146–9 Yam, Shui-yin Sharon 7, 107–8, 148 Zaki, Jamil 45, 113 Zhao, Peiling 68