Thought for the Week: Empathy
Catherine Henderson reflects on empathy
These days, when I’m talking to people, I tend to bring up the subject of refugees. It’s interesting how they respond. My plumber, who makes a point of employing ex-offenders and those recovering from addiction, expressed a view that crops up a lot: what we should be doing is ‘looking after our own kind’. But why this phrase: ‘our own kind’?
I looked ‘kind’ up in the dictionary and found ‘kindred’, ‘kinsfolk’ – our relatives, people like us, people we are kind to. An earlier meaning implies ‘what is natural’ and, therefore, right. Looking after our own kind is certainly natural, and the roots of empathy in both humans and animals are embedded in parental care. But human societies throughout the world have practised hospitality and offered sanctuary for millennia, reaching beyond family and tribe. Is this, too, ‘natural’? The primatologist Frans de Waal writes that when ‘people aid others, brain areas associated with reward are activated. Doing good feels good.’ Over the past decade neuroscientists have overturned the old view that human nature is essentially selfish. Human beings are hardwired for empathy and collaboration. How else could we ever have survived as a species?
The wave of collective empathy that followed the publication of the photos of Aylan Kurdi is an entirely natural phenomenon. A human connection was made, breaking through all the artificial barriers constructed by xenophobic language, nationalism and prejudice. In Iceland thousands of people offered to take in refugees after their government said it would take only fifty. All over Britain collections for Calais were organised and van-loads of tents, food and clothing were driven down to the coast. Roman Krznaric writes in his book Empathy: ‘When a critical mass of people join together to make the imaginative leap into the lives of others, empathy has the power to alter the contours of history.’ This may sound a little like what my mother would call ‘pie in the sky’ but, historically, empathy was crucial to the success of the campaigns for the abolition of the slave trade, for prison reform and civil rights. The energy of collective empathy can push governments towards more generous responses to refugees.
The task now is to keep these human connections open: to challenge the barriers that separate us and that make us see other people as not fully human, as ‘hordes’, a ‘swarm’, a threat to our ‘social cohesion’. In an increasingly unequal society, where we are encouraged by some politicians and newspapers to blame immigrants for everything from low pay to housing shortages, this is hard. We can also find ourselves feeling like powerless bystanders, watching across a divide. We can lose sight of the individual in the crowd. All these things break the links between us.
Jeremy Rifkin wrote in 2010 about the post-world war two change in attitudes towards groups that had been discriminated against for centuries, and about how this led to more enlightened social policies and human rights laws. He noted: ‘We are in the long end-game of including “the other”, “the alien”, “the unrecognised”.’ We need to expand our understanding of what we mean by ‘our own kind’ until it includes us all.
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