Another oldie from March 2007. My lousy record doesn't indicate whether the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ever printed it.

Sympathy and Empathy

            It’s a good thing, we’ll agree, when a person is capable of feeling sympathy for others and a good thing, as well, for someone to have the capacity for empathy.  But aside from the fact that the first of these terms goes way back, while the second was only coined in the 19^th century, the laudable emotions they name have quite different consequences for the actions that might follow from them.  Were I to be brought to the emergency room badly banged up in an automobile accident, I would not look for an empathetic emergency physician whose eyes fill with tears because he feels my pain.

            “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”  In providing meanings for these terms, especially for the older, with its complicated history, I’ll have to simplify.  When one person vicariously experiences the feelings of another—whether of joy or sorrow—we have an example of empathy.  On the other hand, I sympathize with the plight in which someone finds herself, an understanding that also implies a desire to alleviate that distress.  Compassion is a close synonym.

            Sympathy and empathy are important ingredients in the glue that holds society together.  That’s easy to see when we trot out their opposites.  He who lacks empathy is apathetic or unfeeling, while indifference or even callousness are antonyms of sympathy.  Competition would reign supreme in a population wholly endowed with those opposites, making for a Hobbesian world of war of all against all.  But note that both of these laudable traits are needed to have a functioning society; neither alone suffices.

            The tears of that physician will not get my wounds taken care of.  That doctor must not only know how to mend my injuries, but, above all, he must have the will to do so.  How often, as empathizing individuals, we feel badly—vicariously, to be sure—about the misfortune of another, without taking a single step to relieve the sufferings of a neighbor (and our much lesser ones, as well, since they are only vicarious).  And there are analogues on the level of a nation.  Read the newspapers, listen to officials and commentators on television, and hear how we empathize with the sufferings of the people of Dafur!  If the picture were not so grotesque, one might speak of hand wringing by much of the body politic.  Yet this shared feeling, these waves of empathy help no one in Dafur and relieves no suffering.  Basking in ones own emotions can be self-indulgent.  Is that what is going on here?  Empathy is not enough.

            The case of sympathy is more complex.  As noted, to be sympathetic includes wanting to help.  We would not call someone compassionate if she or he did not want to do something about the observed misery.  But while there is of course no general answer as to just what should be done in an untold number of afflictions that might need to be alleviated, there is a perspective that cuts through all the differences of particular cases: namely in the way in which we determine just how to remediate the wrongs that need to be righted.

            One method conforms to what a teacher of mine—in my college days going back nearly sixty years–called the Stalinoid Complex.  You’ve got problems, you are suffering.  We are sympathetic and we want to help.  What we will do is what we think is good for you.

            But an important alternative to Big Brother knows best is to ask what little brother thinks.  To find out what that is, does not require empathic insight, although such an insight would be of great help.  Having empathy constitutes a giant step toward understanding what form the mitigation might take of the suffering that is not ours, but someone else’s.

            Why and how we went to war in Iraq and how we have been and are conducting it continues to be endlessly discussed.  But even with respect to this topic there is a function for those twin characteristics of sympathy and empathy.  The chief reason given for embarking on the war was to avert a danger to our own safety and security.  A secondary one, however, was rooted in sympathy:  our goal was to rid the Iraqi people of a vicious dictator who was oppressing them.  But our sympathy was unaccompanied by empathy.  Our aim was to bring democracy to Iraq—shades of those Stalinoid solutions—without adequately determining what was desired by those with whom we sympathized and wanted to help.  Sympathy and empathy differ from each other, but both are needed on a small scale and large for human society to function.