Is 'empathetically correct' the new politically correct?
Over dinner with some long-time friends, we were discussing the difficulty their grandson, a recent engineering grad, was having finding a job. Knowing that the religious school he attended was certainly not noted for engineering, I asked why he hadn’t gone to the University of Minnesota. At the “U” he would have gotten a far better engineering education, paid much less tuition and accessed the U’s magnificent engineering career network.
“He wasn’t comfortable” with the University, his grandmother responded. Without thinking, I blurted out that I thought the purpose of college was to make the student “uncomfortable.” They were silent for a moment, then broke out into laughter, and agreed fully with my conclusion.
Disturbing the personal status quo
So I was both intrigued and delighted by a blog from Karen Swallow Prior in The Atlantic declaring that “Empathetically Correct” Is the New Politically Correct. Prior’s got her finger on a very important subject. It’s not an oversimplification to suggest that empathy is all about making people comfortable, not disturbing their status quo.
The recent list of those having to back out of commencement speeches because it would make the grads uncomfortable is...
Political vs. empathetic correctness
While political correctness emphasizes the protection of marginalized individuals and groups, empathetic correctness focuses on protecting individual sensitivities. It shows up as students question the Western Canon and refuse to read materials that challenge their own personal comfort or cause “psychological distress.”
The most jaw-dropping display of empathetic correctness came in a recent New York Times article reporting on the number of campuses proposing that so-called “trigger warnings” be placed on syllabi in courses using texts or films containing material that might “trigger” discomfort for students. Themes seen as needing such warnings range from suicide, abuse, and rape to anti-Semitism, “misogynistic violence,” and “controlling relationships.” Astonishingly, some of the literary works advocates claim need warning labels for adult college students are often read by high school students, such as The Great Gatsby and The Merchant of Venice.
Though some may view this as extreme, my fear—my suspicion—is that this focus on empathy will lead to softies who are ill-equipped to fight for civic rights and succeed in conflicted situations. The college grad who thinks that his or her bosses will be empathetic, supportive and sympathetic is living in la-la land. One of the important characteristics of the adult person is the ability to deal with differences, non-empathetic colleagues, and for that matter, plain old assholes. Without that ability a person is liable to end up in a highly circumscribed, limited and even boring world. As I look back on some of my early church counseling and my well-refined empathetic listening and sympathizing skills, I now view much of my early approach as wrongheaded. A bit of limited empathy might be OK. But in the long run, I’ve found that the better approach--in whatever form it takes--is to engage in brief counseling, push them to get on with life, and on occasion give them a good shove. Long-term dependency relationships with counselors are damaging. Thus, students can be sent to university counseling for dealing for unresolved trauma and not “taught” that they can back out of uncomfortable assignments—no matter the reason.
David Brooks and empathy
As Prior notes from Paul Bloom’s case against empathy, empathy is “parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough (and tough enough) not to rely on it.”
But David Brooks makes the most practical statement about the downside in his recent article on the limits of empathy. Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.
There have been piles of studies investigating the link between empathy and moral action. Different scholars come to different conclusions, but, in a recent paper, Jesse Prinz, a philosopher at City University of New York, summarized the research this way: “These studies suggest that empathy is not a major player when it comes to moral motivation. Its contribution is negligible in children, modest in adults, and nonexistent when costs are significant.”
Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.
I couldn’t agree more.
So should we send our kids to schools that will make them comfortable? That’s not a significantly viable issue for making a college choice. The purpose of college is to educate, not keep the kids comfortable. That, of course, argues that parents need to do their work to prepare their children for discomfort--not only in college, but also in life.