Have we gone overboard on empathy? Has empathetically correct become 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.
Political vs. empathetic correctness
Back in 2014 I first wrote about empathic 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 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.
This kind of correctness has now gone to seed and become immensely problematic. I need a stronger term—how about “immensely destructive?”
Just this year numerous bills have been introduced in numerous states—exemplified by the Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis, which bars colleges from compelling anyone to believe among other things, “That an individual . . . bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress because of actions committed by other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.” These are all a slap at higher education. As a general rule, such legislature dictates what can and cannot be taught in the classroom. There are about 70 proposed bills, some of which already have become law in Republican states.
In significant contrast, as my daughter told me, the University of Chicago (from which she and her husband hold multiple degrees) has dedicated itself to the preservation and celebration of the freedom expression as an expression of the University’s culture.
University of Chicago's statement was originally designed to deal with such matters as trigger warnings, refusal to limit conflicting speakers, etc. Though published openly by the university in 2015, more than 68 colleges and universities have signed off on the Chicago statement or similar statements supporting free speech.
A personal response
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. Personally, all three of our daughters graduated from free speech schools and are much better for it. They include UChicago, Boston University and Columbia University. (When I discussed this with my grad of BU, she told me that “John Silber encouraged dissent on campus, but the dissenters sure as hell would have to defend their positions.” As should be obvious, she deeply respected Silber and loved going to “student arguments with Silber.” Of course, as she still responds with laughter, “Silber (now deceased) was a real piece of work.”
David Brooks and empathy
Yale’s psychologist, Paul Bloom, makes a strong case against empathy, writes that 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.” Bloom uses clinical studies and simple logic to argue that empathy, however well-intentioned, is a poor guide for moral reasoning. Worse, to the extent that individuals and societies make ethical judgments on the basis of empathy, they become less sensitive to the suffering of greater and greater numbers of people.
“I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts.”
But David Brooks makes the most practical statement about the downside in his 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 one 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 just 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. Helicopter and overly-protective parents be damned!
bosses, education, empathy, personal development, politically correct, trigger