By Marium Ibrahim
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| Is empathic connection only possible with those similar to us? Photo credit: Pixabay.com |
One of the
common threads throughout my fieldwork experiences while working at the
Collective is related to the dynamics between groups of different social
standings. A Muhajir woman in Karachi, while talking about the sanitation
system in her area, said that usually everyone keeps the area clean, except for
the Bengalis who have their children throw trash on the streets in front of
other people’s houses. In a village in Sanghar, people from a mainstream Soomro community talked about how people from a neighboring socially
marginalized Nohri community were uncooperative and difficult to deal with.
Assumptions
such as these are not uncommon, and likely stem from the fact that more
privileged groups often internalize negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.
It’s not that people with privilege don’t see marginalization as unfair. Humans
are able to recognize and emotionally respond to unfairness very early in their lives, but we are compelled
by our brains to adopt the norms and beliefs of our communities.
The recent
emergence of the importance of empathy in social justice suggests that increased empathy for the
oppressed, and being able to imagine situations from their perspective, can
lead to social change. With the increasing numbers of people talking about,
researching, and teaching empathy, there are arguably many more empathic people
in the world. So if empathy is all we
need, what’s stopping us?
We are
confined by our context and our capacity. Empathy for all marginalized
outgroups may come at social and psychological costs.
For
starters, you can’t feel sorry for everyone. That’s human nature. Many Muslims
in Pakistan show outrage at discrimination of Muslims anywhere else in the
world, but don’t seem to be as bothered by similar treatment of other religious
groups in their own country. Evolutionarily, it makes sense. We divide
ourselves into in-groups and out-groups because we need to have strong bonds
with our in-groups for our own protection and well-being, which may come at the
expense of more threatening out-groups. Even young children have been shown to divide themselves into and
define themselves by social groups that are based on arbitrary common
characteristics.
More support
for why universal empathy may not be possible comes from research that shows
that wealth and power both reduce people’s ability to
empathize with, and feel compassion for others. In addition, many people who are privileged
simply do not think of themselves as privileged. It’s always easy to find
someone better off than you. But if you don’t recognize what you have, is it
possible to care about people who don’t have it?
Some researchers argue that it is possible to fight our
natural tendencies and teach our brains to empathize with more marginalized groups
through meditation, spending time with outgroup members, or going through marginalizing experiences yourself. However, these methods can only take you so
far. Feeling compassion for, and identifying with every individual is “psychologically impossible” and forces us to place
unachievable demands on ourselves.
Many ad
campaigns for NGOs seem to recognize our limited capacity for empathy, as they race
to show photos of the most vulnerable populations, often in an exploitative
way, to try and gain the public’s sympathies. And it works. But appealing to
the empathy of those who are not marginalized often comes at the expense of, and places
the onus on
the oppressed. The marginalized have to
display their vulnerabilities while trying to prove some sort of similarity
with the advantaged group to provoke understanding. In response to this, even
when the more privileged groups do express moral outrage, it stems more from self-serving guilt, rather than true empathy or even moral
obligation.
Is it
possible to get out of our empathy-confinement, and is that something we should
even try to achieve?
On an
individual level, I do think we should strive towards being empathic, as we
check our own privilege, try to understand new perspectives and be open to new
ideas. But the marginalized shouldn’t have to display their pain for the
privileged to care or to feel guilty. Empathy is not the only way to care. We
naturally care for those close to us, and on a larger scale, we can build
our moral concern on this natural concern for others rather than imagining
being in someone else’s shoes. This way thinking is less focused on the self,
and is also less psychologically taxing. If you care for the well-being of
someone in your in-group, why shouldn’t this care be extended to another person
as well?
As a collective, it might be time to move past the idea of having
empathy for everyone, and to think of ways in which people can be treated
fairly even if we don’t understand their experiences.
