If You Prick Us
The Cum Laude Society holds members to high expectations for character. These expectations are embodied in the motto of the Cum Laude Society: arete, dike, time: excellence, justice, honor. That’s a nice motto, but for the world we inhabit today, it strikes me as incomplete. We need to add a fourth concept: empatheia. Empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and feel the experiences of someone else—the ability to walk around in the shoes or skin of someone else. I’m sure most of you have some sort of understanding of empathy. All of us have had moments of empathy. We have offered a sweater to someone who looked cold, winced in sympathy when someone stubbed a toe or cut a finger, comforted a friend who suffered some sort of loss. This level of empathy is simple to understand. We’ve all been cold or stubbed a toe. Most of us have experienced some form of loss. So it doesn’t take much work or imagination to feel these sorts of pain in someone else.
It’s also fairly simple to empathize with our friends or family, though sometimes we must work a bit harder, think more deeply. We have all probably had friends whose behavior has troubled us or shocked us or even hurt us. Perhaps a friend has stolen money or lied to you or failed to stand with you when others have attacked you. If you have forgiven that friend, if the friendship has survived, the chances are good that empathy saved your friendship. Your ability to empathize with your friend helped you understand the behavior. When we understand other people, we tend not to judge them.
Lack of understanding, on the other hand, usually results in quick and harsh judgments. What a jerk. What a jackass. What a pig. Listen especially to this language. What a pig. This is the sound of the absence of empathy. It is the sound of exile. People are no longer even human; they are subhuman—animals, pigs. We have all heard this voice. It’s the voice of prejudice. It is the voice of war, the voice that gives us permission to kill. Those whom we wish to destroy, we first make subhuman. We use language to obliterate their humanity. We called Native Americans savages so we could slaughter them. We called Africans animals so we could own them. We called Jews vermin so we could gas and burn them. And today, we Americans are called infidels—devils, who must be destroyed.
Do you begin to get a sense, an inkling, of the need the world has for empathy? Antipathy, hatred—the feeling that pits us against each other—is the mechanism of war. Empathy, identification with someone else—the feeling that draws us together—is the mechanism of peace.
Unfortunately, there’s something about human nature and perhaps about how we have been raised—something that makes empathy hard work. Two things are hard. The more people we are asked to empathize with, the more difficult empathy becomes. And the greater the differences among people, the more difficult empathy becomes. Most of us can empathize with our friends, but does the empathy begin to fray a bit as we move to their friends? To their friends’ friends? Perhaps we can empathize with those who worship in our church, but what of those who worship across the street? What about those who speak a different language or who aren’t our color? If we are pro-choice, can we empathize with those who oppose abortion? Despite all the fine rhetoric about celebrating our differences, we seem to live in a country and a world that is becoming more and more polarized, more intolerant, more nationalistic, more tribal—more antipathetic and less empathetic.
We don’t have to look hard or far to see the blood-spatter of this antipathy. Look at Rwanda and Darfur. Look at the Mideast and Iraq. Read the newspapers: James Byrd, a Black man, is dragged behind a truck to his death in Jasper, Texas; Matthew Shepard, a gay man, is beaten to death in Casper, Wyoming. Listen to the lyrics of Apache’s “Kill d’ White People.” Listen to the lyrics of white supremacists. Listen to the fear and loathing in the clashes over gay marriage.
But our growing inability to empathize is also evident in less violent, less obvious places. Recently, I read a “My Turn” article in Newsweek by a nice, loving mom who lives in Pennsylvania. In her impassioned essay, Kathy Stevenson wrote of the guilt she feels over the world her teenage son must inhabit: “I want to tell my son how sorry I am that he has to hear words as terrible as anthrax and jihad. That he has to live, like the rest of us, with the constant underlying threat of personal and global tragedy.” Then she goes on to write about suicide bombers: “There is no way to explain what can’t be explained. I have yet to hear any rational person explain how a young mother could attach explosives to her body, kiss her children goodbye and hours later blow herself up along with innocent civilians.”
And there it is: an impassioned failure to empathize. Is it really so impossible to imagine the motives that produced this young suicide bomber? Is it so impossible to imagine her depth of despair or rage? Is it so impossible to imagine the sense of commitment and hope that might have driven a young mother to blow up her enemy so that her children could live free? Might Kathy’s desire for a better world for her son simply be the embryo, the impulse, for a more murderous mother? Kathy’s impulse is to protect her child. Perhaps the same impulse grew in the heart of the young terrorist. How deep must the pain and loss and threat, and perhaps even guilt, become before a mother would use herself as a weapon to protect her children? If we never ask such questions, if we never work to imagine their answers, if we never work to empathize, we will never understand. The world will remain incomprehensible to us. And we can’t fix what we don’t understand.
This is one of the challenges that schools must embrace—the challenge of helping young people acquire the tools to make the world comprehensible. In essence, our task must be to develop the capacity for empathy in our young. All of us must work to understand the world both intellectually and emotionally. We must work to feel and think. These are, I believe, the reasons we study literature and the other arts, the reasons we study history and science and languages—to learn to think and feel our way into humanity and to understand why we do what we do.
When I was young, I loved a TV show called The Twilight Zone. I still remember one show in particular. There wasn’t a line of dialogue in it until the last frame. It was about a woman living alone in a shack in the desert. Her shack was invaded by some kind of very small aliens, and the show was about her terror and struggle against them. I remember feeling scared, in part, because we never really saw the aliens; we’d hear them in the walls and under the floors and outside the windows as their attacks against the woman became more violent.
At the end, the woman survived and defeated the aliens, and the camera panned down through the shack and the walls to this tiny, destroyed spaceship. We saw painted on its side the insignia of the United States Air Force and heard the dying words of one of our astronauts crackling over a radio, and we realized that the old woman was a giant inhabiting this other planet, and suddenly we felt this conflict of empathies because we had so identified with the woman’s terror and now we felt this jolt of loyalty to the astronauts. They were us—Americans. Although this TV show was just a pop-culture lesson for a young boy, it captures how the arts and literature can create understanding through empathy. They can give us the emotional experiences that undergird our ability to understand the psychology of a young mother who becomes a terrorist.
Shakespeare also helps us develop this capacity. Perhaps some of you remember Shylock’s famous plea for empathy in The Merchant of Venice:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, sense, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
I hope you can understand what I am saying to you. I’m not siding with terrorists. I am not anti-American. I am simply making a case for the need for empathy in a world increasingly fractured by clans and tribes and religions and patriots—a world mired in an endless cycle of vengeance. Even Shylock, who appeals for empathy, remains a prisoner of this cycle: “If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” I am someone who is deeply weary of focusing on our differences, weary of celebrating our differences. I long to celebrate what we have in common, our fundamental humanity. This is what school is about. This is what the Cum Laude Society ultimately honors—our need to understand each other so that we can work together for the improvement of humanity, for the greater good. This goal is unattainable without a capacity for empathy, without the ability to see beyond our differences. Empathy is a force for unity. It is the key to forgiveness; it is the key to peace. Arete, dike, time, empatheia.
Alden Blodget is a retired high school teacher and administrator. This speech was originally published in his collection of speeches, Dead Man Talking, and is posted here with permission from Alden Blodget.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.