The Empathy Gap

In an interview the British novelist Martin Amis referred to the writer WG Sebald saying that no serious person should think about anything but the Holocaust. He said it was supposed to be ironic but that at some level he meant it, as, said, Amis, do I. It was a relief to hear this because I had considered myself odd in thinking considerably about the Holocaust, after reading some of the works on that event. Christopher Burney's book, The Dungeon Democracy, is his account of life as a British officer in Buchenwald.  He often gives little moral quarter to the prisoners themselves.  A prison guard might appear reasonably benign compared to the dog-eat-dog life of most prisoners. His point was more that people end up in various stations in life but it is their character that counts. 

Excerpt: The Dungeon Democracy

 Burney's point towards the end, as I recall, remembering now many years back, was that most of us have a capacity for extraordinary evil and that we should build our education systems with that fact in mind so that nothing like the Holocaust happens again. Amis in another interview on the controversial idea that a writer should not write about the Holocaust also says that the justification for it is so that it never happens again.

It was when I read The Dungeon Democracy and Viktor Frankl I think last year that I suddenly understood why Christopher Burney had been so anxious to publish: he knew very well that the traits of all the people who propped up that regime existed in ordinary people - the desire to control, to persecute, to rule, to oppress, to exploit, to lie and cheat and deceive, to use people as means and all for power or status or money. I looked around [a milonga] and I saw those very traits in operation, thinly masked. I realised how, in certain conditions those traits could all thrive again. So it's not just a question of preventing those conditions in society because who can predict how they come about, the danger is as much or more in the human traits themselves. [Correspondence, 2016]

Once aware of these traits and what they can become the Holocaust and related iniquities of human behaviour are never, mentally, too far away. Perhaps that is what Amis and Sebald perhaps meant. that is also why two of my key preoccupations are death and freedom. Freedom is life: freedom from so that there is freedom to. The ultimate control, the ultimate restriction, the ultimate imposition is taking away someone's life, harming their body or their mind but taking away someone's freedom is a kind of living death. 

 We endure unreasonable impositions constantly: on our time, on our freedom, women even endure them on their person and too often we put up with it for the sake of norms, so called civilized behaviour whereas we should question far more - is this reasonable, is this useful, is this fair? Death and freedom, the two great preoccupations.

Amis talks about the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust. The thing to be very alert to is when we encounter the incomprehensibility of someone's behaviour because it is a warning you have to heed. I call it the empathy gap. It is when two people find themselves on either side of a psychological chasm. It happens when you simply cannot comprehend how someone could act in that way because you cannot conceive of doing something of that nature yourself. I can't imagine being a paramedic, but I admire paramedics, so there's no empathy gap there. But when I think of the Holocaust, or Argentina's Dirty War, or the Colombian "false positives", or the common and garden capitalist exploitation of people, of the planet for profit, there is an empathy gap there. It is when you fail to understand how people can act in despicably inhumane ways. The empathy gap can be over huge, world-shaking events or the dispiriting inhumanities practised by individuals on a daily basis.

I encountered it recently and for days afterwards could not acclimatise to the idea that someone could repeatedly refuse to leave someone alone, to the point of trapping them, deliberately cornering them, as they later said to the point of extreme physical and psychological distress.  Even one of the apologies said in chilling, controlling language, they were "not going to allow another miscommunication" - as if, after everything, there was still some future, as if it was all a misunderstanding.  I felt shocked, horrified, appalled.

That shock manifested physically and I am still trying to come to terms with it.  Despite excruciating muscular pain in my neck, left shoulder collarbone, chest and arm as far as the hand it did not even occur to me for over two weeks that exercise and stretching might bring relief.  It was as though the shock had caused some psychological and mental freeze that prevented me from thinking normally.  Today exercise brings relief but whatever it is that connects all those parts is still contracted and needs daily stretching.  

It took days to mentally adjust to the fact that for some people ignoring the wishes of others, trampling repeatedly over their simplest request - to be left alone - is a right. I should have realised. I have an online advert for multi-lingual conversation exchange which, when I am busy, will say in caps lock, that I am not looking for partners at present, yet I am still bombarded with requests.  This is startling in itself but you do not expect blatant, egotistical disregard from people you know and have helped.

The key thing I learned is to spot those traits early, distance yourself and if that doesn't work don't do nothing; take some other measure because you need a plan.  You have to somehow imagine yourself on the other side of the empathy gap, to anticipate what appears to you unthinkable within your own moral scope because without that anticipation you will have no plan to deal with what can arise.  The first problem of course is realising that you are that empathy gap, before it is too late.