Looking for a fun image for this post I came across a cartoon, unfortunately not free, showing a man talking to his therapist:
Therapist: If she comes to you upset you need to validate her concerns, empathize with her, show her you understand her problems.
Later - tearful woman to man: I've, I've just been feeling really self-conscious about my weight recently..
Man, with arm around woman: I can see why you'd feel that.
On the entry Adornments and Anticipation Anonymous quoted my last line from the later entry, "Snobby" dancers: “Empathy includes respecting other people’s choices even if you don’t understand them."
I don’t know what Anonymous’s meaning was with this quotation, but it alerted me to a problem. In fact I remember feeling a flicker of something troubling that I couldn’t put my finger on when writing that line.
The problem is a basic mistake in thinking: empathy and respect are not the same thing and yet in the quotation they are made to sound as though they are.
With empathy we connect on an emotional level with another person. We understand and share their feelings.
Can I see another's woe
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
- William Blake 'On Another's Sorrow'
In 'The Twelve', part two of Justin Cronin's apocalyptic vampire trilogy, there is a description of a murderer:
"A well-groomed man of precise features, silver hair swept back from his forehead to form a delicate widow's peak. A human face, though not precisely: there was nothing you could call a person behind his eyes, only a soulless vacancy. The pleasure he was taking was an animal's. Louise was nothing to him She was an organization of warm surfaces created only for his desire and dispatch. Her name was written plainly on her blouse, and yet his mind could not connect this name to the human person he was strangling in the midst of raping, because the only thing real to him ease himself."
This is a useful, if sensationalised, description of a lack of empathy because the common or garden, everyday variety is, if anything, more chilling. Perhaps that is because it reveals the dismaying extent not of out and out rudeness but simply of callousness and selfishness that we accept in everyday life: when a driver fails to let a pedestrian cross a road, when someone cuts in front of you in a queue, when officials behave officiously, when your adolescent offspring refuse to lift a finger to help at home, when people use you as means for their own ends or as pawns in some bigger game.
Respect stops short of empathy. Quite what respect does and does not involve is probably cause for disagreement. This apparently simple concept has long seemed to me like a well-polished, glib salesman. Where do we draw the line for instance, at listening respectfully? People say things that are foolish, ludicrous, bigoted, even dangerous. Discussion about what does and doesn't count as respectful rapidly becomes complex. For starters, does respect begin with thoughts or does only action count?
Only a few hours consideration and discussion of the subject of empathy and respect led me to realise that it involve questions about linguistics, freedom, honesty, thought versus action, awareness, truth, social systems, individual and societal values, choice, alternatives, free will, boundaries, not to mention the differences between empathy, sympathy, compassion and pity. The subject is like mountain range and we are not even at the foothills so I will leave it at that.
However, the way the terms "respect" or "rights", usually in terms of "my rights", are regularly brandished or bandied about reminds me either of the way an over-zealous priest might harangue an open-mouthed congregation or the way a loud-mouthed, vulgar, drunk might stagger about the street both believing themselves entirely reasonable.
While in doubt about these topics, the quote attributed to Henry James and instilled by many of our mothers is a good moral compass: "Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind"
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