Empathy and its Limits

Aleida Assmann, Ines Detmers, Aleida Assmann, Ines Detmers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137552365
• eBook ISBN: 9781137552372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

This volume extends the theoretical scope of the important concept of empathy by analysing not only the cultural contexts that foster the generating of empathy, but in focusing also on the limits of pro-social feelings and the mechanisms that lead to its blocking.

Part I
The Politics of Empathy

1

The (Ambiguous) Political Economy of Empathy

Steven E. Aschheim

Not only could I put myself in the other person’s place but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering and the poor. Realizing their sorrows I tried to relieve them in order that I myself be relieved. Clarence Darrow¹

The present trend in evolutionary psychology and in neurobiology holds that empathy is a generalized human capacity, indeed, one by no means not even limited to humans but, in varying degrees and modes, part too of the animal, especially the primatological, kingdom.² Social scientists and philosophers, moreover, are telling us that in our own era of globalization we are witnessing the rise of an unprecedented empathic civilization, that in our global village we are all becoming empathetic actors.³ These findings, it is portentously claimed, amount to nothing less than a revision of the conventional, Hobbesian view of human nature as selfish, materialist, and conflict-driven. Humankind, so the thesis goes, is equally a co-operating, often selflessly generous, indeed empathic species.

This is a civilizational view of progress, one in which older tribal and primitive loyalties are being superseded by a post-Enlightenment universalism which is supposed to engender empathic relations and advance notions of dignity and humanity.⁴ The developed world of the 1960s and 1970s, Jeremy Rifkin claims, saw ‘the greatest single empathic surge in history’. ‘When we say to civilize’, he adds, ‘we mean to empathize’.⁵ Viewed from the ground – at least from where I stand – this generalized vision seems excessively rose-tinted. Empathy may indeed have biological and a degree of civilizational grounding, but in its inter-group, collective expressions we may miss what has historically been, and still remains, most characteristic about it: the fact that it is politically structured, channelled, and directed, encouraged or blocked, according to any number of cultural, ideological, religious, racial, ethnic, national, geographical, and other interested factors.⁶ Typically, organized empathic impulses will be encouraged to proceed along normative, official narrative frames and regimes of power and justification (without, one would hope, necessarily achieving total adherence, thus always leaving some room for moral agency and dissent).

What, therefore, is required is a kind of political economy of empathy, one that seeks to account for the multiple, often ambiguous, ways in which it is apportioned, allocated, controlled, confined, resisted, or allowed to expand and overcome differences.⁷ Additionally, such a project would have to investigate the possible role of empathy in conflict-resolution: to what degree is empathy its precondition or result? Alternatively, the possibility should be considered that it might indeed be irrelevant, perhaps even harmful, to just political settlement (I will come back to this). The variations are manifold and there is no way here that a systematic political economy of empathy can be attempted. What I will try to do in the present context is to provide some suggestive directions and indicate some of the historical and ethical issues entailed in such a future study.

Let me begin with an autobiographical confession. As a South African-born historian who lived through the demeaning apartheid era, a student of the gross inhumanity of the Holocaust and other genocides, and domiciled in Israel beset by a seemingly intractable dehumanizing Jewish-Palestinian conflict, I have always been astonished – and remain increasingly perturbed – by either the incapacity, or perhaps more pointedly the structured unwillingness, to attempt both cognitively and affectively to place oneself in the position of relevant politically subjugated groups and to recognize their humanity and humiliation. It has only recently struck me that, perhaps behind the decision to become an historian lies not only the drive to critically interrogate one’s own narrative, but also a kind of empathetic imperative to place oneself sympathetically in the position of other selves – what J. M. Coetzee, in his novel Summertime calls ‘meegevoel’, feeling-with.⁸ If I concentrate on these three autobiographically relevant illustrative cases, the politics of empathy of course has much wider applications than discussed here.

I am fully aware of the hermeneutic difficulties involved in this conceit – there are reams of anthropological and philosophical literature debating the degree to which such an empathic leap is indeed possible. I know that my stipulative definition of empathy – as the cognitive and affective attempt to place oneself in the position of the individual or collective Other – is only one among many possible others. I realize that such a definition is also ethically ambiguous and not necessarily morally obligating. As Lou Agosta has noted, torturers have to be empathic if they are to grasp the effect they are having upon their victims;⁹ and surely, if the historian wants to comprehend the psychology and motivations of Nazi perpetrators or Russian rapists or Rwandan killers this will involve a deliberate act of empathy, but one that hardly entails ethical identification. Any political economy of empathy will, doubtless, have to take into account these ambiguities and – as Samuel Moyn has pointed out – will necessarily have to render a crucial tripartite distinction between empathy ‘as a burgeoning object of historical investigation […] as a methodological requirement and a normative horizon of inquiry’.¹⁰ To some degree this paper will include all three but I must concede that its animating drive remains the ethical one.

We can begin to undertake this task by identifying what we regard as politically relevant components of empathy or, indeed, of its lack.¹¹ We could, for instance, begin with fragments of information such as the fact that, revealingly, Hendrik Verwoerd, the Dutch-born architect of the South African apartheid system, wrote his doctoral dissertation in psychology on the theme ‘The Blunting of the Emotions’. Surely, the blocking of empathy – via any number of techniques of denial, repression, rationalization, and dehumanization – was crucial to the ongoing functioning of that racist system. All of these, it has been exhaustively documented, were clearly at work in the Third Reich.¹² Certainly, empathic blockage of one kind or another is a necessity not only for the perpetration of genocide and atrocities but also the waging of wars. In his classic poem, Insensibility, Wilfred Owen ironically pronounced that ‘Happy are men who yet before they are killed/Can let their vein runs cold/ Whom no compassion fleers /[…] And some cease feeling/Even themselves or for themselves/Dullness best solves/The tease and doubt of shelling/[…] Happy are those who lose imagination:/They have enough to carry with ammunition’. At the end, he suspends the irony in a crescendo of pain: ‘But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,/That they should be as stones./Wretched are they, and mean/With paucity that never was simplicity. By choice they made themselves immune/To pity and whatever mourns in man […]. Whatever shares/The eternal reciprocity of tears’.¹³

Yet another salient political fragment in need of integration within a wider framework would be the still prevalent notion that ‘primitive’ peoples, Blacks, workers, women, or social outsiders in general, possess lower sensitivity to pain than those putatively ‘advanced’ people observing them.¹⁴ Empathy, or its lack, is here conceived in, and structured around racial, class, and gendered terms.¹⁵ These kinds of stereotypes and the political economy of empathy are exceedingly closely related and any systematic study will have to pay close attention to their interaction.

This surely applies to the specific case of the Shoah. The tragic lack of empathy that enabled it has already been mentioned and has been analysed with great thoroughness elsewhere. There is no need to rehearse it here. I want to examine another, less remarked, aspect of the political economy of empathy precisely by examining some of the problematic aspects of post-Holocaust reflection and representation. In that regard, we are faced with a certain paradox. On the one hand, as the event itself and the horrific murders unfolded, the absence of empathy was shockingly palpable. On the other hand, as the years go by, the Shoah – both as historical event and symbolic construct of absolute evil – has become engraved at the very centre of our contemporary moral and empathic consciousness. Why the lack then and the plenitude now? And what does this tell us about the structure of the political economy of empathy?

To be sure, the model of Nazi genocide as radical evil applies peculiarly and particularly to Anglo-American spheres influence and Western and Central Europe societies (and, increasingly, in variably ambiguous ways, to certain Eastern European countries). The basis for this is clear enough. Patently, something in the event itself, its state-sanctioned criminality, its taboo-breaking aims, industrial methods and mammoth transgressive scale, clearly renders such an absolutizing discourse both possible and plausible.¹⁶

Yet (as analysed extensively in the last chapter but also pertinent here and thus worth summarily rehearsing), on its own, this cannot fully account for the centrality of Nazism and the Holocaust within European and American discourse. Empathic and normative hierarchies are seldom unmediated; representations are not built exclusively upon purely immanent or ‘objective’ considerations. I would like to suggest that the special, enduring fascination with National Socialism and the atrocities it committed, the very deep drive to account for its horrors and transgressions, the rich multiplicity of accumulative political and intellectual ruminations it has produced (including, one must add, the resulting ubiquitous attempts to relativize its significance and impact or even entirely deny it), reside also in the particular nature and identity of both the victims and the perpetrators themselves. That is to say, an added, potent impetus derives from an inverted kind of Eurocentrism, our rather ethnocentric sense of scandal and riddle, the abiding astonishment that a modern, allegedly cultured and civilized society like Germany – traditionally taken to be the example of the Enlightened Kulturnation – could thus deport itself.¹⁷ The Holocaust, as Shiraz Dossa once provocatively put it, is the classic instance of ‘the murder of eminently “civilized” victims by equally “civilized” killers’.¹⁸ Much of its paradigmatic power derives from this equation.

Our representations of the killers refuse to be entirely severed from images of the greatness of German culture; the full horror of the ‘Final Solution’ cannot be separated from conceptions of the charged role and status of the victims themselves. If a powerful, ongoing negative anti-Jewish stereotype permeates Western culture it is also true that the Jews are deeply and familiarly implicated within, indeed, co-constitutive, of that history. One could argue that the venom and rejection of Gentiles towards Jews derived precisely from the depths of intimacy and dependency, from the complex set of inter-relations that characterize the relationship, the knowledge that at all kinds of levels Jews represent salient, creative forces and figures within that very culture.¹⁹ This is what I would label the post-facto political geography of empathy. We are, I suggest, less likely to be taken aback by atrocities removed from the imagined Western ‘core’ (including when they are our own) – and even from the Gulag because this occurred in what our mental maps still imagine to be a realm that remains ‘halb-Asien’ – geographically and morally relatively detached from our cultivated ‘Western’ epicentre. When atrocities are perpetrated outside of the putatively enlightened world – say in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, or Sudan – one is (tragically) less likely to be appalled, less able to empathically connect.

How ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers
• Part I The Politics of Empathy
• Part II Changes in Historical Sensibility
• Part III Ethical Issues
• Index