The inaction of universal empathy: in defense of emotional discrimination.
How much should we empathize with the unjustly affected in the world? Is it okay to empathize with some more than others? Should we let empathy drive our behavior more than other emotional or reasoned factors? How do we empathize and what does it mean to empathize without action?
The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has led to an outpouring of public empathy. Images of bombed out homes, hospitals, theatres, and urban centers has understandably upset many onlookers and resulted in a rapid increase in the desire to help Ukraine and Ukrainians. This response has felt quite natural, the decision by Russia to invade Ukraine seems baldly imperialistic with a weak to completely fantastic rationale. The idea that Russia is there to de-Nazifying the Ukrainian state, run by a Ukrainian Jew whose great-grandparents were killed in the holocaust, hasn’t fooled many neutral observers. This conflict has a clear and unquestionably malivelant player in Russia, making empathy for Ukrainian plight ever easier.
Empathy for the people of Ukraine comes quite naturally to us in the West. This war disrupted a peace between advanced militaries which had been held on the continent since the end of the Second World War. Furthermore, the images of cities and peoples affected simply looked more like us. The buildings seem altogether familiar, like apartments we’ve lived in or stores we’ve shopped in before; the people, physically similar, including skin, hair, and eye color. This latter comparison has led many to jump on the collective empathy as being wholly hypocritical. The civil war in Yemen, for example, has been raging since 2014, has killed over 18,000 people, has resulted in widespread famine in the country, and has been viewed as a proxy war between competing factions in the region (US and Saudi Arabia on one side with Iran on the other).
The war in Yemen has received little if any public attention in the West, and therefore almost none of the public empathy which Ukrainians are currently experiencing. Many on Twitter have called out the hypocrisy of people caring about Ukrainians when they showed little to no care for the Yemenis. But is this hypocritical or simply human? Maybe both?
Empathy is the ability to view the feelings and emotions of someone who is not yourself and understand them as if they were your own. The oft used phrase of “walking in another person’s shoes” is a good example of how empathy works at its most basic level. Caring about others in a way in which you feel their struggles or celebrate their happiness are two routes to empathetic thought.
We are built to empathize with others, it’s fundamental in creating societies and systems in which people can reasonably expect to interact without fear of constant physical or mental assault. If someone cannot empathize with my experience then I can’t expect them to care if I suffer pain or injustice and they may be more likely to impart pain or injustice on me if they so desire. Having some level of empathy is therefore almost less important than believing others in your society have empathy, at least when it comes to the creation of civil societies and rules-based orders.
Should we all empathize equally? Is that even possible? At the root of the disparity between empathy for people in Ukraine and people Yemen in familiarity. We can better feel the pain and suffering of those who we think are more like us; the further a person’s appearance or behavior is from our own, the more difficulty we have truly putting on their shoes. This empathy gap can be counteracted upon, we can learn to expand our understanding of the pain of those who look, sound, and behave differently than us, but that doesn’t mean it comes easier than empathizing with one’s friend or neighbor. Familiarity engenders comity. Seeing my neighbors suffer some injustice not only makes me feel bad, it’s also quite literally closer to home. That pain and suffering they are feeling today could be my pain and suffering tomorrow. Likewise, living in a European city has me feeling the experiences of Ukrainian suffering in a much more recognizable way than seeing the bombed out remains of Yemeni city.
Is it fair to empathize more with one person or group's plight than another? Maybe not, but it certainly is natural. Our understandings of empathy are at times too universal. It is not morally wrong to care about the suffering of Ukrainians and Yemenis equally, it is in fact morally right, but humans are not perfectly moral creatures and our concerns are always geared more towards our own experiences than those of others. We are a self interested creature, regardless of cultural difference. Certainly the West is predisposed to selfish or, more charitably, self interested behavior, but that doesn’t mean that more community minded cultures have greater universal empathy. Even in cultures where family or community take precedence over one’s own ambitions and desires, the happiness and survival of that community or family are still more important than the happiness and survival of another distant community or family. Self interested survival is rooted in our animal psychology, we simply have different ideas about how best to serve that self interested survival.
The internet has supercharged our desire for universal empathy. It’s never been easier to read, see, listen, and experience the pain and suffering of different people(s) around the globe. The gatekeepers of international suffering have not gone away, we still have major news outlets deciding what to cover and how much to highlight it, but the ability for regular folks to elevate their own pain and suffering has never been greater. This, coupled with the algorithmic nature of our social media platforms, has allowed super empaths to see more and more despair in their feeds while others are still only exposed via traditional media. The disparity is still often broken down along ethnic and cultural lines.
The regrettable disparity has led to calls of racism and discrimination among those empathizing with Ukraine while neglecting suffering elsewhere. And there can be no doubt that racism and discrimination exist in this paradigm. The question is how intolerable do we view that behavior? Caring more for those who you see as being more similar to one’s self is both rational, from the perspective of self survival, and normatively easy.
How upset should we be about disparity in empathy? Empathy is rooted as an emotion, something which comes to us without effort and which requires great effort to control. Our disparities in empathy are a product of our natural emotional production. We can train ourselves to widen our net of empathy but that is an individual solution and is simply untenable on a societal level. Maybe empathy disparity could even be productive?
If we care equally about all injustice and suffering in the world we will leave little time for the positivity needed to enact real progressive change. Over-empathizing with the injustice being committed half a world away leaves less time to empathize with the injustices happening in one’s own community or region. Reprioritizing one’s empathy towards the suffering in proximity allows for individuals to make real contributions to reducing and ending suffering. This isn’t to say that nothing can be done for those suffering further afield, rather that over emphasizing that suffering can lead to less focus on the suffering an individual can more directly affect.
I want to be clear, I am not arguing that empathy should be reserved only for those closest and most like one’s self. We absolutely should be aware of suffering in the world and care about groups experiencing injustice. I am saying that reprioritized empathy could result in a greater reduction in overall suffering because suffering closer to home has far more opportunities for positive change than suffering halfway across the world. Furthermore, the empathy call out game, in which activists and twitterites shame others for the direction and discretion of empathy only serves to move attention away from subjects who still deserve empathy and the resulting behaviors that come from it. To argue that Westerners should care more about Yemeni suffering than Ukrainian suffering ignores the reality that Westerners are better positioned to make a positive difference for Ukrainian victims than they are for Yemeni victims.
This argument is not to excuse the behavior of many Western states and voters in regards to their disparity between response to Ukrainian refugees and Syrian refugees. The parameters of my argument are about proximity and familiarity, and the extreme difference between empathy for refugees from those two conflicts is somewhat understandable if not still deplorable. The arrival of refugees on one’s borders means that the proximity gap has been closed. The shameful difference in response is perhaps best exemplified by Denmark, which has spent the last seven years undoing their asylum system often in the cruelest means possible. Denmark recently passed a special exception law for Ukrainian refugees allowing them to bypass the moribund asylum system built for everyone else. This was due to the overwhelming empathy that Danish citizens and politicians have felt for the Ukrainian cause, an empathy that is understandable and even justifiable in its exceptionalism. But a gap in empathy should at least be recognized as such. Politicians were unwilling to recognize the clear discrimination in the law. Again, this could be justified, but instead politicians hide from the implications of enacting blatantly discriminatory laws instead of attempting good faith justifications for the disparity.
This is all to say we must be careful. As I’ve laid out, universal empathy requires great effort, doesn’t come naturally, and may be counterproductive in the goal of lessening overall suffering. But disparities in empathy should also be recognized for what they are and we should allow for a more open conversation about who we care deeply about and who we care a little less about. These feelings are necessarily discriminatory, and they can therefore also be racist, classist, or sexist. Recognizing our human inability to care for everyone equally all the time isn’t idyllic, it doesn’t match with enlightened values, but it is natural. Accepting our failings is part of the human experience. We can not care about all the world's ills equally, but we need not be cruel to those causes we care less about. Accepting the empathy disparity as being a natural product of proximity and sameness could allow us to get beyond call-outs and cruelty towards a world where we take advantage of difference in empathy to affect change closer to home.
