"Will responses be human?"
on accurate empathy, fiendish empathy, and the absence of any empathy whatsoever
So if e-scooter platforms are the ‘dote’ of a signature 3S, what is the antidote, or ‘some’ antidote, and how do we get there? This is what I’ll consider in the final post of this series. This is also one of my first attempts to integrate insights from psychotherapy into work that is usually informed by social theory. As Rosa and others have noticed, there’s not only positive potential here, there’s remedial work in trying to repair a rupture that’s grown in these two fields since the 1970s.
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empathy as a ~dote to 3S: “will responses be human?”
If there is an elusive mature urban politics, its better field is defined by an empathic human milieu. At the most basic level, we scan our surroundings, with this hopeful question:
“will responses be human?”1
In no small measure, this is required because we are vulnerable to one another2. All the more so in a community of fate like ours, where we are among many strangers moving quickly, all with their own ideas, interests and agendas. This becomes intense in crowded spaces of strangers, where so many have to share scarcity-and-abundance brought into co-proximity.
Whether we like it or not (and mostly we did not choose and do not like it), co-habiting contemporary urban space means living difference as a tense set of side-by-sides: of too little space and too much money, sleeping rough and begging coins besides Gucci handbags crossing for an airport limousine, the tiny ‘space ask’ of a toddler on a balance bike beside the hogging ‘space ask’ of a Tonka Toy RAM SUV (no need to add caps).
At scale and collectively, this also means debounded risk: the way something as small and nonhuman as a virus, or fentanyl, could/can cross borders and permeate human bodies in agentic ways beyond our awareness, knowledge, choosing, and going-on-being. We seek and need containment and holding environments, but we move among decontained multitudes that fracture and fragment us. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, we’re drawn into these cities: they remain ‘the magnet and the container’ that Mumford so perceptively theorised them as. In these styles of unwanted and unchosen co-proximities, in this style of community of fate, often between unfortunately designed, unfairly matched bodies in motion, we are all so vulnerable – some so much more than others.
So ‘we had better’ practise empathy.
Empathy as I’m intending it here is not strictly the ‘vicarious introspection’ that Kohut formulated from his early clinical work in the 50s. Nor is it just-quite a quality of warmth and positive regard, the way Carl Rogers formulated it, also from the 50s3.
It’s also not the ‘08 Obama-era style of ‘empathy deficit’, a politicised rhetoric that (correctly) says what’s wrong by deficit framing such-and-such an event or instance as lacking or in need of ‘empathy’ (which isn’t spelled out), while pointing to one’s own (better style of) politicking as governed by a (superior but implicit and feeling based, so un-critiqueable) moral code. Empathy is not ‘what the Republicans lack’ – although perhaps they do.
Empathy is not a feeling (we have)
it’s a field (we are in).
Will responses be human? This is what my mind hopes of the humans that surround me. This is what I hope of you if I hope I can trust you, if I hope we can be friends or just be friendly, or even disagree without needing to kill one another.
So many responses these days, they are not human: of course this is to be expected coming from the nonhuman – and the inhuman… we are also faced with whether the humans in our midst will give us a human response to our human needs and wants and questions.
As this local piece of public address indicates,
the empathy I’m after is like this mood of being care-ful with each other (rather than careful around each other). This isn’t about other-directedly worrying, about treading on eggshells, or being avoidant, all of which – so pervasive – are reactive modes of relatedness, which preclude spontaneity and joy. They are set up to shut out and shut down; they cannot be open, they cannot hear, they refuse to listen or engage.
Empathy as being care-ful with one another is about ‘taking a Tamagotchi approach’4 to being present, attuned, and responsive, because this builds (or does not damage) trust, and striving to stay nondefensively in relationship with people, who still have intrinsic worth – even when you disagree with them, when they aren’t like you, when they have very different choices5.
The demand for empathy is actually commensurate with divergence and heterogeneity, with tension and with prejudice. It’s not just about nice people being nice to one another because it’s nicer to be nicer – or about criticising, canning, or cancelling people when they’re not nice, according to the contingent norms of your online group (which you happen to be very very impressed by, because they’re your [group’s] norms). It is when we are no longer that other ‘village people’ – sharing a communally held conception of the good and the just – that we need this care-ful empathy. We need the care-ful human-responsive field of empathy all the more when it becomes scarce; that it becomes a population-level demand with an (at present) elusive supply shows the problem and the difficulty of finding what would be the solution. The following quote gets at what I mean, and I quote it in full because it includes many of the personal energy costs, tensions, and contradictions that attend it, which are not always acknowledged:
“The specialness of the empathic method can’t be overemphasized. It is most likely needed when interacting with children, when meeting strangers, when a conflict emerges with a friend, or when healing is needed, such as in psychotherapy. Once the high biological and psychological energy cost of empathy is accepted, we can understand the value of a group, community or society at large adopting normative patterns of behaviour (rules) to represent a consensual view. The advantage of consensual reality and its expectations is the reduced exhaustion from not constantly needing to be empathic in all interactions6. This non-empathic, consensual system works well in a homogenous group or society until something goes wrong. With a relatively heterogenous group or society, however, empathy is likely to be needed in interactions between persons whose backgrounds are divergent subcultures, whether majority or minority. The greater the divergence between the beliefs and practices of subcultures, the greater the need for empathy in intercultural interactions. And in multicultural countries, as the old, formerly consensually validated patterns break down, the need for the empathic way of knowing increases, because as Gadamer indicated, empathic understanding involves formulating the prejudices7 that each person, group, organization, religion, or culture brings to a relationship” (Lee, Rountree and McMahon 2009, 51).
In sum, empathy moves from being a care-ful field in which we give and receive human responses, toward being an ongoing informer of appropriate action, whatever the intentions may be. I have found this to be something subtle that I’ve had to sit with and reflect on to grasp.
fiendish empathy: accurate, correct, dastardly.
Empathy can also be fiendish. This is in oversupply right now. ‘Correct empathy’ can just as soon be in the service of a dastardly attack; when someone knows how to hit you right where it hurts, this is also ‘correct empathy’. Empathy is agnostic, as far as purposes are concerned; it is politically necessary, but not politically correct. As Kohut reminded us in a later corrective to earlier interpretations that had meandered out of and away from his intentions for it in his formulations of empathy in clinical settings:
“I don’t how many times I have stressed that these purposes can be of kindness, and these purposes can be of utter hostility. If you want to hurt somebody, and you want to know where his vulnerable spot is, you have to know him before you can put in the right dig. That’s very important. When the Nazis attached sirens to their dive bombers, they knew with fiendish empathy how people on the ground would react to that with destructive anxiety. This was correct empathy, but not for friendly purposes” (126).
Fiendish empathy is (still) correct empathy, as it insightfully informs appropriate action toward the enemy.
There is empathy in enmity; love and hate are perennial proximities, knowing how to hurt is also knowing hurting, having been hurt oneself.
Consider the details of Mossad’s pager attack here as one recent and conspicuous example of fiendish empathy.
a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun: Mark Zuckaberg as avatar of 0 empathy
The antithesis of any empathy, whether beatific or fiendish, is surely Mark Zuckerberg. So if we opened this series with one tech titan decrying that e-scooters lacked dignity, let me end by descrying that this tech titan lacks empathy, and that, if we follow Kohut, the absence of empathy is even scarier than its fiendish use in Jericho trumpets and exploding pagers.
When I think of Mark Zuckaberg, I think of these lines from Yeats’ Second Coming
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
Mark Zuckaberg strikes me as a sphinx-like riddle of a ¿human? with no understanding of the human, with no milieu within which he has – or appears to show – any care-ful concern about what he is doing – even with the often fiendish empathy practised on his behalf and placed at his disposal. He knows very well how to ask other smart people to design ‘sirens’ for his ‘dive bombers’ for fracking human attention for profit, but as for the person himself, he seems completely GPT about the whole shebang and what it means for us all. It’s no coincidence that Zuck was the guy who popularised ‘move quickly and break things’, a phrase that by definition is completely indifferent to who or what gets broken.
Lindsay Graham: “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that’s killing people.”
Mr Zuckerberg: “Technology gives us new ways to communicate with our kids and feel connected to their lives, but it can also make parenting more complicated… (Meta is) ….on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids.”
Mark Zuckaberg does not give a fuck, because a fuck is not in him to give. He does not seem to hate or get angry, but I wonder if he can love and feel joy. It is striking that he is so like the bot he wishes to see in the world, and give to all of us so we can give him our attention and money.
Back to self psychology to bring this to a couple of concluding points, this absence of human responsiveness – will responses be human? No – is precisely what Kohut believes confronts Kafka’s characters: they seek to get close, they wish to know and be known, to be seen and affirmed, to have their empathy and guilt mirrored back, even in anger – yet there is ‘nothing’ in response. This is the difference between being blanked by a person you know on the street, and that person’s just not having noticed you at all;
your child was run over,
by a person who was just scrolling TikTok,
and didn’t notice the bump,
and kept driving.
If we allow this absence of empathy to really land, we may notice, via Kafka, how and why this is far more terrifying than the fiendish empathy of the Stuka’s Jericho trumpets or exploding pagers. The absence of the human is, somehow, worse than the presence of the bad or malevolent human. Even emnity is regard. Again, this quote from Kohut, which gets us at this, moves between clinical and societal settings:
“the worst suffering I’ve seen in adult patients is in those very subtle, and difficult to uncover, absences of the mother – because her personality is absent. Nothing will be told about it, because the patient assumes this is the milieu in which people group up (sic). He had been made to feel guilty all his life for yearning for something else, for making demands. And the mother rightly made him [feel] guilty because he demanded something that just wasn’t in her to give… Kafka described so well in The Castle—the attempt to come close and yet there is absolutely no response; or in The Trial—the wish to know what he’s guilty about. There is no guilt, he’s just disregarded, the knife turns and he’s—that’s the end of him. Metamorphosis—the changing to an ugly insect because the parents in the next room speak of him in the third person singular—he’s doing that, he’s doing that, clearly excluding him” (link above).
We can see this moment, the difference between empathic connection and where the personality is absent, where responses are nonhuman, in the following anecdote from RD Laing.
“I began a session with a schizophrenic woman of twenty-five, who sat down in a chair some distance away from me while I sat half facing her in another chair. After about ten minutes during which she had not moved or spoken, my mind began to drift away on preoccupations of my own. In the midst of these, I heard her say in a very small voice, ‘Oh please don’t go so far away from me’ (link).
It is this that is needed; it is this that is missing; it is this that, above all, keeps 2024 stupid, stubborn, and surreal.
Butler builds her 2010s work around vulnerability; I like it, then I feel it doesn’t get us anywhere.
I find it fascinating that they were both in Chicago in the early 50s and both at different bits of the University of Chicago, but didn’t know one another/meet then.
As the old RSPCA tag line had it: ‘a puppy isn’t just for Christmas, it’s for life’.
This is very similar to how Derrida parses politics in a recent quote taken from an LRB piece: “Derrida’s conception of politics was quite old-fashioned, perhaps pre-Kantian: for him, politics was concerned not with designing a new society but with responding to random conflicts thrown up by the ordinary chaos of social existence. When politics works, according to Derrida, it provides a place where hostilities come up for negotiation, and when it breaks down, ‘hostility is replaced by hatred,’ which ‘explodes absolutely without limits’. The idea of basing politics on ‘principles’ – hospitality, for example, or liberty, equality and fraternity, or moral righteousness – has an obvious attraction, but principles easily morph into dogmas, and then into pretexts for chauvinism, violence and genocide. For Derrida, the enemies of politics aren’t so much venality or malevolence as intellectual narrowness, stupid self-assurance, and a refusal to reflect philosophically and think things through” link.
Interestingly, this is a point that Luhmann elaborates on in Theory of Society, in his own syntax. It’s also what’s behind schemas in psychology; these rough maps of the world, these ‘systems of expectations’ of the world we use as a shorthand for what-we-expect in an interaction or relationship.
I think Lee et al really mean Dilthey (on empathy), and Gadamer taking up these bits from Dilthey in elaborating points around prejudices…