Empathy: Superpower or Kryptonite? (Part 2)

I’ve been writing weekly here for two and a half years. Surprisingly, I’ve never written anything that evinced as much response — to me directly and in posted comments — as last week’s piece in opposition to the war on empathy.

But after sifting through the feedback, here’s what I think is going on: there are a lot of people frustrated by a lot of what is going on in the world and “empathy” is a convenient flash point for that frustration. There are three big anti-empathy arguments folks who wrote me over the past week have made:

·      They said some people don’t take enough personal responsibility anymore (for problems they create for themselves or could solve for themselves). When others show them “empathy,” they make them think that’s okay.

·      They said some people are duplicitous. They take advantage of “empathetic” people to scam us (examples: some Somalis in Minnesota defrauding the government; phishers everywhere targeting senior citizens). Empathetic responses make us weak when we need to be strong.

·      They said empathy leads to bad public policy (there’s apparently a much longer list of examples than I mentioned in my initial piece). Too much empathy, they said, tempts us to make policy based on anecdote – addressing one person’s pain -- instead of data – doing the best thing for the greatest number.

I conducted my own experiment in empathy this week. I found a podcast that promised to explain the British perspective on the American Revolution. I learned a couple of things: first that I can yell at a very high decibel level at podcasters who can’t hear me; and, second, that most people we disagree with have, in their mind, some very good reasons for believing what they do. Here’s some stuff I’d never heard before about the financial situation of Great Britain in the 1760’s and 1770’s that helps me better understand those irrational, idiotic, “taxation without representation” Brits.  

·      After Britain finished paying for the French and Indian War in the colonies (known in Great Britain as “The Seven Years War”) in 1763, they were left with debt of £137 million (and paying £5 million a year in debt service). Their annual revenue from the 13 mainland colonies was about £750,000 in taxes (they made much more from the 13 Caribbean “sugar” colonies).

·      Folks living in the American colonies paid taxes at about 1/10 the rate of those living in England.

·      The “Sugar Act” passed in 1763 for the colonies actually reduced the official tax, but beefed up enforcement (Americans were simply not paying the existing tax). The 1773 Tea Act imposed no additional tea taxes, but it did crack down on the importation of illegally-smuggled Dutch tea.

·      The “Stamp Act” that so outraged us Americans was the same one that subjects in England had been paying since 1694.

It was surprising to learn all this, and I found myself picking nits, mostly because of the condescending, Britcentric way it was presented (in contrast to the Americentric way I am accustomed to). The hosts glossed over British shooting of civilians, for example, and completely ignored the question of whether colonists should have had representation in Parliament. Still, I left the podcast for the first time at least understanding slightly better Great Britain’s reasoning for imposing taxes and resisting American independence.

Once we understand that the people we disagree with may see the world differently than we do, we gain a rare kind of superpower.

We don’t have to agree with them, and they may still be mistaken, but it makes us less likely to think of them as malevolent, and we are more likely to be able to have a civil conversation with them and to take them into account when we are developing policy.

Without empathy, the strongest of us is crippled (image generated from Openai.org)

Take away our empathy and our uniquely human superpower becomes kryptonite. Democratic and neocon politicians who believe in the logic and long-term merits of global trade become tonedeaf to the short-term pain it causes for people who lose their jobs. Republican negotiators who see the negotiations over ending the war in Ukraine as a real estate transaction miss the psychological cost of the invasion to Ukrainians, the political value of the land grab to the Russians and the moral precedent Europeans see.

As I noted last week, the risk of deep empathy is that we identify so closely with the person or group we are empathizing with that we lose our ability to offer a different perspective, or we imply we agree when we don’t.

“Compassion” may be a more useful word. But in most cases I believe our ability to empathize makes us smarter. It makes us kinder and more generous. It forces us to rethink our own assumptions, shore up our arguments, improve our negotiating skills. And, occasionally, it may even help us to hear or learn something that changes our mind.

I don’t think my new understanding of the Brits’ perspective on the taxation of the American colonies in the 18th century is going to make me “weak on the Redcoats” and it isn’t changing my mind about the American Revolution. I think we had good reasons. But as I continue my reading to get ready for our 250th independence celebration, I’m going to cut those Brits the occasional break.

Notes:

Here’s a link to the first part of “The Rest is History” podcast’s four-part series on the American Revolution: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-revolution-part-1/id1537788786?i=1000619057107

1773 Tea Act: https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/the-tea-act

Ukraine-Russia as a real estate transaction: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-shar