I have been reading Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (amazing book, I highly recommend it for everyone, but I digress), and I came across a section where he talks about the downside to empathy. It really impacted me, as an autistic person who has hypoempathy, and I thought I'd share a little bit about it for other people who experience hypoempathy, whether autistic or not, because it's really interesting!
So Bregman explains that empathy, while perceived as this kind, moral thing can actually be a drawback in our ability to be good, moral people. There's this chapter "How Empathy Blinds" where he explains that some psychologists (He refers to Professor Paul Bloom specifically) now feel that empathy serves as a sort of spotlight. Empathy singles out a specific person or group of people, and while you're focusing on them and their emotions and struggles, the rest of the world fades away.
He cites a study where volunteers were told the story of a young girl, Sheri Summers, who is ten years old and dying. She is on the waiting list for a life-saving treatment, but time is running out. The volunteers are told that they can move her up the list but asked to be objective in their decision.
In this scenario, most volunteers refuse to move her. They understand that the list is full of children needing treatment, and that all of them are running out of time. The list was made as it was by people who know the needs of every sick kid they need to treat.
But when a different group of volunteers were given the same scenario and instead asked to imagine how Sheri must feel, the majority wanted to move her up. The small change of framing Sheri in a light that lended itself to empathy changed the outcome. Just because the volunteers felt like they knew Sheri better than the rest of the sick children.
Bloom and Bregman argue that empathy is, in practical terms, a limited skill. We simply cannot hold enough empathy in ourselves to cover everyone. If you try to put yourself in everyone's shoes, you are going to get overwhelmed and be incapable of truly feeling empathy for them all.
We simply can't feel total empathy. And that's a problem, because it means that when we base moral decisions around empathy, we are going to make biased decisions.
That's why it's a good thing that empathy is not the same as sympathy or compassion. We can feel those much more broadly, because they don't require as much emotional weight. We aren't borrowing the struggle of everyone else when we feel compassion the way we do when we feel empathy.
Individual humans primarily feel empathy for those closest to us- our friends and families, our favorite bands or celebrities, the homeless person we see every day. And for people we see on TV, whether fictional or real. And "the more we identify with victims, the more we generalize about our enemies." When we feel empathy for someone's suffering, we lose sight of the suffering of anyone we perceive as 'at fault.' This mentality is the same one that leads to xenophobia and nationalism and exclusion. In this way, empathy can actually prevent us from seeing other people as human.
Of course there are cases where people have done truly heinous things, and I'm not arguing that their actions are just as valid as their victims or anything of the sort. But in lesser cases, where the fault is not so consuming, or where there truly is fault on both sides, empathy can impede our ability to be objective and fair. Further, feeling sympathy for our enemies doesn't mean having to forgive them- it can also just be useful to remember that they are human, because that gives us an insight into their thought process and helps with the process of preparing for any negative actions they may take. In the best situations, understanding their feelings might even help us to deradicalize and defuse people who otherwise might have gone on to hurt others.
Sympathy doesn't require us to forgive our enemies or let them off without punishment, but it helps us understand them. It's even more important to utilize this in situations were our adversaries are not truly evil, so that we can learn how to function together better.
Bregman didn't talk about how this impacts low- or no-empathy people, but I think it's a hopeful reminder. When people accuse you of being unfeeling or evil for not feeling empathy, you can remember that empathy isn't the net-positive value that a lot of people assume it is. In some ways, for some people, having hypoempathy can actually help you be a better person than someone who is empathetic but refuses to give anyone outside of their in-group the time of day.
