VOLZ: The Case Against Empathy

My earliest memories are of homelessness as a child. My parents, my eight siblings, and myself lived in a homeless shelter for over four months, and then spent another four or five months living in a motor home. Both of my parents’ mental health issues led to a life of chaos with intermittent periods of stability, but constant poverty. In middle school I became a dependent of the court. When I reunited with my mother and moved into a trailer park in the rural northern Sierra Nevada mountains of California I believed that I was now part of middle-class America. Throughout these experiences I was the recipient of much empathy from those working at food banks, others in attendance at the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to which I accompanied my mother, social workers, teachers, classmates who knew where I lived, etc. This was not because of any individualized concern for me as a person but empathy based on my status and the pain they imagined for me. Empathy encompasses both feeling another’s emotions and having the desire to help him. This vision of empathy is untethered because (1) it’s not channeled through a personal relationship, but extended to a category of human beings and (2) it’s taken for granted that there ought to be no limiting principle because empathy will help us determine what is right and wrong. What makes empathy right to begin with?

I became cognizant of the culture of empathy-as-the-panacea in college when I took an English class focused largely on unpacking empathy; this is also when I began to question the legitimacy of its hegemony in our value system. In a collection of essays entitled The Empathy Exams, author Leslie Jamison traces the suffering of her own life and others she finds to have been victimized, such as “cutters,” or those who inflict harm on themselves. She concedes that cutters may just want attention, but posits what could be more human than granting that wish by empathizing with them? I began to wonder whether trying to share in or understand the pain of a class of people who are unknown on an individual level added any value to their lives, whether it bettered the author or empathizer’s own life, and how this kind of empathy had affected me as someone who grew up as a long-term recipient of social welfare.