A Crisis Of Empathy: Reclaiming Our Capacity For Deep Thought And Empathic Connection

By: Messan Bokor

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?”

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

As I’m writing this, it’s the end of January and the beginning of 2024; and last week was the coldest week we’ve had all winter. Temperatures dropped down into the single digits and we had the first snowfall we’ve seen all season. It was a sudden shift from what this winter has been so far, at least where I live. It hasn’t been warm by any standards, but it also hasn’t been the kind of winter that would make you wish you were wearing gloves as you pumped gas into your car either. Last week, it was just that.

I remember thinking to myself—after placing the gas nozzle back into its holder—”nobody should be outside right now” and was mulling over whether or not I should just head back home instead of completing the errands I set out to do as I drove down the street towards the local Wal-Mart. As I came to a stop at the next traffic light, I took a look around and noticed a homeless man leaning against a cart full of his belongings at the pedestrian crossing button beside my light. He looked to be middle aged though I couldn’t really get a good look at his face as it was cusped between his hands as he tried to breathe warmth into them. I looked at my phone to quickly check the temperature---it was 12 degrees outside. I looked back at the man and saw that he had little to no protection against the cold. Although he had a couple layers on, they were just a couple shirts layered over each other under one medium sized jacket---not nearly enough to protect him against the blistering cold and constant wind that filled the air that evening. Seeing this brought to mind the lives of all those around the world who are in the same predicament as this homeless man tonight—struggling to survive within lives of constant precarity, pain, and strife. As I thought about what he must be going through in the moment, a phrase from a book I read all the way back in high school---popped up in my head: Quiet Desperation. This term is from Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden, and it aptly captures the chronic battle of fatigue, sorrow, and pain that this homeless man was bearing now and has been forced to become resigned to leading up to this moment and extending beyond it. The full quote goes as follows:

“…the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind…” (1).

This was a term Thoreau used to express the hardship of life and weariness of spirit experienced by the common man and woman living in the countryside villages, small towns, and growing cities of America during the 1800s, but it's a term that grew to extend way past this period. Over the years, it will grow to encompass---among other things---the societal turmoil/pain brought forth by the Civil War and the following Reconstruction/Jim Crow years, the weight of factory life characteristic of the Industrial Revolution, the chronic economic despair brought forth by the Great Depression, the societal-wide pain, fear, and anxiety created from the following decades of war and global conflict, and so on and so forth. And keep in mind that everything I just listed was simply in reference to the subsequent periods within the US, let alone the rest of the world. All the way to our current moment within a societal system fraying at the edges, where we mask a hidden subclass of impoverished citizens behind a thin veil of technological and societal progress. A neglected class which has truly come to embody what Thoreau meant when he used the term “Quiet Desperation”.

My goal within the following series of dialogues is to explore the causes of this quiet desperation, what it's doing to us on an individual and collective level, and how we can address this before it leaves us with a disease of the human spirit which we may never be able to truly cure. This will be hard to do this in a single post so I will break this up into a series of posts that focus on different aspects of this topic. Within this one, I will discuss the underlying issue that not only maintains this quiet desperation but allows it to be so rooted within our society that it has now become commonplace---simply a background process of general societal life. What I’m referring to here is the moral apathy and empathic detachment that many of us have succumbed to which allows this quiet desperation to fester and grow.

A central question that I hope you ask yourself after you read these posts is:

Did that homeless man need to be out in the cold that night trying to survive in 12 degree weather? Was there any other path, any other reality where he could have avoided a situation like that? This is not a question about solving homelessness. We cannot reduce such a complex issue to such a simple question. We currently do not have enough shelters or resources to adequately aid people in this situation. This is a question about, had we cared enough, what actions could we have taken to alleviate the quiet desperation that man felt that night---that he feels tonight? Could we have extended Wal-Mart’s operating hours, if only for that night, to provide those that would be forced to sleep out in the freezing snow and wind a warm place to spend the night? Could we have instructed our public transportation drivers to look for and allow these individuals a free ride to makeshift refuges like that? Could we have handed out vouchers for free warm meals at common restaurants or fast-food places? The point is not how we can help them, with enough minds and hearts working on the issue, viable solutions would surely arise. The question is, can we care enough about what they are going through to truly try to help?

The Things We Prefer Not To Dwell On: Moral Apathy, Empathetic Overload, & Conditioned Detachment

In a previous post---“Amusing Ourselves To Death” by Neil Postman: How The Values Inherent In The Tools We Use Affect Us---I explored Neil Postman’s analysis of the medium of television and discussed several adverse side-effects that its design and operation has had on the psyche of both its viewers and the overall society they live within. To quickly recap:

“…in short, the use of advertising through commercial breaks within televised broadcasting has had a degrading effect on the flow of information through the tool. The prevalence and importance placed on commercial breaks within the medium has fragmented and corroded the presentation and digestion of information relayed through what would otherwise be deep and serious broadcasts that deserve the public’s undivided attention. This element of television breaks the focus of the viewers and--combined with the fleeting nature of our memory---causes them to forget much outside of the main points of what was discussed before the commercial break…in other words, it disrupts the digestion and synthesis of information by not allowing the time and continuity of thought for this process to take place. Adding to this issue is the fact that some programs like daily news shows are often already quite fragmented due to the fact that they are attempting to fit in large amounts of information within short time frames that are further shortened and broken up by commercials. The end result is that we are left with no sense of continuity regarding the progression of the world and the events occurring in it, hallowing our understanding of the state of our world and its history to this point. Repeated exposure to this leads to desensitization and a detachment from the events happening in the world altogether. Where informational overload paired with disrupted digestion and synthesis of information results in us no longer holding any empathetic connection to the stories we hear and no longer conducting any deep reflection on them. The overall impact of this is that, while the viewers know the general gist of an event, they hold no real understanding of it nor any real attachment to it. This also degrades our ability to learn from these events/stories through introspection and synthesis of new information with prior understandings of our lives and the greater world we live in. Instead, we are nudged to simply move on to the next commercial or story listed on the docket…” (1).

I mention this here because of that last part:

“…repeated exposure to this leads to desensitization and a detachment from the events happening in the world altogether. Where informational overload paired with disrupted digestion and synthesis of information results in us no longer holding any empathic connection to the stories we hear and no longer conducting any deep reflection on them. The overall impact of this is that, while the viewers know the general gist of an event, they hold no real understanding of it nor any real attachment to it…” (1).

As Postman correctly discerned regarding the golden age of television of the 1980s, the way we have constructed our society---embodied, among many things, through our culture, customs, and even the technology we build---is permeating a corrosive effect on the way we think and, most importantly, the way we feel. I start our discussion on this note because it is a good example of the process that we will focus on within this section: the slow erosion of our empathic capacity and sense of connection to one another both on an individual as well as on a collective scale.

Before we explore this topic, we first have to define the distinction between literal connection and empathic connection. It is undeniable that the world is more connected today than it has been in the past. We have the ability to learn a great deal more about the world around us and the experiences of those living within it than ever before. But has this translated to a greater empathic connection to those “others”? Or have our methods of establishing that literal connection instead had an adverse effect which has diminished the potency of our empathic connection to one another by diminishing the weight of those experiences simply through the way we learn about them, our constant exposure to them, and the way we frame those experiences in relation to our own lives? In order words, regardless of the fact that we are more connected than ever before, does the fact that we are more desensitized and detached than ever before negate the empathic connection to one another that would have otherwise developed as a result of a more connected world?

Let’s begin again from Postman’s argument. A good name for the process Postman remarks upon here in his analysis of the psychological implications of our use of the television is what I will term as the “disrupted digestion” of information and experience. Although this example of it focuses specifically on the fragmented presentation of information with television programming, it's a process that takes place all the time through many different mediums and methods ranging from the way we approach educational instruction (the fragmented nature of our curriculum), the way we conduct important discussions like political debates, and even down to the way we interact within our digital worlds. Regardless of how this process occurs, it plays a huge role in the slow erosion of our empathic connection to one another---or to frame its effect more accurately---our growing detachment from the greater world around us.

This process of disrupted digestion has essentially watered down how much weight new information and experiences have within our minds when we take them in. In other words, it renders us incapable of understanding the gravity of an issue due to our inability to properly digest its implications and frame its significance accurately within our individual worldviews. Its similar to when you eat a lot of food so quickly that you end up throwing all of it up, losing all the nutrients that your body was supposed to digest from that food. We have created a society where we bombard ourselves with so much information in such corrosive ways, that we end up having to discard much of the information we take in as soon as we learn it so that we can make room for new information coming in. The end result is that our mind has lost the mental space, time, and analytical capacity it once had to digest information/experiences and store them properly. We have essentially lost our ability to dwell on our thoughts and experiences which is in turn eroding our ability to ponder each other's experiences and relate to them.

I started our discussion by referencing the work of Henry David Thoreau. Though Thoreau was a writer, professor, social philosopher, and even one of the early pioneers in ecological studies---he was, at heart, a naturalist. He was one of the biggest advocates of his time of learning from the harmony of nature and living a simple and natural life set aside from the overbearing nature of common societal life. Living in our society today, you start to understand why Thoreau stressed the importance of detaching from our society in order to live a more natural and grounded life that preserves the stillness of mind and spirit necessary to think and feel clearly. A natural life is one way through which we can reclaim the mental space, attention span, and digestive capacity to properly think and feel clearly about the things around us. Without the depth of thought that these allow us, our thoughts, feelings, and overall human experience, stay surface level---lacking the substance needed to affect us in any meaningful way. But rebuilding our capacity to properly digest and frame new information---to dwell on our thoughts---is just one aspect of the problem. After solving that, the issue then becomes what thoughts do we choose to dwell on?

Part of the problem with choosing what to dwell on lies in the fact there is simply too much to take in and care about. In our current age, we are constantly bombarded with a never-ending stream of news and experiential information concerning every aspect of our lives and the world. This kind of informational overload can be overwhelming, especially considering that this is a recent development within our civilization and a huge shift from the ways we lived and operated in the past. We are not yet accustomed to adequately dealing with the sheer amount of experiences we are confronted with even as we do something as simple as scrolling through our social media feeds. As a coping mechanism, we default to simply blocking out or discarding the vast majority of these experiences, only choosing to keep those that immediately affect us. While this, in of itself, is understandable, the problem that arises is that when we discard the vast majority of the information and experiences we come across, the importance of them are minimized within our individual mental perspectives. It often results in us placing our own often trivial matters in a place of higher significance and importance within our mind than the things that are happening outside our immediate human experience. This leads to a situation where we scroll past a post that depicts the brutality of a war happening halfway across the world in order to like and comment on a post our friend made about where he or she traveled last weekend. This inverse forced prioritization in order to cope with informational overload is leading to a kind of empathic disconnect where we fail to feel the weight of certain experiences and events because we prefer to focus on matters that are easier to digest and more relevant to our immediate lives. We lose sight of the significance of the important things because we are bombarded with too much information to take them in properly. In short, it simply becomes easier not to dwell on these things.

What makes this constant process of disrupted digestion and forced prioritization even worse is the fact that we have created a society built around triviality and superficiality. As Postman remarked at the beginning of his book:

“At different times in our history, different cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit…today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death…” (1).

This cultural focus has led to the creation of a society plagued by triviality, superficiality, and escapism. Which, in turn, has conditioned us towards a kind of mental impulsivity that has detached us from the mindfulness needed to be truly connected to the most important aspects of our world and our human experience. To frame it another way, how do you think and feel clearly within the mass of triviality and superficiality that we permeate throughout our society? To use our previous example of scrolling social media, one has to scroll past a hundred trivial posts that play at impulsive desires and anxieties before they come across one that adds any real meaning to their lives.

The resulting culmination of all this is that most of us don’t really care about the world, including each other, anymore. We lack any real meaningful attachment to it and the lives that others live. What I mean by this is that much of us have discarded our capacity to truly care about the world because we have detached ourselves from its progression, people, and its future. It’s ironic that the age of connection is characterized by a societal-wide apathy to many of the people that we are now connected to but this is the exact situation we now find ourselves in. Through both individual maladjustments to the new age of information and the direction we have allowed our society to go in---our analytical/empathic capacity, mental fortitude, spiritual well-being and moral commitment has been eroded. This, paired with the socio-economic strife that many of us struggle with and the unhealthy dynamics that plague our relationships to one another within our civilization (both of which we will explore deeper within the next post in this series), has led to a situation where we are entirely disconnected from each other and quickly losing our connection with the real world outside of our immediate bubbles of lived experience. I believe Harvard professor Dr. Cornel West frames it best in a public lecture he gave titled “Philosophy In Our Time Of Imperial Decay” (linked below - would highly recommend giving it a listen):

“...there's no way that we will ever be equipped to deal with our present circumstances: the effects and consequences of the various structures of domination and exploitation. The ways in which the market has so thoroughly colonized our minds and hearts and souls, that it's hard to even conceive of being agents collectively organized or even individual in our relationships because intimacy and vulnerability have been so thoroughly called into question. That's one of the reasons why we're experiencing a moment of not just polarization. Again, that's just deodorized talk. America's not polarized. America's polarized and gangsterized. And gangsterization is different than polarization. It cuts much deeper...gangsterization is about the enactment of wholesale nihilism, which is not simply epistemic skepticism or ontological skepticism. It is lovelessness. It is touchlessness. It is meaninglessness. It is what Dostoevsky called hell in "Brothers Karamazov," which is wrestling with the incapacity to love because the gifts that one has been given have not been cultivated in such a way that you even know how to love anymore…so even the discourse of love and justice, and any justice that's only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice. If all you got to offer is just justice, and you're not doing it because you really love and have a caring concern about the people catching hell, it’s just a lifestyle choice. It's not a fundamental way of being in the world…that’s how dim and grim our situation is…” (3).

Reclaiming Our Capacity To Think And Feel Clearly: The Need For A Renaissance Of Our Modes Of Thinking

I mentioned earlier that living a minimalistic and natural life was one way that we can reclaim our capacity to think and feel clearly. But we can’t all build a cabin in the woods and live there, so what practical steps can we take to strengthen our mind, spirit, and empathic connection to one another? I discussed something similar to this question in a previous post about the problems with our current civilizational system and what it would take to transition to a better one (Playing A Different Game: The Path To Transitioning To A Better Civilizational System). One of the central solutions I explored within that post is the nurturing of a deeper sense of and connection to Life encapsulated in what Daniel Schmachtenberger---social philosopher and founder of The Consilience Project---referred to as “abstract empathy”. What I’ll discuss within this section is the underlying pillar to that abstract empathy: the modes of thinking and feeling that the philosophical and theological foundations upon which it is predicated nurture; because---just as this is a solution to the collective problem of the macro-interpersonal dynamics of our civilizational system---it is also a solution to our individual problem of thinking and feeling clearly enough to properly relate to one another’s experiences.

Let’s begin with philosophy. Philosophy, at its core, is a practice of internal growth and transformation through self-interrogation and analysis. It is a practice predicated upon and designed to nurture deep thought (informational/experiential digestion) and complex analysis (informational/experiential synthesis). It does this through teaching modes of thinking and mental frameworks that make it easier to digest information/experiences and explore complex thoughts and feelings. This is a direct contrast to the impulsive and disconnected surface level thinking that we are falling into within our current age; which even the practice of philosophy itself, has fallen victim to over the years. As Thoreau pointed out, even within his own time:

“…there are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically…” (2).

In a separate essay, Civil Disobedience, Thoreau reiterates the importance of philosophy:

“...they who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead...” (2).

If this was the case during Thoreau’s time, just imagine what our current society built around ‘amusing ourselves to death” has done to our capacity for deep thought and philosophical analysis. The culmination of everything we've discussed in this post is leaving us with no time for self-interrogation and no desire for complex analysis of experience---which are core pillars of exercising empathy and internal transformation---which is resulting in the withering of our capacity to think clearly and deeply. The only way to reverse this downward trend is to re-root ourselves within the philosophical tradition through resurfacing and refortifying the modes of thinking and mental frameworks it has birthed which serve as a foundation for deep thought and analysis of our experiences. In short, philosophy can renew and expand our ability to dwell on our thoughts without the mental overload that comes from sorting through complex experiences. In other words, it can make it easier for us to reconnect with the world, its people, and its progression without being overwhelmed. Dr. West frames this well when explaining how philosophy can aid us in understanding our world and finding our place within it:

“…you can't have a calling without a recalling, a relation to the voices, the figures, the exemplars who have come before who shape us and mold us. And if there's going to be any kind of serious philosophy, love of wisdom in a moment of imperial decay, countervailing truth-telling against the present status quo, countervailing organizing against the status quo, countervailing arguments, countervailing stories, countervailing analysis, counter-hegemonic ways of being in the world, it has everything to do with basic things like trying to get us to see the world more clearly comprehensively with a subtlety and sense of complexity that is inseparable from feeling deeply and shattering callousness and indifference so that we actually can have genuine care and solidarity. And last but not least, most importantly, being willing to act…[Alfred North Whitehead] says, "I'm concerned with the tone of a thinker."…the temperament of a thinker and a philosopher and a human being wrestling with decay and decline and loss and catastrophe. Crucial is the tone and temperament of how we relate to each other. And if we measure American culture in terms of tone and temperament, oh, we're in deeper trouble than we thought. It's not just the ideas exchanged. It's the how…” (3).

Which brings us to the other side of the solution: overcoming “callousness and indifference” in order to reclaim our capacity to feel clearly in regards to one another. This is where spirituality comes in, specifically the fortifying of our empathic capacity that comes through studying the theological tradition---the age-old lessons and practices that its various religions consist of. Theology and philosophy can be looked at, simply, as two sides of the same coin. Both are intended to nurture a deeper sense of being through strengthening your capacity for complex thought and feeling; though both do so through different means and methods; and manifest through different ways. One way we can look at the relationship between philosophy and theology is through the lens of theory and practice. Philosophy renders religion more intelligible by explaining, in straightforward terms, the meaning and lessons behind religious text. Through this lens, religion is essentially philosophical tenants in motion, given form through the stories and events depicted within the various religious texts. In other words, philosophy is the underlying theory behind religion. Maybe if we called the study of these tenants “Philosophical Meditation On Biblical Stories” instead of “Bible Study”, this relationship would be easier to recognize. The difference is that the spiritual lessons and practices one can derive from the study of theology are more geared towards your perspective of yourself in relation to the things and people around you rather than just deriving the truth of a matter through deep mental analysis---though both are still mainly predicated upon self-analysis and self-interrogation. What I mean by this is that, although both explore these areas, theology---through the study of the various religious tenants that have been passed on throughout history---deals more with the practical importance of the ideals and virtues these beliefs/tenants embody and why they are important to how we think about ourselves, how we perceive the world, and how we interact with one another---central among these ideals and virtues being empathy, compassion, and a collective responsibility for one another.

Re-grounding ourselves in both practices and placing a greater emphasis on them within our society can help us bring about a renaissance of our modes of thinking and our modes of feeling that reconnects us back to our individual life experiences, back to each other, and back to the greater world we live in. Through changing the way you think and perceive others, these modes of thought establish a more serious and grounded tone to your mind which helps you better observe and understand the significance of the experiences you have and come across throughout your day-to-day life. So while you still may scroll past significant posts on your time to stop at something trivial or simply drive past a homeless man freezing out in the cold, your mind notices that you did and through that observation you are able to delve deeper into why and learn more about yourself and the world through doing so. Its often the smallest things that convey the significance and gravity of an experience. Like noticing the fact that the homeless man I mentioned at the beginning had no gloves on as he breathed warmth into his hands. With the pain of the instant frostbite that just made me wish I was wearing gloves as I pumped gas still in my mind, it became clearer to me the kind of pain that he must have been experiencing throughout that night, even that entire week. Being able to notice these subtle indications of lived experience within the interactions we have throughout our lives is the underlying pillar of true empathy. And that observative capacity only comes from a mind that has honed discernment through philosophical analysis and honed a deep capacity to care about others through the interpersonal perspectives inherent in the various theological traditions. Through them, you can change the way your mind perceives, interprets, and digests your experiences as well as those of others—grounding you within a deeper sense of life and a deeper sense of the connection of that life to the lives of others.

Within our discussion here, I’ve explored what has happened to our capacity for deep thought; and how this has affected our ability to understand the significance of the information and experiences that we come across; which has a led to a detachment from them altogether. Due to this detachment, or disconnect with the world, we are starting to lose our empathic connection to one another and our desire to feel for and help one another. I mostly approached this from an individual level within this post but in the second part to this---The Plight Of The Human Spirit: Our Increasing Detachment From The Human Experience Of Ourselves And Others---I’ll switch to a macro scale and explore what this doing to our collective human spirit---our shared humanity---as well as how the unifying potential of technology paired with the renaissance of deep thought and feeling embodied through the practices I mentioned above could aid us in healing what has been broken.

References

1. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Television. New York, NY: Penguin Random House LLC, 1985. Book.
   

2. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden And Civil Disobedience. New York: First Signet Classics Printing, 1999. Book.
   

3. West, Cornel. "Dr. Cornel West: Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay | The New School." Philosophy in Our Time of Imperial Decay. New York: The New School, 29 March 2022. Video Lecture. Click here to watch