There
have been a lot of articles over the last ten years about the decline of
empathy among American college students.
As empathy would be considered to be a positive trait to have in a
society – a trait that helps to bond people together and helps to create social
stability, it would be important to try and understand what could be the cause
of this decline. As you probably can
imagine, given the focus of this column on modern technology, I believe that
interaction with modern technology has a lot to do with it. There have already been discussions about
this, particularly within the context that use of modern technology,
particularly consumer technology, takes away time that could be used to have
direct face-to-face contact with other people.
I believe the problem is more complex than this and involves changes in
a person as a result of ongoing contact with screen reality experiences.
But
before I go into a discussion of these changes, I’d like to explore what
empathy is and how it differs from sympathy.
Sympathy involves giving solace and comfort to people who are
experiencing pain, suffering or even discomfort in their daily life situations.
It requires giving support to a person
with problems in such a way that the person giving the support maintains strong
defined discrete personal boundaries.
And whatever emotional help is given, it allows the person receiving it
to also maintain strong defined discrete personal boundaries. There is an atmosphere in this emotional
connection, whereby the person offering sympathy appreciates the distress of
the person with problems in the form of a vague overview, a general summary
approach that doesn’t really dig into the deeper details of what is bothering
the person receiving the sympathy.
People who go to funerals offer sympathy to the bereaved. It is like a formal ceremonial display of
concern in which both the comforter and the mourner play very precise careful
defined discrete roles.
Empathy,
on the other hand, has nothing of the formal or ceremonial. Empathy is an emotional connection that
breaks through personal boundaries. The
comforter blurs together with the person in distress through flowing blendable
continual expressions of emotional grounding.
The comforter gets into the details of the distressed person’s life to
break down the sense of isolation that is so much a part of the distressed
person’s problems. By getting inside the
distressed person’s world, the distressed person derives approval from the
comforter and a sense of greater security from knowing that he’s not dealing
with his stress by himself. So empathy
becomes a vehicle by which a person’s problems act as the foundation for
binding people together emotionally as well as helping to bind the distressed
person together emotionally from within.
In other words, empathy is a kind of emotional mortar that holds people
together both from without and from within.
This
is why studies made over the last ten years showing a decline in empathy among
different groups of people are so troubling.
They show a decline in one of the most important components in emotional
connection. Without empathy, society
starts to crumble apart.
From
another perspective, sympathy provides the emotional foundations from which a
comforter makes and preserves more shallow imprints on the person with
stresses. For instance, a condolence
card is nice, but when a person dies, many friends, family members and
acquaintances also come to the funeral and sign their name in a book. The bereaved certainly take note of who
signed the book, but signing the book, in the long run, does not represent an
imprint with long-term transformative ramifications. Yes, a signature remains in the book for mourners,
but how often are mourners going to refer to it, particularly with the passage
of time. On the other hand, empathy
leads to deeper more significant imprints on the part of the comforter,
imprints that can be more transformative in their effects on the distressed
person. An empathic comforter would perhaps spend time with a mourner or
mourners to help pull them out of their depression. And yet the loss of empathy in the previously
mentioned studies seem to indicate a numbness with regard to people’s sincere
interest today in and care for the people around them. So what is going on here?
What
is going on is that people are spending too much time in the mediated
experiences of screen reality and not enough time in the primary experiences of
external world reality. The screen
realities of movies, television, video games, computers, smartphone and tablets
create fields of experience that occupy a lot of our time and that prevents
direct contact with other human beings.
Even to the extent that we are communicating with other human beings, we
are doing it through the mediated channels of phone conversations, texting,
emails and Skype. We spend less and less
time in the full flesh-and-blood experience of face-to-face contact with other
humans. As a result, we don’t learn to
pick up on the nonverbal sensory cues that allow us to really connect with a
person. The non-definable flowing
blendable continual stimuli: three-dimensional physical appearance, gestures,
vocal inflections, even smells that allow us to bond more deeply with a
coherent organic person. Screen reality
gives us the equivalent of laboratory data about a person, selective
information that gives us defined focused aspects of a person, but not a larger
coherent understanding.
How
can one empathize with someone that merely exists for another person as
fragmented data or the equivalent of barely connected pixels? One becomes numb to the other person. Not even capable of sympathy which represents
a more mediated connection to a person who we should be experiencing as a
defined discrete but also coherent entity.
Screen
reality media model for us a relationship to our world that is distant from
that we would normally experience as human beings, if we were not so immersed
in technology. They flatten our fields
of experience, and they flatten our emotions as well. They don’t contain the flowing blendable
continual stimuli that are the foundational stimuli for the natural bonding
that occurs between people and, by extension, the empathy that gives support to
the distressed and meaning to the comforters.
But screen reality media occupy so much of our time that they allow
precious little time for direct primary experience external world connections with
other people. In effect, these screen reality
media fill our time much of the time with the equivalent of empty calories,
junk experiences. Empty calories and
junk food leave us feeling depleted of energy.
Screen reality media, with the vacuumized experiences that they offer,
leave us feeling empty of feeling, leave us feeling simply numb.
And
when one is simply numb, he is definitely incapable of empathy.
© 2019 Laurence Mesirow
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