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This week’s newsletter is not going to focus on one particular word, but instead on how our tapestry of words and our philosophy can help us through troubling times.
The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two adults has once again shaken the foundations of the United States. Gun violence is an American crisis that the majority of Americans want to solve, but the Republican Party continues to prevent any progress.
As Republicans prevent any meaningful progress to remove guns from our society regardless of the thousands of innocent children and adults who are senselessly murdered every year, we all know that their words are hollow and meaningless. We know that “thoughts and prayers” now equates to a meaningless phrase that means Republicans will continue doing absolutely nothing to protect Americans from gun violence.
In fact, Republican lawmakers continue to defend their inaction by claiming that new gun laws would not solve the problem because murder is already illegal. Essentially, they believe that if someone is committed to breaking the law they will find a way to break the law regardless of the number of laws that stand in their way. These lawmakers believe that laws are meaningless, yet their job is to make laws. They exist to do the opposite of what they have been elected to do, and their lawlessness continues to make all Americans less safe.
Their inhumanity continues to enrage and traumatize a nation, and people often feel at a loss for words as this uniquely American manifestation of terror and death shows no signs of abating. Children are dying and lawmakers declare that it is impossible to protect children.
Last September I became a father for the first time and I have recognized that I now have two different emotional responses to this type of terror, one as a philosopher and the other as a parent. This realization has been enlightening over the past week, and I hope it can help all of you during this difficult time.
Empathy and the Philosopher
A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, and I have always believed that the impact of a philosopher depends on how far his wisdom reaches.
For example, an individual can have a personal philosophy that shapes how they live their life, and having a personal philosophy is great and I highly recommend that each person should cultivate a personal philosophy. However, a person with a personal philosophy is not a philosopher if their philosophy does not extend beyond themselves.
The process of growing a personal philosophy into something that other people can implement is the process of becoming a philosopher. The breath and longevity of your philosophy will determine how successful of a philosopher you may become.
In my opinion, the process of growing from having a personal philosophy into a philosopher requires empathy because you need to be able to “feel-into” other people, so that you can adapt and modify your growing philosophy so that other people can practice it.
Without empathy, one would merely create dogmatic commandments that people feel forced to implement and fearful of the repercussions if they do not. In the absence of empathy, one would try to destroy the capacity to “feel-into” and profess the benevolence of divinely following a leader or savior.
Empathy is integral to cultivating a philosophy, and America’s lack of empathy impairs our capacity to cultivate healthy philosophies.
Most Americans still remain completely unaware that the word “empathy” did not exist in the English language until the early 20th century. Empathy derives from the German word “Einfühlung” which was primarily used to describe the capacity to “feel-into” an inanimate object such as a painting or a chair. It could also be applied to “feeling-into” another person, but more often than not Europeans considered this type of feeling to be sympathy or “fellow-feeling.”
In 1909, Edward Titchner translated Einfühlung into “empathy” in English. Europeans were now linguistically and psychologically capable of “feeling-into” inanimate objects, but feeling into another person that was considered an “other” and not a “fellow” still proved elusive.
The United States’ democracy was created before ethnocidal colonizers could even say “empathy” let alone act upon it, and America is still being harmed by politicians who embrace the ideals of our Founding Fathers while showing no empathy after children are murdered at school.
America’s ethnocidal society has always embraced division and the creation of an “other,” so empathy has always been shunned in our society. Empathy could break down divisions, and the absence of divisions would completely change America’s status quo.
Our society’s dependence on division and creating “others” remains evident in the justifications Republicans use for their inaction on gun control. They always articulate a division between good and bad. According to them, guns are never the problem. Instead the problem is that a “bad” person got the gun, therefore they want to propose ridiculous ideas to either identify this bad person or make guns more accessible to “good” people.
This discourse is about a battle between good guys vs. bad guys with guns. Yet America’s ethnocidal society is also dependent on cultivating an “other” that can be labeled as a “bad” person.
Since the beginning of colonization, Europeans’ inability to empathize resulted in Indigenous and African people becoming the “bad” “other” that the “good” colonizers needed to protect themselves against. Ethnocide has ingrained this division into every facet of American life, and many Americans do not know how to exist without an “other” that they can project all of their fears, anxieties, and failures upon.
The shooting in Buffalo, New York and the embrace of Great Replacement theory amongst many white Americans is an example of America’s foundational divisions and the terror that many Americans are willing to implement to sustain it.
America’s ethnocidal divisions exist to make “bad” people so that “good” people can kill them. Without an abundance of guns, “good” Americans would be defenseless against the “bad” Americans they show no empathy or sympathy towards.
As a philosopher, I understand that America’s lack of empathy and ethnocidal divisions means that anyone can “become bad” at any moment, and that the prevalence of lethal weapons so that “good” people can kill certainly makes it very easy for an American to become a bad person who can kill innocent people.
Sympathy and the Parent
Following any sort of tragedy, Americans proclaim that we need to imagine what it would feel like if your “child,” “daughter,” etc. was the recipient of the terror. We express this narrative because we want to create the necessary emotional connections to create change. Prior to becoming a parent, I understood the inadequacy of this request, but as a parent this realization has become unmistakeable and reinforced.
Following the attack at Robb Elementary school, I desperately wanted to spend time with my son. Luckily, he’s at home with me and Andrea all day, so I could spend all day with him. We knew that we could keep him safe and cherish these moments.
After the shooting, I also stopped watching the news. I would check my phone for updates, but I did not watch MSNBC or CNN. Seeing people talk about the terror was too emotional. Now that I’m a parent, it has become much easier for me to imagine how I would feel if something like this happened to my son while he was at kindergarten or elementary school. I did not want to feel those emotions because I knew I would become too overwhelmed.
As a parent, I was able to have “fellow-feeling” or sympathize with other parents, yet my newly-found sympathy did not change my perspective or provide greater clarity. My empathy had already shaped my views, and helped me see the systemic flaws in America’s ethnocidal society. My empathy compelled me to refine my philosophy and cultivate the language to help people better understand our society.
My emotions before and during parenthood may be different, but my actions and desire to change the world for the better remained roughly the same.
This week, I thought a lot about sympathy, and how an American society nearly devoid of empathy tries to fill this void with a false sympathy. We are asked to imagine scenarios that could cultivate “fellow-feeling” instead of “feeling-into” other people who we may have very little in common with.
Even as a parent, it was still impossible for me to truly feel the anguish of the parents who lost their children at the Robb Elementary School shooting. I did not have a “fellow-feeling” with these parents, but I could attempt to “feel-into.”
It is not hard to imagine how devastating it would be if a loved one, and especially a young child, was senselessly killed in a mass shooting in America. I do not need to imagine what it would be like if this terror happened to my child for me to understand that it should never happen.
Empathy does not have the limitations that sympathy does, but sympathy can be more emotionally taxing. Sympathy can feel more powerful because it can prompt a well-spring of emotion, but the subtlety and expansiveness of empathy can be far more powerful.
Empathy can build a philosophy and sympathy comes from building a family or community. We need both empathy and sympathy to make a better world, and America’s lack of empathy makes us less safe, less wise, and tragically incapable of solving our problems.