Identity, Sentiment & Compassion

I first recall noticing the phenomenon in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "We Are All Americans" was the sentiment that I recall hearing about then, in those days marked by the acrid smoke blowing uptown, when I'd sit in Fiddler's after work and see the firemen in their dress blue uniforms knocking back beers after yet another funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. It seemed to be a continuous sight for months. We New Yorkers were proud of our cops and firemen, the firemen particularly; they captured our imagination so that we, and the rest of the nation adopted them, wearing "FDNY" and "NYPD" caps and t-shirts, as if we could be them and join them in their mourning.

I remember seeing and hearing people who weren't in the city that day talking about how they felt like they were New Yorkers, somehow. "You're not, though!" I'd protest. "Hell, I wasn't even there. I mean, I was on my way in to work in Midtown; I didn't see the towers come down. I didn't lose any friends or family there." The attempt by people outside the situation to identify with it personally made no sense to me.

Since then, I've noticed this need to identify with victims as a general trend in the face of disaster. Perhaps it's because we feel powerless in the face of great adversity that we feel the only way we can express our concern for our fellows is to try to become them. Katrina hit and everyone was a New Orleanian, the Japanese tsunami hit and Facebook pages everywhere started displaying the Rising Sun.

Which brings me to the instant point, the maddening "I Am Troy Davis" t-shirts worn by the supporters of the man executed last week in Georgia for killing a Savannah policeman. Maddening, because it makes no sense: the t-shirt-wearing supporters are not on death row, either rightly or wrongly. They did not kill cops, or get wrongly convicted of killing cops. They are not facing imminent death at the hands of the justice system they decry; after the needle is withdrawn from Troy Davis's arm, they will go home and put their t-shirts in the laundry, and they might or might not think much of the incident afterward. In the end, there are perhaps good intentions in the desire to identify, but the gestures, the emotionalism, all ring hollow because of their noisiness and falsehood.

So what, then, is real? How are we to react to the sorrows (and joys) of others? It seems that we are in an age that has lost a capacity for empathy (the ability to perceive and to understand the emotional states of others) and for compassion (literally to suffer with, to experience the suffering of others and seek to alleviate that suffering); to be void of empathy is to be narcissistic. The faculties of empathy, and the resultant compassion, are imaginative in that it requires the emotional and intellectual exercise of trying to envision what it is to be in such a situation, and to imagine how one would want to be treated in that situation.

Despite our connections by social media, we become more and more fragmented, more lonely, more detached from our neighbors in favor of building disembodied acquaintances with people across the country or around the world. Perhaps those imaginative capacities are taxed by the vast quantities of stimulation and information that we are exposed to these days; there is simply so much noise, light, color, and speed, that we do not give ourselves time to pray and to meditate, to contemplate and imagine what it must be like to be in someone else's situation, be it an unemployed friend or neighbor, or an orphaned child in a war-torn country, or a man sitting in a death row prison cell awaiting execution.

What is required is not an unexamined emotional "I Am _____" slogan, but the virtuous exercise of what Russell Kirk (expanding on Edmund Burke's phrase) called the "moral imagination", which "aspires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth." Another suggestion might be to read Dr. Edith Stein's doctoral dissertation on the Problem of Empathy.

My early experiences in Alcoholics Anonymous taught me how to begin exercising that faculty of imagination (a trait that we alcoholics often have in great abundance!) in a properly-ordered way: the talks, the stories that people in recovery tell are directed toward teaching one another how to experience empathy and how to identify one's own need for healing, repentance, and forgiveness. Alcoholics tell one another that they "identify" with one another, meaning not that their circumstances are the same, but that one can experience the sorrows, pains, embarrassments, and joys of life by listening to what others have to say.

This introduction to empathy was expanded upon my return to, and growth in, the Catholic faith. The scriptures, the sacraments, the prayers, the art and musical treasures of the Church are directed toward bringing one into communion with God in the person of Jesus Christ; in reading the stories of the Bible, in meditating upon the Mysteries of the Rosary, in the reading of the Passion account on Palm Sunday, in participating in the Way of the Cross, one encounters in a profound way the suffering of Jesus, of His Mother, the joy of His disciples at the Resurrection, and the zeal of their mission at Pentecost.

It is from these things, from empathetic and compassionate engagement with individual people, rather than from narcissistic slogans, public candlelight vigils, and protest rallies, that we will heal and bind up wounds and remedy injustices. It is in prayer and fasting and proclaiming the Gospel to the sad, lonely, and desperate that the world will be saved.