Why Empathy is Key to Democracy

by Susan Lanzoni

What do you feel as you watch the video of the young woman walking on the streets of Somerville MA as a masked group of men and women circle her, grab her hands, pin them behind her, and lead her away as she screams? If you can imagine her feelings of horror and fear, and then couple those feelings with the knowledge that she is Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student who merely wrote about saving lives in Gaza in her college newspaper, you are engaging in empathy.

Empathy is the intertwining of feeling and thinking when imagining the lives of others. In this instance, we imagine Ozturk’s fear and connect this feeling to the reasoned idea that there is no longer due process in our country.

I have studied empathy in history, neuroscience, psychology, and the arts, and wrote a book charting the ways empathy has been understood and practiced over the past hundred years.

“Empathy,” surprisingly, is a relatively recent concept, first introduced to the public after the traumas of World War II. Social scientists were keenly aware that the failures of interpersonal understanding coupled with the vilification of others was a key factor in the rise of anti-democratic impulses, even the horrors of the Holocaust. During the civil rights movement, the psychologist Kenneth B. Clark argued that leaders and white citizens needed to cultivate empathy in order to grasp the difficult circumstances of Black Americans. The transformative power of empathy, he thought, would spur the creation of a more just social order.

Since these years, empathy has been celebrated as an essential element of an open, inclusive, and democratic society.

A decade ago, however, a handful of psychologists began to view empathy as a liability. They did so by narrowly defining empathy as merely sharing feelings with another, which they argued could prompt irrational responses and biased decisions. Empathy also came under critique as being strongest within familial and ethnic groups, potentially generating animosity for those outside of one’s own cultural or racial group.

But I have never seen empathy denigrated as it has been in recent months.

Conservative Christians today argue that empathy is permissible only if it is tethered to their political agenda. Even as Jesus’ key teaching is to love your neighbor as yourself, these authors direct their followers not to empathize with (nor love) the immigrant, transgender, or the non-Christian neighbor. Empathy has also been denigrated as a feminized trait and thus viewed as problematic for positions of power.

Our current political leaders have argued, remarkably, that empathy is not only bad, but it is suicidal – if we extend empathy to immigrants or a dying child across the globe, we hamper the flourishing of western civilization. These policies are not only deaf to the suffering of others but are designed to deliberately punish. Russell Vought spoke about his plan to fire federal workers as a way to “put them in trauma.” Our government today revels in demonizing federal workers, those who are transgender, scientists, academics, lawyers, protestors, and, of course, immigrants. We are witnessing the rise of an anti-empathy ideology, coupled with repressive and cruel polices.

At the same time, I suspect that the diatribes against empathy are so vehement because they implicitly recognize empathy’s power. We read books, watch films, and listen to stories precisely because we have the capacity to imagine the lives of others. Empathy is our human capacity to employ both feeling and reason to understand the lives, hopes, dreams and sorrows of those around us. And recognizing the experiences of fellow, struggling human beings means that we view others as unique persons with inherent rights. Imagining ourselves in another’s place acknowledges, in an implicit and sometimes explicit way, that this person is entitled to the same basic human rights that we are.

This recognition is key to democracy. Once we grasp another’s experience, leading us to care about their situation, we can then devise beneficial interventions and policies. This is exactly what our representatives are elected to do in our constitutional democracy.

The gleeful rejection of empathy by our political leaders will redound to harm each one of us, at some point, in this new regime. If green card holders thought the government would only deport undocumented immigrants, now they themselves are targeted. In a few short months, American citizens have also been denied due process and shipped out of the country.

Our task as members of a democracy under threat is to continue to extend our empathy to all those mistreated by this administration, which also includes those who voted for it. The deliberate, effortful practice of empathy will bolster our democratic principles, and at the same time will create resilient, nurturing communities.

Empathy reveals that the personal is indeed political. Now more than ever, we must not retract in fear but continue to expand our empathic reach.

Susan Lanzoni, Ph.D. is a writer and an historian of psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, who teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of science at Harvard University. Her award winning 2018 book, Empathy: A History, published by Yale University Press won the Cheiron best book prize. Lanzoni’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, American Scientist, Psychology Today, and The Washington Post. Her book in progress charts the many dimensions of empathy including its bodily, emotional, aesthetic and cognitive aspects.