Empathy is loosely described as the ability to understand someone’s perspective by trying to imaging oneself in their shoes. Our societal norms require every person to have basic empathy towards a fellow human being (and other living organisms). Although this norm comes from a good place, just like how common sense is the least common of senses, empathy might be the least common -pathy.
I say this because with empathy the expectation is that given a circumstance, you ought to perceive how another person, who has a completely different upbringing than yours, feels. Just like how with common sense, you ought to predict a “common” discernment. When AI models, which are extremely simple compared to the human brains, when trained with different data malfunction when exposed to working on out-of-distribution testing quite often, how do you expect humans to feel and discern things the same way? And should we even expect them to? Doing so might disregard the nuances that each person perceives differently.
I understand that humans are only able to build connections when they can share and understand experiences. And that is how people communicate and persuade one another. To pull from pop culture, the example that comes to mind is how Naruto (one of the most popular Anime series) uses “Talk No Jutsu” (The Art of Talking) to convince his enemies that they are both “the same” (when you disregard every possible nuance), every time the opponent is stronger than he is (like Gaara, Neji, Obito, Sasuke). However, the problem with these kinds of connections is the overlooking the full complexities of separate lives and experiences.
Another problem I have with the enforcement of empathy is the shame that is imparted when you cannot immediately “feel” how someone else feels. You expected to either discern beforehand that how the group feels and pretend to have the populist belief or be at the risk of offending people — or worse being called a psychopath/sociopath. One time, unbeknownst to me that it is offensive, I said someone looked like Hagrid because of their curly voluminous hair, and their winter coat (at least in my head Hargrid is a positive character, and I know people who cosplay him). As a result, I was told off by the whole group of people, how I “might” have offended that person and should have never said this - “what if someone called you Shakira?”. Ironically, they weren’t empathetic toward me! I understand now that the comparison could have landed badly, but what bothered me was the assumption that I should have known that beforehand.
In another example, someone recently told me that it might be offensive to compare the facial appearance of teenage girls with their fathers. This is extremely counterintuitive to me because from where I come from, it is very common to say children resemble their parents. The point being that each person’s upbringing, culture, and experiences are different from the next and so are their feeling and judgement. How, then, does one expect the other to predict their reaction perfectly?
Famously, actor Denzel Washington when asked why the movie Fences’s writer wanted a black director, said - “I know, you know, we all know what it is when a hot comb hits your head on a Sunday morning, what it smells like. That’s a cultural difference, not just color difference.” So the question becomes, can you feel what a Black person feels when you have never felt a hot comb? And can you fully understand feminist in an embodied sense without being a woman, without knowing how a period cramp feels like every month, or without having eyes over you wherever you go and whatever you wear?
Perhaps the problem is not kindness, but how we talk about empathy. We treat empathy as if it means perfectly feeling what someone else feels. But maybe that is too much to expect given that one can never know whether their imagined version of another person’s experience is accurate. What we should instead expect is sympathy: the humility to admit that I may not feel what you feel, but I can still recognize that you feel it. Sympathy does not pretend to collapse two people’s experiences. It simply asks us to respect the difference in experiences while be caring.