This strikes me as a fundamental divide. The idea that one has to be in a constant state of empathy to be compassionate is nonsense. If a child is scared of something, I’m quite capable of comforting them without sharing in their negative emotions. In fact acting that way, with warmth, is the most effective way to be compassionate.
This idea that if one is in a permanent state of emotional distress about suffering going on in the world, that makes one virtuous, is just bullshit. What it makes one is a person with poor emotional control. Empathy is necessary to open up to compassion, but it is not itself compassion. This is most clearly understood in Buddhist philosophy and practice:
In his book on Buddhist moral philosophy, Charles Goodman notes that Buddhist texts distinguish between “sentimental compassion,” which corresponds to what we would call empathy, and “great compassion,” which is what we would simply call “compassion.” The first is to be avoided, as it “exhausts the bodhisattva.” It’s the second that is worth pursuing. Great compassion is more distanced and reserved, and can be sustained indefinitely.
This distinction between empathy and compassion is critical for the argument that I make throughout my book Against Empathy . And it is supported by neuroscience research. In a review article, Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki describe how they make sense of this distinction: “In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.”
The neurological difference between the two was explored in a series of fMRI studies that used [French Buddhist monk] Ricard as a subject. While in the scanner, Ricard was asked to engage in various types of compassion meditation directed toward people who are suffering. To the surprise of the investigators, his meditative states did not activate those parts of the brain associated with empathic distress—those that are normally activated by nonmeditators when they think about others’ pain. And Ricard’s experience was pleasant and invigorating. Once out of the magnet, Ricard described it as: “a warm positive state associated with a strong prosocial motivation.”
He was then asked to put himself in an empathic state and was scanned while doing so. Now the appropriate empathy circuits were activated: His brain looked the same as those of nonmeditators who were asked to think about the pain of others. Ricard later described the experience: “The empathic sharing… very quickly became intolerable to me and I felt emotionally exhausted, very similar to being burned out. After nearly an hour of empathic resonance, I was given the choice to engage in compassion or to finish scanning. Without the slightest hesitation, I agreed to continue scanning with compassion meditation, because I felt so drained after the empathic resonance.”
Here is an excerpt from Ricard’s Wikipedia entry:
Ricard received the French National Order of Merit for his humanitarian work in the East. He donates all proceeds from his books and conferences, as well as much of his time to over 200 humanitarian projects in Nepal, India and Tibet (www.karuna-shechen.org) which serve over 300,000 beneficiaries every year in the fields of health care, education and social service.
What have you guys done recently? Ricard resides in Nepal. Do you think he’s unaware of the existence of suffering in the world, or the indifference of a lot of people to it? Is he a less virtuous person than you because he doesn’t spend so much time being miserable about this?
Constantly being like “but what about the kids in cages” doesn’t actually have anything to do with people suffering, what it is is a demand that we spend more time discussing your feelings. The yardstick used to figure out what we should be discussing here is not “what is most salient to what is actually happening in the world, or what we can do something about”, it’s “what is most salient to what makes me personally the most emotional”. Even worse, we’re all supposed to recognise this narcissism as a virtue.
