Empathy

Feeling Another's senses

I ran across this photo in National Geographic

and was struck by a number of things.

Beguiling a photo as it is, doesn’t it make you wonder what that polar bear senses, using that iceberg as bed and pillow? The photographer, Nima Sarikhani, pointed out that the bear had scraped and fashioned a “comfortable” bed before settling down for a nap.

Of course a polar bear has to be extraordinarily insulated, but even so.

And that raises the oddest thing: how much empathy is it possible to have a visceral sense of another, person or species experience?

A brave writer friend is working on a short story in which there is a poignant exchange between a racist, tenement-dwelling white man, and a well appointed but financially marginal black man. I consider my friend brave because he is willing to risk crossing what for many has become a canonical boundary.

Writing stories about ethnic or economic groups whom the writer doesn’t inhabit.

There was a time when such writing was commonplace. That was when white middle class writers had the stage to themselves. Much of that writing has since been deplored, declared insensitive, or worse. Among the most egregious that springs to mind is Gone With The Wind. Considered a masterpiece at the time, it is now seen as a racist parody of the culture it presumed to portray.

One of the tenets often given to budding writers: write what you know. That accounts for how many of my novels have included clergy, which guild I have inhabited for 60 years. I admire writers whose imagination and courage are richer than mine, who convincingly bring the reader into an encounter with people and situations quite different from the writer’s own life.

How about empathy for other species?

I claim all sorts of motives for Zinnia, our 9 year old Norfolk terrier. I pretend to know when she’s sad, or upset. In fact I haven’t a clue about what goes on in her mind. She seems aware when there’s tension in our house, or is she hungry? Or needs to go out?

So much of what passes for empathy is more likely projection. I can’t believe the polar bear isn’t cold on that iceberg, because it makes me cold to see that photo. Perhaps a better strategy is to assume that another’s experience of, and reaction to, anything, has its own integrity.

Which is to say that everyone, and every species, has an evolved nervous system that, for them, provides a picture of their reality accurate to their perception. I can’t inhabit their reality, only observe it from within my own.

Helpful for me to understand while we all inhabit a single reality , it passes through our individual and unique awareness, alerting our consciousness as a movie scene does. We are actors, not the author, and I would do well not to presume that I can know how it seems to you.