A Crisis of Empathy
The cost of caring in a pandemic
I used to fantasize about murdering the man who hurt my sister. They were my daytime thoughts, which I indulged in to soothe the nightmares. The ones that I had over and over, when I closed my eyes. The ones where he would kill everyone in the family, and I would have to watch.
I don’t love that I wished someone death. I talk about this with my therapist a lot: those times when I do wish someone harm. Actual harm. She tells me this is okay. It makes sense, in a way, to wish away the people who have done you the most harm. It’s a Fruedian wish fulfillment. She says she will let me know when I am cruel. When I am dead inside.
Once, I proposed this idea: She tells me the names of all the bad men in town, and then I seduce and murder them. And we call the Netflix show The Freelancer. She assures me, I am not quite over the edge. But no, she won’t violate HIPAA, even though she thinks my Netflix show idea is great. Fine. Okay.
But it’s happening again this year. There are some people getting sick, and I cannot muster up an ounce of sympathy for them. Not one. In fact, sometimes, I want them to suffer. I don’t like saying that out loud, but there it is.
And it’s because they are in power and have done nothing to minimize the loss and grief of this year.
In the early days of the pandemic, when it became very clear that the people in the Midwest who were the most impacted by the virus were the food processing plant workers, I wrote a column about that fact. I wrote about how as a state and a nation we were all saying, “We’re in this together,” but we were not, and we never were. We were happy to let people die so we could eat Tyson processed pork products.
Here is what I wrote in April: “From the beginning of this pandemic, people, companies, and political leaders have loved to repeat the refrain that ‘we are all in this together.’ As some sort of rallying cry. A way to encourage unity and hope. Gov. Reynolds has said this in news conferences and on Twitter. ‘We’re all in this together!’ But that statement rests on a fundamental denial of inequality in America and in Iowa, where the virus is disproportionately affecting black and brown people, immigrants, and the formerly incarcerated who work at meat packing and food processing plants. The virus is disproportionately affecting health care workers and ‘essential workers,’ who often earn minimum wage. A wage that GOP leaders in Iowa and nationally have refused to raise. And now, with the state opening up, furloughed workers are being told to go back to work or risk losing their jobs. I put ‘essential workers’ in quotes because many of those workers are not essential for our daily lives, they are only essential for corporations to make money. Some of them may die, but to quote the great leader Lord Farquaad from the movie Shrek, that’s a risk our governor is willing to take.”
After I wrote this, I received a lot of mail. “But what about our food!?” one emailer protested. “You can maybe not eat pork for a month so other people can live,” I wrote back. His response, which I wish I could quote, but the email is long lost, accused me of being a typical liberal, and maybe I should know how poorly New York was handling the virus as well.
That was a line of attack that I got a lot for a while. “Well, New York isn’t so great, either!” And I’d always respond, “Yeah, exactly!”
I still think about that. In response to the overwhelming cost of human lives, many, many Iowans took time to email me, “But what about my dinner?”
An essay by Reginald F. Baugh titled, “The Evolution of Social Beliefs 1960-2016 in the United States and Its Influence on Empathy and Prosocial Expression in Medicine,” argues that in response to social upheaval, our societal inclination is to become more selfish and less empathetic.
Charting the 56 years between 1960 and 2016, Baugh pulls together some research all in one place and notes (with footnotes), “Mistrust of others continued its 40-year increase into the first decade of the 21st century. Importantly, the same period saw a 40% decline in empathy among college students, just as social anxiety regarding multicultural pluralism as a social motivator was becoming evident. Researchers also documented a decline in dispositional empathy, especially after 2000.”
Wondering when we stopped caring about others presumes we ever really cared before as a society. It presumes that there was a point at which humans looked at one another and said, “We care.”
The reality is, empathy has been a gift all too often bestowed on those we deem worthy of it rather than those who need it the most. Study after study shows that humans empathize with those who look like us. Humans who do violence don’t lack empathy. They have empathy, but only for the people who look like them. For everyone else? Well? The answer lies in the number who are dead from this pandemic.
This week, at her press conference, Iowa’s governor, when questioned about why she has refused to take the pandemic seriously since the spring, lashed out at the media and asked, “Were you a chorus in adding volume to what we were trying to say?”
The reality is, no. The media was the chorus saying what the governor was never saying. The Des Moines Register, me at The Gazette, The Times Citizen urging people to do the opposite of what our governor was doing and wear a mask and stay home. It was a Greek chorus of voices begging people to care, to have empathy.
At the Register, they did the Iowa Mourns project.
The point is, our lack of empathy isn’t a messaging problem, it’s a cultural one.
It’s one that has always been there.
And I do not mean in other people. I do not mean in “those others who voted Trump.” I mean this lack of empathy exists in you. It exists in me. Humans are bad at sitting and grappling with our cognitive bias. We always want to blame others. We always see ourselves as the good ones.
A person I know just posted pictures of her trip to Florida with her kids. This same person has complained about other people not wearing masks or taking the pandemic seriously.
A couple of things: 1) don’t post pictures of your trips, 2) wow, the cognitive dissonance.
And, I don’t know. I’m not saying I am better. It’s a pandemic. None of us is getting an A+ at this. We are all muddling through. But, so often, our muddling comes at the expense of other people’s lives.
I spoke to a nurse at the University of Iowa last week for an assignment for the Washington Post. I think about her, how she cries every day going to and from work.
There are other people demanding our compassion. I get this, too. Business owners trying not to lose their incomes. Communities trying not to lose the places that have shaped their narratives. The bars. The restaurants. It’s not nothing, these places.
There is a man in my town, whom I will not name, but he’s gunning hard to be the next mayor — and this is why I can never leave Facebook, because in small towns (shut up, Cedar Rapids is small, and we all know it), Facebook is how our policies are litigated — and this man keeps crowdsourcing ideas to save businesses. None of those ideas ever include going to the people in charge of this state and asking for a bailout. To him, businesses are the thing in crisis. Because he is a businessman and that’s where his empathy lies. I am not saying businesses do not deserve empathy. What I am saying is that as humans, the target of our empathy has more to do with ourselves than the actual pain in the world. And our pandemic has put two things at odds: lives and livelihoods, when it was never a zero sum game between the two.
There is also something else at play in this logic: The individual is the solution. When we make crisis solutions an individual responsibility, rather than a corporate one, they come at the cost of our empathy. Baugh’s essay points this out too, charting that as our individualism increases, our empathy for others decreases. After all, if we can fix our lives, why can’t others? And so we devolve into screaming matches over masks in the grocery store, all the while voting to retain the status quo.
In refusing to hold our systems accountable, we pit human lives against a pork tenderloin, and lose our humanity.
About wishing people dead: you know, I was astonished at the reactions when Trump was sick with coronavirus. All these good people wishing him well and hoping he'd recover, and I was there saying, "What the hell is wrong with you? Would you have wanted Hitler to put down the gun and check into a mental hospital so he could go on and have a much longer career in murdering people? Maybe you would've yanked him back if he was stepping into the path of a bus in 1935?" I mean I hadn't thought about it till just now, but those docs at Walter Reed owe the people of Philadelphia and Atlanta for the pardoning of their consciences. Sure, they take an oath, and it's an important oath, but other things are important, too. Like the kind of lawful democracy that supports Hippocratic oaths. Other people's lives. A certain utilitarianism creeps in. Anyway. These people would look at me, when I said, "What the hell is wrong with you?" and solemnly tell me they don't wish anyone ill. And I'd say, "You understand that this is not about you, right? That the whole world does not shrink to the point of your being able to rate yourself good by a checklist you frankly haven't examined all that far?" But I do think that that's how perspective has turned. I also think they had no way of distinguishing vengefulness and relief.
Here's another one who it's good he's dead: Slobodan Milosevic. I don't care if he suffered. I'm just glad he's dead. And look, he saved everyone the expense of having him in prison. Epstein? Also good he's dead.
This is a thing I've found a lot of men have trouble with. Back when I was out litigating feminism on the internets I used to have a lot of debates and arguments about sexual harassment, and there was a thing that always seemed to pull men up short: we'd be talking about workplace sexual harassment, and I'd say something along the lines of how, in every workplace, there was a guy, and when something happened to that guy -- disabled and gone, dead and gone, got a bad cancer and wouldn't last long -- when certain women got the news, perfectly nice women, they'd receive it the same way. The head cocks, maybe there's a probing question about the factualness, there's a composed silence, and then a quiet: "Good." And you know what they are then? Happy. Not happy from revenge. Happy because freed. Their hearts are light, there's a song in their hearts. They'll hum a little tune, they'll feel good, because that guy is gone gone gone and can never torment anyone again, the workplace where they spend so much of their lives becomes a better place that day. The relief will be like a spa. That's the guy who used to ogle and make remarks and keep joking-not-joking about debates and want to know about their sex lives and never fucking let up so that they'd actually chart their movements to avoid him. And I'd say, Look around where you work. Most if not all of the women there have someone like that where someone will tell them about a death and they'll say, "Good." They'll feel they oughtn't, but it will be true and for good reason. And if they have ever treated women like that at work, they can be assured that when they die or are permanently disabled or whatever, those women will say, quietly, "Good."
This used to shock the men. They'd recover and start talking about how terribly vicious -- and I'd say no, it's not viciousness. They don't want revenge, much. They'll be glad you're dead because it'll mean you can never torment them or anyone else like that again. And they will be relieved, and breathe more freely in the world. The men are shocked because it's the first time someone has put it to them so plainly what bad actors they are in the world. They've convinced themselves it's fun and jokes and showing off. But they're wrong about that, and now they know what the cost of it will be, in the most selfish way imaginable. What people will say about them -- even those pretty ladies they believed were inconsequential -- when they're dead.
I understand how if someone's really, deeply hurt you wanting them to feel some of that, too on their way to dead. I think there's a fond hope baked into that, which is the idea that the person you're hurting has unimpaired emotions and will actually feel bad. Will have some crisis and actually feel the torment you felt. To which I say: eh, probably not. This is a hard thing to accept because it means there isn't justice, won't be justice. So, as the man says, it goes. But if that person were so susceptible to feeling things, probably they wouldn't have been such a champion asshole in the first place. I mean nobody should waste time on hoping Trump feels bad. All you can do there is just be glad you're not him. So what does that mean for the impulse to hurt them back, which wouldn't live for real in you anyhow? Well, once you see there's nothing in it, that's how people become pro bono and public-interest lawyers. And write a lot for the Nation, and whatnot. You begin to see the prevention of cruelty as not just a societal problem, but a governmental problem, and you work to write it into law, legal education, institution-building, and so on. The reward comes when you see people living well.
As for feeling bad when you wish someone dead....It's a pity that my people -- Jews, I mean -- so often turn into assholes when they get some money under them (relax, it's not all, just a really conspicuous lot), because I really think that there are some very healthy ways of dealing with these things in Jewishness. There's a well-worn Yiddish phrase old Jewish ladies used to use liberally: Gay in drerd. Go to hell, but literally, go in the ground. Drop dead. (They liked that one, too.) They meant it! You should die and stop being a torment. They didn't say "die and suffer," just "die". Die and leave us alone, we're better without you. And that right there should be the sting: We're better without you. You should want things to be better with you!
Anyway. Yes. You have to teach people from the start that they are part of something, and that this something is a society that makes a nation, and that the nation is only one of many. That's the postwar project, is it not, and while it's not without flaws and crimes, it hasn't done badly. Except that a few generations on, people forget why it happened at all, why one must learn civics, history, a sense of looking around and seeing that other people have something to do with you, and you with them: a sense not just of empathy, but of responsibility.
I have hope we can get a lot of that back, but it'll be different this time, because it has to be rooted in something else for the young people. They don't have a devastation of world wars ringing in their ears. They have other things. And the education in empathy along the way is not a bad thing. It's just not the only thing, doesn't get you there by itself.
Two years ago at this time I was recovering from abdominal surgery and a 12-day post-op hospital stay, and the massive doses of Prednisone given me after my chemo treatments for Non Hogkins Lymphoma had run their short course and I hit the brick wall on Thanksgiving Day. I had no functioning taste buds that everyone insisted made me think everything was 'plucky, yet pernicious', but mostly metallic. I quickly tired (period) of explaining, "No. Not anything. They are aggressively neutral. They are the younger sibling who hovers you like a cloud of gnats chanting "I'm not touching you!" while poking their finger to within a hair's width of contact...all of my taste buds are annoying siblings chanting "I'm not tasting you!" with every chew until my body just holds a confab and sends my reptilian lobe the exhaustive question: why are we doing this? I had no answer, so I curled my hairless self into entire bloodlines of grandmother crocheted shawls and whimpered. My wife's family always starts holiday dinners with an earnest discordant chorus of which way dishes are supposed to be passed until they just start of their own volition. This was an easy discussion with just the two of us and only the one doing any eating. I started and ended it by saying, "I pass."
That was a winter of isolation and worry that has passed and I'm still standing. My therapist and I talk about the coming winter and being proactive and mindfulness and routines, and it all makes sense to me now why Russian literature just continues to digress until enough people die, leaving sufficient stragglers for a sequel.
I barely leave the house. I've learned to remember the music theory frightened out of my in middle school by auto-didacting the Low G Tenor Uke. My wife is about ready to bring home a 4 month old kitten from the shelter...there are papers to grade, final assignment rubrics to tweak and run through spill-chicken before posting. I will see my great nephews on a computer screen tomorrow. Their names are Sam and Sol. And if they don't open a corner deli at some point I'm going to think something amiss. We're cooking from the local sources, except the cranberry 'sauce' which has to come from a can and actually be a type of jello with ridges.
The University I work for wants to make Johnson County an epicenter/super-spreader that'll make that truck stop in Walcott look like its made for an HO train set lay out. My students are freaked out, but not enough to keep them from being bullet proof. The U is sending them away, knowing 70%+ live off-campus and WILL NOT shelter in place with The Fam until the end of January. I think Covid Kim should bus tables at the Airliner, The Scummit, Sports Column, and all the bars run my our highest civic-minded business folk for a month. Or until she gets put on a ventilator. Which ever comes first. Maybe a pool? I mean, sooner or later we're going to reach the end of Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Podcasts, all our books, bored games, and will need to either take up the accordion and glass harmonica or go totes stir.
Keep 'em flying, Ms. Lenz. We're gonna need you.