Meerkat Prompts: Sympathy & Empathy
Sympathy and empathy are two qualities that I sometimes fear are becoming increasingly absent from the human condition. To have sympathy is to have ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’. To have empathy is to have ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’.
These traits are important. They help to define humanity, and they bring out the best in us. When sympathy and empathy are absent, we see the worst of humanity. I know of people – sadly a great many people – for whom sympathy and empathy are hindrances. This is most obvious when discussing matters like immigration, poverty, healthcare and bigotry, though it can be apparent in other walks of life as well.
One of the more unsavoury skills humans possess is the ability to ‘other’ those who are different. If their skin colour is different, or their language, culture, or economic background is somehow deemed undesirable, we tend to take a dim view of their plight. If we find the individual or group more palatable, we treat them better. Our empathy and sympathy, indeed sometimes just our general treatment of people, should not be dependent on their appearance, faith or creed, but to listen to far-right commentators, looks matter more than substance.
Hate dressed as Love
A lack of true sympathy and empathy is never rendered more obvious than when those of a deeply conservative religious persuasion start talking about the LGBT community. They claim to speak the truth with love, yet fail to consider how damaging it is to call people ‘abominations’, and how hurtful and demeaning it is to refer to them as abnormal, sinful (which is irrelevant to most in the LGBT community, since most don’t believe in the concept), and wrong. At no step do these commentators pause to reflect on their choice of language, nor on how their demands over policy will do real harm.
What matters more to the religious right is getting their way. They are often so wrapped in dogma and indoctrination that they cannot conceive of anything other than their own righteousness. Love, compassion, sympathy, kindness… they distort the truth of these words into something grotesque and harmful, and they can’t or won’t comprehend how harmful their rhetoric and language is.
This is not an issue limited to the LGBT community. Women face prejudice for similar reasons. In various parts of the world, and often (not exclusively, but often) down to rigid interpretations of organised religion, women have their rights and freedoms curtailed. Instead of empathy and understanding, women are denied bodily autonomy, for they are seen as vassals and property. A lack of sympathy and true compassion has reduced women to second-class citizens in the eyes of some, expendable and irrelevant.
We can expand this still further. There is a furore over immigration, generated by the cold rank and file of the elite and the powerful to distract from real problems. The hard-right pushes the narrative that the unkempt immigrant is dangerous, greedy and lazy, and out to destroy western culture, whilst desiring us to overlook the true source of greed and inequality. They want people to be divided, and they seek to cultivate a lack of empathy to further this agenda. Unfortunately, it is a highly-effective scare tactic.
What society needs is to see the individual, and to hear their story. I have neighbours who are immigrants, and they are among the loveliest people I could know. They have always been friendly and they have often lent me a hand with one thing or another. I have a female boss at work, and this is not the first time this has been the case. I have worked with members of the LGBT community. Nothing good would have come from ‘othering’ them, or from treating them any differently to how I treat anyone else. See the person, hear their story, remember they are an individual, and show some true sympathy and empathy for what they have been through. It’s not difficult.
