Word of the Week: ‘Empathy’ culture
Nicholas Clairmont
In his Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739, the philosopher David Hume wrote that “the minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each other’s emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits this as the first written account of the existence of empathy, the capacity by which “humans can resonate with and recreate [another] person’s thoughts and emotions on different dimensions of cognitive complexity.”
Empathy is a word that has been used a great deal lately. Google’s NGram word usage frequency data tool shows that empathy has never before been so used. By 2019, it appeared in books three times more often than it had been in 2000, and it had already doubled between 1980 and 2000.
But it is in the years since 2019 that “empathy” really took off. The New York Times published an interactive, multichapter online guide on “How To Be More Empathetic,” including sections titled “practice empathy” and “raise empathetic kids” and “admit you’re biased.” (Confess!) It began to seem awfully political for a human emotion or a mere psychological marker. Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter called Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign an “empathy offensive.” And it only got more childish. The Atlantic declared empathy “Joe Biden’s Superpower” in a headline, and the children’s book Empathy Is Your Superpower: A Book About Understanding the Feelings of Others became a hit. A popular slogan emblazoned across lawn signs and T-shirts declared that “empathy is everything,” replacing the previous “kindness is everything.” It was the liberal version of conservative sloganeering about how “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Empathy became such a staple of liberal discourse that even it provoked a backlash. “Our Never-Ending Empathy for Everything Is Backfiring,” wrote Dahlia Lithwick in Slate. The New York Times featured an essay called “The Trouble with Empathy.”
As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, the rise of “empathy” is a story of usurpation: “Before the psychologist Edward Titchener (1867–1927) introduced the term ‘empathy’ in 1909 into the English language as the translation of the German term ‘Einfuhlung’ (or ‘feeling into’), ‘sympathy’ was the term commonly used to refer to empathy-related phenomena.” Empathy, in other words, is the term that sounds more technical, specifically by sounding more like it comes from the field of psychiatric science. (“Sympathy,” per NGram, peaked in usage in 1864, during the Victorian Era.) But the actual distinction is minimal. The prefix “em-” means to cause or put into, as in how “embitter” means to make bitter. “Pathos” is Greek for feelings. “Sym-,” meanwhile, is a prefix meaning shared, as in “symbiotic,” a word for shared life. So to sympathize is to feel with, and to empathize is, only slightly distinctly, to have feelings put into you.
Why and how did empathy come to such popularity? It has a lot to do with a bad idea abroad in the culture, namely that if you can sound like you understand some technical nuance of therapeutic or psychiatric science, you have the authority in the conversation. So, sentences such as these in the Atlantic have become normal: “Empathy is not feeling sorry for someone in physical or emotional pain — that’s sympathy. Rather, it is mentally putting yourself in the suffering person’s shoes to feel their pain.” The preceding quote contains a link to the website of corporate clinic Psychiatric Medical Care, stipulating that “sympathy separates you from the person struggling.” The website links to a video of a supposed expert who says sympathy is “a way to stay out of touch with our own emotions and make our connections transactional. Sympathy puts the person struggling in a place of judgment more than understanding.” The expert, meanwhile, describes herself on her website as “a researcher, storyteller, and (currently enraged) Texan who’s spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.”
The story of “sympathy” and “empathy” in modern usage is one of liberal intellectual self-flattery: Because of the strange views of one Ph.D. in Texas combined with a few flaps of the butterfly’s wing and the pages of the New York Times and the Atlantic, a word meaning simply “feeling with” has come to be denigrated by the very people who identify as valuing fellow-feeling the most. It’s enough to send you to a 2020 story in Psychology Today, noting how “empaths can be set up for emotional abuse.”