The Power of Empathy
Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world—one that makes you understand that your obligations to others extend beyond people who look like you and act like you and live in your neighborhood.
—President Barack Obama
Star Trek episode of “The Empath”
To Explore Strange New Worlds
At the end of the post entitled Soulful Grace in the Face of Adversity, I said that a cultivation of grace can be a pathway to more effective leadership and to bolster our capacity for empathy.
As I thought about empathy, I recalled a Star Trek episode from my teen years. I love sci-fi. Growing up, we watched Lost in Space and Star Trek, and then the universe expanded with more Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, Avatar, and others—great adventures exploring humanity’s potential in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges and tests of character revealing the best of human nature.
This Star Trek episode, called "The Empath,” was first broadcast in 1968. While visiting a doomed planet, Captain Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy find themselves in an underground laboratory where they meet a young, mute woman, whom McCoy names Gem. When Kirk is injured, they discover that Gem has empathic powers allowing her to absorb his pain, and ultimately, heal herself. Kirk and McCoy are tortured by their captors, the Vians, who tell Kirk that he must choose which of his men is to die. Each crew member volunteered to go with the Vians, displaying admirable selflessness.
They soon learn that Gem, because of her empathetic power, is the object of the Vians’ experiment, but that she must not be coerced into helping. The Vians wanted to see if Gem had adopted the instinct of selflessness and told the crew: “Everything that is truest and best of all species of beings has been revealed by you. Those are the qualities that make a civilization worthy to survive.” Gem had to learn to make her empathic powers “a part of her life system,” instead of letting her fear stop her from healing another.
Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.
—Oprah Winfrey
Can the power of empathy bring healing not only to another, but also to ourselves?
In her dystopic novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Black-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler created a main character suffering from an affliction called Hyper-Empathy Syndrome. This character, Olamina, experiences the pain and pleasure of others directly and is often incapacitated by the violence around her. Butler uses empathy to establish kinship and to demonstrate that individuality was not the answer to the lawlessness, turmoil, and environmental devastation. Empathy represented interdependence and connectedness among humans to figure out solutions for the ills of the world.
Olamina says, “The one good thing about sharing pain is that it makes us very slow to cause pain to other people. We hate pain more than most people do.” (Parable of the Talents-34)
I'm talking about an inability to recognize ourselves in each other, to understand that we are our brother's keeper, that we are our sister's keeper, that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
—President Barack Obama
I See You
Empathy is the ability to feel into the emotions of another. The experience of understanding and actually sharing the feelings of someone else can be thought of as seeing and feeling with a person. Whether we have these feelings or not is a choice.
The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you”—you are important to me and I value you. It makes the other person visible and acceptable as they are, flaws and all. The intention in this greeting is to release any preconceptions and judgments so “I can see you as God created you.” Sawubona reminds us to see and pay attention to the other person. If we authentically see a person, we can attune to their needs, fears, sorrows, and learn to trust. We can flourish in an environment and in relationships where we are heard and seen, as well as hearing and seeing others.
[Empathy] calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision. No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.
—President Barack Obama
We Are Wired for Empathy
Neuroscience has shown that we continuously connect, interact and integrate with the world around us via mirror neurons. These neurons, found in the frontal lobes of the brain, fire when we are observing an action or experience happening to a person, as when we do the action ourselves.
Our capacity to perceive and resonate with others’ suffering allows us to feel and understand their pain. The personal distress experienced by observing others’ pain often motivates us to respond with compassion. Compassion and empathy work in tandem, emanating from the same perception that moves human beings from observation to action.
If we hope to meet the moral tests of our times, if we hope to eradicate child poverty, AIDS or joblessness, or homelessness . . . then I think we’re going to have to talk more about the empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to see the world through somebody else’s eyes. When we choose to broaden the ambit of our concern, and empathize with the plight of others, whether they are close friends or distant strangers, it becomes harder not to act. It becomes harder not to help.
—President Barack Obama
In a complex world, with as many perspectives as there are people, empathy is an emotive value that can ignite curiosity, self-reflection, and growth. Empathy requires cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and moral capacities to understand and respond to the suffering of others. Lack of empathy will be our downfall. As Gem learned, using her empathic powers caused her no harm, yet brought a world of healing to those around her.
