How many petitions did you sign today? It’s nice to be making an impact isn’t it, especially from the comfort of your sofa. But how’s the air in that bubble? Kinda stale? If only you could burst it and make a real impact…without leaving that sofa. Maybe with empathy, delivered by VR and meditation, you can.
‘Empathy’ comes from the German word ‘einfühlung’, meaning ‘feeling into’, which Freud and co. took to mean ‘feeling what others feel’. In 2006 Obama announced an ‘empathy deficit’ and since then zealots have been hyping empathy as the antidote to rampant individualism and callous globalisation. But now, in ‘the year of empathy’, cracks are beginning to show. Is empathy replacing ‘facts’ and ‘expertise’? That can’t be good. Doesn’t empathy encourage aggression and retribution? Should we empathise with racists? What if racists empathise with each other, making their views more extreme? If empathy means ‘feeling with’, do we need to feel racist to stop racists?
It depends which type of empathy, because there are probably two: cognitive, and affective. Put simply, cognitive is rational and intentional, and affective is emotional and automatic. The problems listed above derive from affective empathy, which can be very powerful but also open to bias and manipulation. Cognitive empathy forces a verfrumdungseffeckt: distance that permits understanding to drive considered action. It’s rallying pro-gun policymakers out of office, versus just sending another teddy bear to victims. Paul Bloom, who thinks empathy zealots lack ‘moral imagination’ champions cognitive empathy (he calls it ‘rational compassion’), suggesting the hope for positive change on a global scale is in appreciating that ‘(strangers’) lives have the same value as the lives of those we love’.
So if cognitive empathy can help us to make positive change in the world, what’s all this about doing it from the sofa? The best way to develop empathy at a distance may be in Virtual Reality, which you can do anywhere.
VR has been gathering steam as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’ thanks to successful experiments like the UN’s VR film ‘Clouds Over Sidra’, which encouraged charitable donation rates to double. But VR’s power makes it risky: detractors warn of poverty tourism, claim it might encourage deeper resentment and hostility towards the sufferers, and fear what it could do in the wrong hands. But let’s assume VR could help us develop cognitive empathy – how do you encourage people to choose the ‘right’ VR experiences (not the ones where you just blow stuff up)? What makes developing empathy attractive to the user? Especially those wealthy, powerful users who can have the greatest positive impact, but are also least inclined to understand and care.
The answer might lie in meditation. Dr Barbara Friedrickson is pioneering a practice that helps people to develop happiness and a healthier heart by focusing on kind and compassionate thoughts about others. So the meditator improves their wellness, whilst also developing pro-social behaviours like compassion and generosity. Harnessing wealthy people’s selfish desire for wellness (the new luxury) to care for people who are suffering – it’s like behavioural alchemy: turning narcissism into empathy. Sounds too good to be true!
It might be. Can cognitive empathy really help solve our problems? Can tech and wellness make it achievable and desirable at home? These are just provocations; this is a complex and relatively new science. What’s clear is that we are increasingly thinking about ourselves whilst people all over the world are suffering, perhaps as a direct result. If we can understand and value each other better, then maybe we can curtail doomsday demagoguery, or at the very least stop people filming their maids falling off balconies.