Protest march against Donald Trump in Minneapolis. Picture by Fibonacci Blue from Minnesota, USA. Creative Commons. CC BY 2.0.From the distance spanned by social media, since the presidential election, I have observed friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in North America in a state of trauma. Physical illnesses are spreading and anxiety is intense. Some who are educators feel that their courses cannot go on as usual after the disaster of November 8; one announced that she planned to put the curriculum aside in her next session and “talk about empathy” instead. It is hard to talk about empathy without slipping into self-congratulation. Literary theorist Fritz Breithaupt has described a primal “scene of empathy” in which an observer takes sides in a conflict between two people, empathizing with the one she perceives to be suffering righteously.
Empathy is selective, more a matter of choosing sides than of opening one’s heart to “the other” as such. The self-presentation of the liberal self as empathetic conceals the choices she has made on the way to selecting her others. If you empathize with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who fell victim to the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations’ sanctions, or the hundreds of thousands more who perished in our subsequent invasion, that you have chosen your others quite differently than Hillary Clinton did. Yet the problem does not stop here: there are some with whom a liberal cannot meaningfully empathize while retaining her liberalism. Does empathy extend to Confederate flag wavers who feel that their “heritage” is at stake, or gun owners who feel unsafe if their legal right to an assault rifle is abridged? Sharing others’ subjective experience cannot be a moral imperative without leading us into a relativism that defies commitment.
Even liberal empathy with refugees and undocumented immigrants is not as unmediated as many liberals suppose. It is not simply a matter of meeting those people and sharing their experience; how one understands that experience depends on the prior interpretive framework with which one approaches them. Within the framework of nation-state legality, the undocumented appear as poachers on a territory they have no right to, claiming jobs and services not rightfully theirs. Those who oppose their presence think they are empathizing with citizens legally entitled to the same jobs and services. Not reacting this way indicates that, whether consciously or not, one is operating within a different framework.
