Heart and Head: The deepest well and Against Empathy

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long Term Affects of Childhood Adversity is pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris’s deeply moving, real-life account of the discovery and application of trauma science as she starts a clinic for children in her own low-income neighborhood.  The book not only engagingly describes the psychological and physical affects of trauma on the cellular level, particularly in adolescents, it will resonate with any activist or community development practitioner who understands firsthand the complex organisms that are neighborhoods with their multi-layered collective experience of trauma.  Burke Harris’s explanation of Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACE’s, first came to my attention through a compelling TED Talk Video where she implicated all of us - not just poor neighborhoods or minority children - in our resistance to want to get well and overcome trauma.  I was glad to add reading her book to the video, and I’d suggest the same for you.  For anyone who wants an inspiring introduction to trauma-informed work with children and youth, this book will be worth your time.  

I followed Deepest Well, a compassionate and impassioned look at healing trauma in our communities, with a book having a very different title: Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by rationalist and atheist psychologist Paul Bloom.  Bloom acknowledges that some will say his provocative title may have overstated his case.  Perhaps he is arguing for reasoned or careful empathy, particularly in the solving of major social problems or in public discourse generally, rather than arguing against empathy.  But he doubles down on his title throughout the book, holding his ground on the word “against” even though he repeatedly makes note of empathy’s more desirable traits.  I enjoy provocative titles (and speech, for that matter) that aren’t too boringly nuanced, but when a title needs repeatedly defended throughout the book, maybe the title did indeed go too far.

While I disagreed with plenty in Against Empathy, I nonetheless found it an interesting and enjoyable exercise in questioning something that is often held up as a virtue above all others.  Bloom writes, in a way that resonated with me, that empathy is often the highest standard of morality in a society driven by feelings.  He warns of the ways this can conceal or distort important data or long-term benefits that would actually help suffering people in the long run - sometimes millions of them.  In the name of extolling the virtue of empathy, maybe we sometimes create shallow heroes and short-sighted solutions.  It’s a point worth giving our consideration.

Bloom’s book is an interesting exercise in moral philosophy, but I’d argue he puts too much confidence in humanity’s ability to rationalize objectively. His arguments are sometimes predicated on the ability for us to objectively see what he is seeing.  Isn’t the answer obvious?  Aren’t the numbers clear?  Isn’t the data impossible to argue against?  Perhaps.  But data collection and interpretation and decision making - especially social decision making - is notorious for having people see the same “facts” differently.  That’s not going away, and it must be because our make-up is more than only rational.  It’s also emotional, spiritual, social, and storied with ways of seeing the world.  A corrective against ditching rationality is probably needed in the time in which we live.  It’s proving increasingly dangerous to seriously struggle arriving at widely accepted “facts” in an era crying “fake news” from all sides.  But over-faith in our reasoning won’t save us either.  

However, I couldn’t help but think of the pertinence of Bloom’s argument when his writing reminded me of some gut-wrenching stories in The Deepest Well.  Burke Harris, who clearly operates with loads of empathy for her own community, writes about stepping into key meetings about creating more access to trauma-informed care for low-income children and youth.  Here, she sometimes encountered fierce opposition to common-sense care - but not from detached politicians or academics.  Sometimes the strongest opposition came from home-grown community leaders or racial and economic justice activists.  Here, the opposition was not because of a lack of empathy but because community leaders and activists didn’t want their children labeled (with trauma scores), taken further advantage of, or handed over to a mental health and medical system they did not fundamentally trust (for good reasons).  Burke Harris, like any good community development advocate, seeks to understand and empathize even with these barriers.  But she also grows frustrated.  Help is so close, but it is also so far away.  Here, she seems to argue, empathy can get in the way of the data that could have actually created programs and practices to help kids.  

The calculating rationalism of Against Empathy is, like Bloom acknowledges, too much for me.  Maybe “empathy with caution,” or, “not only empathy” or “empathy, and remember to think too!” - but not “against” empathy.  It’s void of God’s own pathos, His own compassion.  There’s something divinely virtuous in empathy because somehow God knows our human condition.  In fact, in Christ He experienced it.  We’d be harming ourselves not to cultivate empathy in society. 

So maybe The Deepest Well charts a better way for us in empathy alongside the rational powers of our researching brains.  Maybe somehow in the mix of the fiery protests of community activists and the strong and ever stronger data of trauma science - maybe somewhere in there - empathy can help us use data in non-exploitative ways and data can help us direct our empathy to actual solutions.  Perhaps hopeful, creative solutions can be found in the breadth of human expression and experience, mind and heart.