EMPATHY - taught or learned?

This was posted to the Yahoo Harp List by a very erudite member.

1a.

Re: Therapy

Posted by: "Jon Murphy" Jon@Murphsays.com   jwm5357

Sun Jan 29, 2012 4:42 am (PST)

Thanks Susan, and I reply all only to add a comment or so.

We often confuse learning and teaching, they are two different things.
At my 54th reunion last spring I said to a small group I was chatting
with that I was taught nothing at Princeton. One of them looked shocked,
as we had been speaking of our love of our college. I said to him "I
learned, I wasn't taught - if I parroted a professor's views in an exam,
or a discussion, I'd have gotten a poor grade". He then understood, we
were taught to learn by being presented with varying views. A well
written paper that took an opposite view to the professor would be
graded well, if it were well reasoned. A badly written paper that
supported the professor would be graded badly.

Empathy cannot be taught, in the above sense. It can be learned. The
ABCs and the "times tables" are taught, the understanding and use of
them is learned. And this is an objection I have to current elementary
education, the attempts to teach such things as sensitivity - to the
detriment of the teaching of the "three Rs". There is more empathy, and
understanding, to be learned in literature than can ever be taught in
the classroom. Rules of conduct are not laws to be enforced, they are
attitudes to be learned by example. Again I'll get personal, I was
bullied on the playground when I got back to elementary school from my
polio - I won't detail what Eddie Dederer did to me regularly to get a
laugh from his buddies - but it involved grabbing a sensitive location
from behind and lifting, then flipping me over. The upshot was a greater
desire to gain strength, and more work. It also resulted in an attitude
that stood me in good stead, within a few years I was putting myself
between bullies and the weaker. I wasn't strong enough to beat the
bullies, they would have whipped my butt if they'd taken me up on the
challenge. What I had learned was that the bullies were cowards. It has
been over 60 years since then, and that rule still applies. One must be
willing to stand up, and risk the beating - they will usually stand down
if you stand up - but if they don't then you retain your integrity, even
if suffering some bruises.

And this brings up the new thrust for "anti-bullying legislation", and
the various "zero tolerance" regulations. The learning process is
complex, and involves reversals. The attempt to "teach" social behavior"
will always fail with some people. I have a college friend, the
administrator of our Classmate Fund that anonymously assists those
classmates in need. Shep was a neighbor, across a patch of woods, when I
had polio. His family had money, and on our first meeting he paid a
couple of other kids in the neighborhood five bucks apiece to beat me up
(a lot of money in 1945 for an 11 year old, but he had a big allowance).
Shep went off to Lawrenceville, a boarding school. When we were about 13
he sat on his lawn and shot at my buddy and me as we played in the
woods, it was a pellet gun rather than a rifle. We came together again
when we were both in a country day school for our last two years of high
school (Lawrenceville had kicked him out). He was a bully at Pingry. At
PU he was barely there, his grandfather had given a lot of money and he
lived off campus with his first wife - totally against the rules.

OK, a bully and a bad guy. I next met him ten years out of college, now
married to a wife he still has. We smiled, shook hands, and became
friends. We had both grown. Is there a point to this, I'm not sure.
Would he have grown had his bullying been controlled by regulations? Or
would his resentments just have seethed and become more vicious? I have
no idea. But I can tell you that this is now a man who devotes much of
his effort to helping others. He learned, he wasn't taught. I have no
idea how he learned, but he did.

Life and learning are both easy and complex. The infant cannot be
taught, but is wide open to learning. We have a history of civilization
to teach now - but think of our early ancestors. The infants learned,
the young were taught some specifics that had been passed on. Which
plants are poisonous, how to use a bow and arrow, etc. The delayed
development, in contrast to the animals, was a time for learning - and
teaching. The Hobbesian dictat of life being brutal and short was a bit
off. It was short, but there was empathy. Grave sites from over 50,000
years ago, long before complex language and written rules of society,
show burials of people with disabling injuries that have healed. Broken
bones that healed in a way that would be disabling - but the healing
indicates that the family, or the larger community, supported them
despite their lack of ability to contribute to the food supply by
hunting or gathering.

And that brings me to my old comment - the arts are either parasitic or
symbiotic, depending on the circumstance. I suggest that these injured
primitive people may have been our first artists. The community
supported them as family, and for their previous contributions to the
"economic" process. In their disability/immobility they yet wanted to
contribute. They drew cave paintings of the hunts they had been on, they
made the sounds of the hunt on primitive instruments. The oldest
instrument yet found is a whistle/flute from about 50,000 years ago - we
can't know if there were stringed instruments then, perhaps hunting
bows, they would have deteriorated by now.

Empathy is a part of our genetic structure, as it is in much of the
animal kingdom. Elephants have been recorded on film visiting the bones
of their family. The issue is the extent to which the empathy extends.
The chimp has an extended family, one might call it a clan - but the
empathy doesn't extend beyond it. Mankind has progressed from family to
clan to tribe to nation - but unevenly. The noble academic, or cleric,
speaks of the worldwide family of man - I agree with them, as an ideal.
But the population of the earth is at varying levels of development (and
I mean as to tribe/clan/nation, not economic). Is not empathy just that
fellow feeling that all have for family? It is a natural thing. The
problem is extending it to those who are not family, and that is an
issue in social structures that are artificial, i.e. imposed rather than
evolved. I am not religious, but the parable of the good Samaritan
applies. The thrust of the parable was that the Samaritan was not of the
family of the victim, but yet saw him in the family of man. That is a
goal, but not one that can be taught or legislated.

Tolerance and understanding are the keys, but there are many cultures
yet today that see their "nation" as primal. Remember that a country and
a "nation" are different. The US is a country comprised of many
nationalities, a nation is a genetic thing - the wider group that
follows the sequence of family/clan/tribe/nation. The word is often
mis-used.

Enough, any objections to the details will be answered - off list if
appropriate, on list if appropriate.

Best, Jon
PS for Susan. The therapist didn't do me a favor, he was honest. I
didn't expect that he had a cure, but contacted him out of curiousity in
case he knew something I didn't. I offered him my time to speak to his
patients, and give my history of come back and also of the current
deterioration and how I view it, the offer is open and perhaps I'll
remind him of it. Depression is the worst disease, it saps the soul. I
knew people in iron lungs, and almost made it to one myself, most of
them found an interest, and one was elected judge in the municipal
court. Life in the mind is as valuable as life on one's feet - witness
Steven Hawkings. Do not feel sorry for my continuing loss of mobility
from post polio syndrome - I glory in the fact that I'm here to deal
with it, and have adjusted my interests to match my physical abilities.
And that is the key to life - if you can't do one thing do another. As
long as you can think you are alive and of value both to yourself and
the community. jwm