So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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of interest"?34 As Lomax recalls,
Then [the non-commissioned officer (NCO)] picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. . . . I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body and the branch smashed onto them again and again. . . . The interpreter was at my shoulder, “Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.”35
Fifty years later, having survived his ordeal and retired from the army, Lomax was overwhelmed by fury at his torturers. He received psychotherapy and married a highly sympathetic woman. He also discovered a book describing his ordeal written by Nagase, the Japanese interpreter, who was now a devout Buddhist pacifist and antiwar activist. Lomax’s wife wrote to Nagase, who responded to her: “I will try to find out the way I can meet him if he agrees to see me. . . . The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.”36
The two men met in Kanburi, Thailand, the very site of Lomax’s torture. “He was kind enough to say that compared to my suffering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too,” Lomax respects. “In all the time I spent in Japan [as a guest of Nagase] I never felt a flash of the anger I had harbored against Nagase all those years. . . . As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history.”37
At the end of his visit, Lomax asked to sit alone with Nagase one last time, a plan that frightened Nagase’s wife, who feared Lomax might finally seek revenge. But that was not to be. Sitting quietly alone with Nagase, Lomax “gave [him] the forgiveness he desired. . . . I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanburi in 1943,” Lomax recalled, “I assured him of my total forgiveness. He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking . . . without haste.”38
Huck Finn empathized with Jim. He came to trust his empathy and muster the courage to act on it. Eric Lomax first prepared the way (through psychiatry, a sympathetic wife, and the passage of time) before coming to empathize with the transformed Mr. Nagase. Huck had Jim on his map; his challenge was to follow it. Lomax came to recognize Nagase as worthy of his empathy, and to redraw his map. Huck wanted to act on his love, Eric Lomax wanted to transcend his hatred.
GETTING THERE
So how do we expand the empathy zones on our maps? One way is via an unexpected personalizing gesture. Perhaps the most astonishing example is the famous World War I “Christmas truce” of 1914 on the Western Front. Huddled in deep trenches hundreds of yards—sometimes only fifty yards—apart, were British and German soldiers who had each undergone strict military training to despise and kill one another, and shared little by way of language or culture. But in the early hours of Christmas day, each side raised white flags of truce, climbed out of their trenches, exchanged cigarettes and other gifts, played football, and alternately sang Christmas songs. Some from each side even danced together. For this day, the truce extended along some half of the front line on the Western front and included a few officers up through lieutenant colonels. When generals on each side discovered this shocking breach of discipline, the practice was immediately stopped. But such a brave act of trust was based on some sense that “you guys must be feeling like we’re feeling.” Perhaps it was the daily touch with death; 9 million soldiers died in World War I, and many must have felt “What do we have to lose?” What had transpired, though, was a surprise attack of empathy.
Many also extend their empathy more gradually through the logic of the exceptional person. Some whites have one black friend about whom they say “he’s not like the rest of them.” Some Christians have one Muslim friend about whom they say “he’s an exception.” Some straight people have one gay friend, and so on. Such connections cross boundaries, but they also re-create them. For each person says to himself, in effect, “I can empathize with my friend because he’s so different from others of his kind whom I can’t empathize with.” But in other cases, empathy for one person becomes a pathway to empathy for others within a forbidden social category.
We can also expand empathy by establishing some practical common ground with people we have been taught to disdain. Summertime “Children Create Peace” camps have brought together 8- to 12-year-old Israeli, Palestinian, and Christian children to share an interest in animals.39 Coming from areas such as Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, and Jericho, where residents are ever prepared for gun or missile fire, these children learn to share a fascination with giraffes and extend empathy to each other. Other versions of this experiment exist in different forms in many public schools and colleges. Focusing on children from kindergarten to eighth grade, Mary Gordon established in 1996 the “Roots of Empathy” program, a nonprofit organization with twelve sites in Canada and three in the United States. In it, a parent and baby pay a series of visits to a classroom (twenty-seven visits in all), and a trained empathy instructor helps the children recognize what the baby is feeling.40 Even such time-limited exposures can lead many to begin to redraft their maps.
By whatever means we find to alter them, the maps themselves seem to vary according to our membership in given social categories—gender, race, national origin, and social class. Again the clues can be indirect. A series of studies show that the poor give more to others than the rich. Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization that researches charitable giving, reported that “poorer households ($25,000 and below annual income) gave away 4.2 percent of their incomes while richer ones ($75,000 and above) gave away 2.7 percent.41 In another study, the social psychologist Paul K. Piff and his colleagues found that low-income people were more “generous, charitable . . . and helpful to others” than were the wealthy.42 The rich who live in neighborhoods with many other wealthy people give away an even smaller share of their income than do rich people living in more economically diverse communities.43 The vast majority of income the rich do give away, another study found, is not directed toward the poor but to such things as the opera, museums, and their alma maters, institutions that largely benefit people like themselves.44
So what is the link between a person’s empathy and their generosity? In an experiment, Piff’s group discovered that if higher-income people were shown a sympathy-eliciting video and instructed to imagine themselves as poor, they became more willing to help the poor. But the reverse was also true: when lower-income people were instructed to think of themselves as rich, they became less charitable.45 Notwithstanding generous-hearted rich men such as Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, the desire to protect wealth can get in the way of empathizing with those who don’t have it.
Ideas about our placement in the world alter the maps we draw. Among American college students, ideas conducive to empathy seem to be losing, not gaining, hold. In a meta-analysis of 13,737 students—some who entered college in the late 1970s to early 1980s, some in the 1990s, and some in the 2000s—a team of psychologists discovered a decline in what they called “empathic concern.”46 (This was indicated by answers to questions such as how well statements like “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” described the student.) Maybe students today are more preoccupied with their own uncertain futures than earlier students were. But if, as the national gap widens between the very rich and very poor, the young express less empathy than those their age used to, we may be heading for serious trouble.47
In the end, the world may indeed be in a race, with a “good” team pressing for more empathy with our fellow creatures on the earth and the “bad” team pressing against it. But to increase the odds for the good team, we will need to discover far more about the making of maps. How can circumstances—such as those of the surprising battlefront Christmas dance, or the summer camp for children of warring states—enable us to empathize better and more than we do? In empathy, women have taken the lead. But so too have many men, such as the great fictional Huck Finn and the extraordinary, forgiving Eric Lomax. By itself, more empathy will not solve all the world’s problems; but more empathy would make it an entirely different world.
Families,