So How's the Family?. Arlie Russell Hochschild
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for another person.22 Our hearts can go out to Sudanese war orphans or Congolese rape victims, but we may do nothing to help them. As the philosopher Joan Tronto points out, caring about a person differs from caring for a person (such as arranging for care of an elderly parent), which differs from taking care of a person (feeding and dressing the parent).23
How do we distinguish empathy from other things like “understanding,” “projection,” or “identification"? Empathy is less purely cognitive than understanding, because it requires imagining what another is feeling. We also sometimes project the idea of ourselves onto another person, mistaking the one for the other. A recently bereaved widow, for example, recounted a friend’s well-meaning attempt to comfort her:
I knew Adrianne loved me and wanted to comfort me. But I knew my loss reminded her of her loss. In the living room that afternoon, I felt the presence of my husband and was trying to absorb all the marvelous recollections friends had shared of him. But Adrianne began rubbing my hand back and forth as if she were sanding it, and told me she knew how upset I must be feeling. But that was her upset, not mine.
The good side of projection, of course, is that we take flight from ourselves; we do not remain aloof or uncaring.24 The bad side of it is that we mistake ourselves for the other person. We see the other as like our generous mother, depressed sister, or judgmental colleague, when he or she is not any of these. Projection distorts empathy. Again, we may identify with another person and, over a long period of time, gradually incorporate him into our personality. (We say, the young boy laughs just like his dad.) Empathy does not have to stick like that.25
This is because empathy is an art. It is the art of the surveyor, the draftsman and the reader of the empathy map.26 A surveyor gauges the height of the mountain, depth of a sea, expanse of the desert. She discovers a reality that exists in places where, generally, she is not. By means of aerial, radar and sonar testing the surveyor gathers information about where things are, climates, and the possibilities of life. She needs a steady hand to hold her surveying instruments. As the surveyor of an empathy map, one learns to hold “a steady hand”—that is, to manage to some degree the anxiety, outrage, grief, or other emotion that the misfortune of another might evoke, so that the empathizer stays tuned into what the other is feeling.
A draftsman carefully draws a map based on the surveyor’s report, and the reader reads the draftsman’s map. So all told, the empathizer develops the skill of noticing, remembering, and imaginatively reproducing the feelings of another, and accepts in her—or his—own heart the feelings evoked by all that was seen. Empathy maps are not given to us: we develop the art of making them.
Some maps are mere sketches. A recovering alcoholic I talked to explained the simple suggestion of empathy she received from a “buddy” through Alcoholics Anonymous. “They assigned me a buddy who had been through the same struggle that I face. He called me every day and told me a short story. I responded with a story. No questions were asked. I didn’t get to know him really well, but he reminded me that I wasn’t alone.” Other maps can offer rich details of the topography of another person’s self.
When we draw a map, we draw boundaries around high-empathy, low-empathy, and no-empathy zones. We feel deeply for the people within a high-empathy zone, and refuse empathy to those in the no-go zone. We imagine individuals or categories of people as eligible for empathy and others, not. To widen the criteria for entrance into an empathy zone, we try out empathy on a wide variety of people. So we come to know how it feels to be an abandoned baby, a prize-winning student, a heartless murderer. We know these things because we have cultivated the art of imagining ourselves into other people’s minds.
Cultivating this art is to open channels and keep them open. We can feel spontaneous empathy for a person or even a group, as we shall see, and in such cases the art lies in countering the forces which would—also spontaneously—inhibit empathy.
FEELING RULES AND ZONES OF EMPATHY
For in empathizing with another, we are guided by various tacit moral rules governing our idea of the “right” sort of person to be—the standalone individual or the helper-cooperator. To some, it is shameful to depend “too much” on others; so at the slightest sign of dependency, one is quickly disparaged as “a clinging vine,” “a perpetual child,” or “a welfare bum.” The moral rule carries with it a feeling rule: Do not feel sorry. Do not empathize.27 Others hold different ideas about needs, feeling that it is natural to have them and good to seek help from others. So for them, the feeling rule is: Feel compassion. Empathize. Which moral rule we hold dear determines who we feel empathy for, and how hard we try to feel it.
Our social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural beliefs—and thus our experience—greatly alter our map. I began to think this over in light of interviews I conducted for The Outsourced Self.28 For example, a personal assistant working for an immensely wealthy employer was trying to help her partner work off $50,000 worth of graduate student debt and to pay for a caregiver for her dying mother who lived 500 miles away. “Every time I walked by his million dollar awful art collection, I thought about my partner’s school debt. I’d look at the ugliest piece and say to myself, ‘That piece would buy my mother excellent care, and that piece over there would cancel my partner’s debt.’ I had a hard time empathizing with them over their malfunctioning hot tub, you know?”
Some moral rules get in the way of empathy. In the pre-Emancipation South, for example, black slaves were held to be private property, and it was deemed wrong to steal or free them. To be sure, Quakers, free blacks, some indentured servants in similar circumstances, and sympathizers such as those who ran the underground railroad proved to be exceptions. But at that time, the idea of racial equality was largely absent, a point central to Mark Twain’s classic 1885 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.29
Twain famously juxtaposes the rule against theft and Huck’s great empathy for his beloved friend, Jim, a runaway slave. After a long raft trip down the Mississippi with Jim—“we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing”—Huck wonders whether to abide by the values he was brought up to believe in by the Widow Douglas and return Jim to his owner “like I should,” or protect Jim and “go to hell"?30 Huck struggles with himself:
Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that no way. . . . [I felt] bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong.31
Holding the deed of ownership of Jim in his hand, Huck said, “I studied a minute . . . then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.”32 Huck brought himself to trust his affection for Jim and tear up his society’s empathy map.
In his searing account of his horrific torture at the hands of Japanese prisoner-of-war camp commanders during World War II in Kanburi, Thailand, Eric Lomax faced a more difficult challenge: trying to empathize with someone he hated. In his book The Railway Man, he describes a change of heart about the Japanese interpreter who had helped those who mercilessly tortured him.33 Captured in Thailand, Lomax, a British Royal Signals officer specializing in railways, was found to have a forbidden map detailing the stations along the Thai-Burma rails. He was severely beaten, then locked into an oven-like cell with both arms broken. He was left thirsty and hungry, and as ants crawled over him he was forbidden to wash or visit a latrine. Later, water was forced into his nose and mouth until his belly swelled, and he was certain he would die.
Given all this, how could Lomax forgive the Japanese interpreter,