Some time ago I was listening to an interview with Alice Walker, the famous poet, on NPR. She was lamenting the loss of civility and the disintegration of empathy. She said—and I’m paraphrasing—that humanity needs to relearn how to be empathetic. We have become too self-centered and selfish. The word humanity was not a paraphrase. She used that specific word several times.
Humanity.
What is that, exactly? Humanity is one of a considerable number of deceptive abstract terms that, while they are ultimately meaningless, nonetheless suggest something of paramount significance. Humanity is a fuzzy category that has no actual physical, concrete referent. Humanity doesn’t exist. Anywhere. It never has and never can. Humanity is a rhetorical device. It is frequently used as a placeholder for the entirety of our species. But even as shorthand for “the human species,” or simply “humans,” it is invariably used in ways that are illusory and misleading. For example, it has been said that humanity has been to the moon, when actually only a handful of individual humans have done so. And if by humanity, Walker meant to say “the human species,” then she was speaking gibberish—unpoetic gibberish. The human species is incapable of empathy. The human species is an artificial creation, a taxonomic category, not an actual thing in the world.
Humans, individual human beings, individual people, are actual things in the world. And, while it is true that there are several individual humans who could probably use a little more empathy in their approach to other individual people, there are several folks out there who ooze empathy from their pores. When Walker says that humanity has lost, or is in need of learning, empathy, what is she saying? That there are more and more people who are less and less empathetic? And, further, perhaps, that the world would be a better place if these people could add a bit more empathy into their daily thoughts and interactions? If that was what she meant, then I’m hard-pressed not to agree. Given the context of the conversation, however, it appeared that she intended to mean something more than just this.
Her main point was that “humanity needs to become more empathetic.” And I do remember her saying that humanity needs to “learn” empathy. What does that mean? How can an abstraction learn? Where is this newly acquired knowledge to be housed? And if she meant “all people,” need to learn this, such a blanket statement is entirely unwarranted. Again, there are plenty of people who are at this very moment operating at the very top end of the human niceness spectrum.
Perhaps some additional context might help to sort this out. Walker’s NPR interview was given in the midst of congressional hearings relating to a belligerent and misogynistic supreme court justice nominee who had been accused of sexual assault, and on the heels of the President openly and publicly mocking his psychologically wounded accuser in extremely demeaning ways. The man is clearly an oaf who does not deserve to be in any leadership position, no matter how trivial. And by “the man,” I mean both the supreme court nominee and the President. The media is saturated to the very brim with similar stories, alongside stories of mass shootings paired with open disdain for any suggestions that something substantive should be done to prevent them, and a number of other clear indicators that empathy—in even the most rudimentary sense of that term—appears to be a rarified element of society.
But Walker is wrong. Even if we allow the slippery non-thing of humanity to mean something concrete, she is wrong. Humanity has nothing to do with anything because the situation she is referencing has nothing to do with actual humans. It has to do with the operative design of the complex collection of bureaucratically organized systems of power that are being forcefully imposed on people. She is talking about global corporate consumer society itself. She is talking about civilization.
Individual people are acting “unempathetic” toward other individual people because civilization reduces—and in many cases completely eliminates—the possibility for us to act toward each other as actual human persons. The major part of our behavior toward each other has nothing to do with anything human. We are not living together as authentic and spontaneously interacting humans, we are living scripted roles, as functionaries, as servomechanisms in the machine. We are made to grind against each other because that is the nature of the machine itself, because the resulting friction is necessary for the machine to operate. The scarcity of empathy is a direct result of our forced participation in a system based on a grossly unequal distribution of power, on manipulation, on competition, a system that overtly punishes empathetic behavior.
The human empathetic response is an evolved capacity, an adaptive capacity that came about because of its potent utility as a tool for maintaining group cohesion in small-scale hunter-gatherer society (and, likely, in the social systems of our proto-human primate ancestors as well). In terms of survival value, it is second only to our inborn sense of fairness and the resulting social norms of reciprocity that are defining features of the anarchistic and largely egalitarian human social circumstances that were universal up until just the last few thousand years. The second you add a power differential to society, the second that people no longer have equal and unrestricted access to essential resources, is the second that empathy starts to lose its survival utility.
Neither egalitarianism nor anarchism exist in the modern world. They disappeared among the civilized the moment that the civilized came into being. The elimination of these features of the social landscape is part and parcel of the civilizing process. An egalitarian civilization would not be a civilization. Anarchistic civilization is an oxymoron. Sharp inequalities of power and access are not just necessary conditions for civilization, they are what civilization ultimately is: a complex collection of mechanisms for amplifying and maintaining power, and for disseminating inequality.
The question “Who is we?” is a game changer. All of the handwringing about how we need to change society is misplaced because no one is asking this basic question, the question of “we.” The problem isn’t what some nebulous “we” (or humanity or—insert your favorite reified abstraction here) is or is not doing. The real problem is the fact that this “we” has absolutely no power to do anything. We is simply not that kind of thing.
You and I, however, there is where the real power lies.
