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 too self-absorbed. The word humanity was not a paraphrase. She used that specific word several times.
Humanity. What is that, exactly? There are two ways the term is commonly used. Sometimes it is meant to refer to all human beings taken collectively, as a synonym for the human species. Sometimes it refers to a psychological posture, a disposition toward empathy and compassion. Walker was invoking the former, while bemoaning the scarcity of the latter. Her words were compelling, and her passion was irresistible. Even the most illiberal and cynical listeners would be hard-pressed to disagree with her. Nevertheless, she was wrong. Or, more accurately, what she said, taken at objective face value, was logically absurd and absent of meaningful content. Humanity cannot be empathetic. Humanity is incapable of expressing empathy, or of demonstrating any other psychological—or, for that matter, physical—attribute. Simply put, humanity is not really a thing. Humanity doesn’t exist as an actual entity, as a tangible inhabitant of the universe. Humanity is a rhetorical device.
Humanity doesn’t exist. Anywhere. It never has and never can. Humanity is one of a considerable number of commonly used abstract terms and expressions, such as “the American people” or “the global economy,” that, while they have no actual material designation in the world, nonetheless suggest something of paramount significance is being referenced. There is a particularly pernicious symbolic illusion at play here. Even as shorthand for “the human species,” or simply “humans,” humanity is invariably used in ways that are deceptive and potentially misleading. For example, it has been said that humanity has walked on the moon, when in fact only a dozen individual humans have done so. And if Walker meant to say “the human species needs to become more empathetic,” then she was speaking gibberish—unpoetic gibberish. The human species is as incapable of empathy as it is of walking on the moon. The human species is a taxonomic category, a conceptual convenience, 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, 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 actions? Given the context of the conversation, however, it appeared that she intended to mean something more than just this. I do remember her saying, specifically, 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, surely, she didn’t mean that 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. I know several personally.
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 of the United States openly and publicly mocking the nominee’s 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 who was, unfortunately, confirmed, 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 contemporary society. Walker’s passionate concern is clearly justified. But, again, the dearth of empathy cannot be humanity’s doing. So, if not humanity, then what?
Human empathy is an evolved capacity, an adaptive capacity that came about because of its potent utility as a tool for maintaining group cohesion. In terms of survival value, it is second only to our inborn sense of fairness and the resulting social norms of reciprocity that are a defining feature of the anarchistic and largely egalitarian human lifestyles that predominated up until just the last few thousand years. Neither anarchism nor egalitarianism 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. Hierarchical divisions of power and sharp inequalities in access to essential resources are necessary conditions for civilization—even stronger, they are, to a large extent, what civilization ultimately is: a complex collection of mechanisms for creating and maintaining the unequal distribution of power and resources. 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. Modern civilized society pushes empathy to the vanishing point; the degradation of empathy is a direct result of forced participation in a system based on rigged competition, a system that leads to perpetually expanding chasms of inequality, a system that rewards selfishness and overtly punishes empathetic behavior.
Walker is right about the shortage of empathy. But she is wrong to blame humanity or to suggest that humanity can play any role whatsoever in a possible solution. Even if we allow the slippery non-thing of humanity to mean something concrete, humanity has nothing to do with the lack of empathy in the world because the situations Walker is responding to have nothing to do with actual humans. They have to do with the operative design of civilized society, with the complex collection of bureaucratically structured systems of power that are being forcefully imposed on people. Humanity (whatever that really means) isn’t the problem. The problem is global corporate consumer society itself. The problem is civilization.
