The ability to put yourself in someone else's place has been at the forefront
of social and political change at least since the 18th century.
It's an ingredient in the stories of social and political change that we're often
forgetting that's being left out of the history textbooks.
I think you can look back through the last three or four hundred years of human history, at least,
and seen moments of mass empathic flowering
which have shifted the political landscape .
Take for example, evacuation in the Second World War in Britain.
1 million children were sent from the cities to mostly rural and provincial homes,
to live with foster families, relatively well-off rural people
suddenly had the reality of urban poverty on their doorsteps, poor kids
from the streets of London and Liverpool and other cities, they saw them that they
didn't have proper clothes or shoes they had lice, they had rickets and what happened?
There was mass political change, there were questions raised in
Parliament, women's organisations campaigning for child welfare policies
as a result of this and the government extraordinarily acted almost immediately
at a time when there was huge resource scarcity due to the war, they expanded
food and medical provision for children and all of this got solidified in the welfare state.
But what really happened there was empathy occurring on a mass scale and changing society.
Empathy is the imaginative capacity to put yourself
in the shoes of another person and look at the world through their eyes
all human beings develop this by the age of about 2 or 3
and they develop two different types of empathy.
The first kind is what's called affective empathy where
you mirror or share somebody else's response, so if you see anguish on a
child's face and you too feel anguish, that's affective empathy
And the other kind of empathy is called cognitive empathy
or perspective-taking empathy,
that's about where you're really trying to imagine what is it like to be another person
to be a homeless guy sleeping out rough on a cold winter's night for example,
So I think there's this problem with too much focus on affective empathy,
that emotional empathy, because yes you see a photograph of a child suffering
you know in the newspaper or on TV and whether it's through affective empathy
or guilt or sympathy all sorts of emotions make us respond a lot to the
individual and of course if we want to create a more moral world
we need to universalize our moral concern.
That's what the cognitive empathy does
does because it allows us to make that larger step away from just
being so emotionally involved in one individual to do something a little bit
cooler and it's about moving between the two of these and we can move from the
individual to the collective quite easily and if you think of something
like the film Schindler's List, Oscar Schindler a Nazi sympathizer
made friends with a Jewish accountant, but that one relationship and cognitive leap
allowed him to start thinking about well, what's it like and life like for
all the workers in my factory?
So empathy is ultimately about making an imaginative leap,
and if you go back and read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments,
he says well what is it that human beings possess that is the basis
for morality - it's our capacity, our imaginative capacity for the 'changing
places in fancy with the sufferer' as he put it which i think is a wonderful phrase.
You actually need to feel connected to another person or group of
people and to be able to see their perspective so
that you realize that they are something like you
But of course there are limits to our
imaginative capacities. Can I imagine what it's like to be a Rockefeller heiress,
or to be a shaman in the jungles of Ecuador?
No, it's pretty difficult but I can try.
I could make an effort, and it's that
ability or that desire to make an effort which can really make a difference
I think if you don't bring empathy into politics, what do you get?
You get the Holocaust, you get things like the Nuremberg Laws where you dehumanize
people whether it's Jews or Roma. You get things like right-wing populism rising
in Europe today against immigrants and refugees
where you fail to see the other person as a human being
Empathy appeals to the individual because
being able to see someone else's perspective allows us to function in our
relationships to get on with your kids or to get on your partner but when you
can ramp empathy up to the collective level that's when you can start shifting
politics and you don't get concern about human rights and social justice and so on
without empathy being at the heart of it.
The lesson of history is that
empathy has opened the door of our moral concern and then
rights and laws have come along and universalized that moral concern they've
opened that door more permanently
Subtitles by Tamur Qutab