Empathy

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

Grace

Like many other things, grace is much harder in real life than in the abstract. I was reminded again during my recent flight from San Francisco to Denver.

I noticed the large young man in the gate area waiting to board. He was tall, wide, and he wore a hockey jersey, but what really distinguished him was his flouting of social norms. He listened to hip-hop music on his phone without earphones – he wasn’t blaring it, but I could still hear it clearly. He used the phone to speak to his mother, answering her questions in the annoyed, impatient tone that all young people use with their parents. He told her in great detail about his trip to the airport and his struggles getting through TSA. His voice was loud, penetrating, impossible to tune out.

As I lined up to board the flight he passed completely from my attention. I settled into my window seat near the back of the plane, then closed my eyes and enjoyed the respite between my rush to the airport and the flight to come. I would have forgotten him had that insistent voice not trashed my calm as he stood in the aisle, asking someone which seat was his, window or aisle.

It was the window seat. And it was directly behind mine.

My seat felt like a buoy on the ocean as he pushed, pulled, and jostled while squeezing himself into his seat. Oblivious to the people around him, he began talking loudly to the unfortunate man sitting next to him, detailing his trip to the airport and all the things he had to manage in preparation for the flight. Bad enough the middle seat, but what is worth this extra penance?

Our man spoke about his preference for window seats. He asked his seatmate to hold his coffee while he rummaged through his backpack for food. And when the seatmate, realizing his very bad luck, feigned sleep, our oblivious traveler got on his phone and called a friend.

The conversation – or at least the half of it that I overheard (truthfully, it was more like 80 percent, because our guy dominated it) – could not have been more banal. It covered his TSA experience again, his travel plans for the day including flight times and layovers down to the minute, his recipe for carnitas, and his delight in getting frozen shrimp for less than $8 per pound thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free promotion at the grocery store. The conversation, all at volume, lasted at least 20 minutes. All the while he fidgeted, bouncing me around in my seat. In short, I could not ignore him, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to do anything but stew in my own aggravation.

When he finally ended his phone call, he still could not sit still. So I continued to fume, piqued that my calm had been disrupted, that the bubble I cast around myself when I venture into the world had been pierced.

And then I heard it. A soft grunt. Almost a hum. Then another. And another. Every twenty seconds or so. Like clockwork.

The guy I consigned to inconsiderate jerkhood has a compulsion. I don’t know the condition – autism, Tourette Syndrome, some other neurological issue – but I realized that he couldn’t control the internal energy he generated. He was disrupting me, not out of malice, not out of apathy, but out of need. It’s just how he’s wired.

Which reminded me that whenever we enter the public sphere we will encounter people different from us. People with different behaviors, different backgrounds, different perspectives. Usually those differences are minute, hardly noticeable, but sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes, like on my flight, they are large and prominent. They can’t be ignored. And that’s when we feel uncomfortable.

We won’t always be comfortable in the public sphere. But, aside from personal safety, we don’t have a right to demand that others conform to our expectations when we’re sharing public spaces. We all have a right to be ourselves, and while we owe each other safety we don’t owe each other comfort.

Sometimes we must endure discomfort, so that we can all live in freedom. Freedom to share what’s communally ours, even if we’re not wired to notice other people’s cues. And so while my incredibly disruptive travel companion banged my seat all the way to Denver, I tried to move past my annoyance and find grace.

I wish I’d been able to do it without the reminder, but perhaps I’ve become complacent. I am, after all, an older, affluent white dude, which puts me atop most social orders. I am the norm, or at least the model around which we’ve organized our social norms. So forgive my short-sightedness when I’m inconvenienced.

I don’t begrudge the test. I just wish I had passed without the help.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

I’m pretty sure our current malaise is self-inflicted.

After all, we choose what we think and what we do, and we’re choosing to think bad things of other people and to do things to punish them for their transgressions. Or at least to stop them from doing whatever we’re sure they’re going to do to us.

We seem to have lost empathy for our fellow people.

Giving whoever we meet the benefit of the doubt.

Assuming other people are just doing their best every day, the same as we are.

Instead we choose to believe that other people want to harm us, take advantage of us to further their own ends, force us to do things we don’t want to do. We’ve vilified great swaths of professions – politicians, journalists, scientists, business people – under the assumption that their members have a common agenda that trumps their professionalism and the many years of training and experience.

The saying – its author is in dispute, or I’d attribute it here – that we don’t see things as they are, we them as we are, resonates strongly with me.

If I want to impose my view of the world on others, I am going to believe that others want to do the same to me. And if I’m not open to compromise, to experimenting to see what might be the most effective solution to the matter at hand – in other words, if I think I have the one true answer – then I’ll believe that anyone else who doesn’t already agree with me won’t be swayed by my words either. And that they’re completely wrong.

We all know that relationships take work. You have to tend to them. Trust is the foundation of any healthy relationship, and open, honest and frequent communication is the vehicle to build trust. (Well, along with doing what you say you will, but that’s a topic for another day.) And as we know from our personal experience, communication isn’t just talking. It’s also listening. And it’s also thinking, evaluating what we’re hearing and being willing to modify our decisions if there are good reasons to do so. Because we hadn’t considered a different experience. Because we want others to be happy too. And even because we want to reduce tension in our environment.

Living in a community is a relationship. If we want to have a healthy relationship with the people in our community, we need to communicate with them. Talk, and listen, and think. I’m not suggesting that we abandon our principles or values, subordinate our experiences, or ignore our truths. Just that we try to understand what other people are saying. Listen. And think how we can merge our two truths into one we can both embrace instead of how we can never bridge the divide.

That’s the relationship work we need to do if we want to heal our communities. If we decide we don’t want to make the effort, then we’ll have more of the same acrimony we’ve got today.

And that doesn’t seem to be working for anyone.