The Buie Knife

Is Absence of Empathy the Beginning of Evil?

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him. - Dostoyevsky

 

"By leading the Americans in his audience at TEDxPSU step by step through the thought process, sociologist Sam Richards sets an extraordinary challenge: can they understand -- not approve of, but understand -- the motivations of an Iraqi insurgent? And by extension, can anyone truly understand and empathize with another?"

Direct Link. (Hat tip, Sa Lim)

Empathy is “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion,” writes Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of actor Sasha Baron-Cohen, and author of "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty."

Evil is "empathy erosion," he writes. "Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect."

He wants to know why humans turn other humans into objects. "How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for another human being who is suffering?" he asks. His argument is that "when you treat someone as an object, your empathy has been turned off.

"Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings.

"When people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests, they have all the potential to be unempathic," he writes.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, points out in a NYTIMES review of Baron-Cohen's book that one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. He acknowledges that empathy is often eroded by situations people find ourselves in. A study by Philip Zimbardo at Stanford illustrated, for example, how normal students were transformed into brutal torturers simply by being given the part of prison guards. Zimbardo argued in his book, The Lucifer Effect, that his experiment explains the events in Abu Ghraib, as well as Nazi concentration camps, and the Japanese massacre of 350,000 Chinese civilians at Nan King in 1937.

Included in Baron-Cohen's book (and also online) is an Empathy Quotient survey, which can supposedly determine if someone lacks any empathy (sociopathic), tends toward autism or Asperger's Syndrome (low empathy), or scores high on empathy. Predictably, women score slightly higher on empathy than men. Take the quiz and see how you score. I scored 64, highly empathetic, not a bad trait for a writer or teacher but probably not a good trait for a CEO who may have to fire people. Three percent of CEOs have no empathy at all and are classified as sociopaths, according to the author.

Drill Deeper:

• Amazon.com page for The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.

• Excerpt from Baron-Cohen's book.
  

• NYTIMES review of Baron-Cohen's book.

• Empathy Quotient survey

• Article on The Lucifer Effect

Best Self-Help or Mental Health Books?

I used to read a lot of books about self-help or mental health, partly because I was interested for reasons of personal growth and insight and partly because I needed to do so for work -- I covered mental health policies and trends for about seven years as a journalist. I've mostly moved on to other topics, but looking at my library, here are some of the best books I've read on the topic. Click. What books would you add?

'The Lobotomist': Shocking Expose

On PBS' American Experience is a shocking expose of Dr. Walter Freeman, "the lobotomist." This is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand the history of treating mental illness in this country. My grandmother barely escaped a lobotomy in the early 1950s, as recounted by my uncle in the second link below.

Related:

• 'My Lobotomy': Powerful Story
• 'I'd Rather Have a Bottle in Front of Me Than a Frontal Lobotomy'
• Rosemary and the Kennedys Exemplary Leadership on Mental Retardation

Strengthen Gun Regulations, Commitment Laws for Mental Illness

In the aftermath of the Blacksburg, VA massacre, psychologist Jonathan Kellerman writes in the Wall Street Journal that our mental health commitment laws need to be strengthened. Regulations regarding background checks for mental illness also need to be strengthened, a New York Times article makes obvious.

Reflections on Anger, Depression, Validation and Invalidation in Individuals, Families, Organizations, Societies, National and World Politics

Anger is a secondary emotion, a response to something else, often emotional hurt or frustration. When hurt or frustration or other basic feelings are validated, especially by the one perceived to have caused it, anger usually lessons dramatically. Invalidation of feelings and experiences contributes to depression, anger and aggression. Depression is anger internalized, turned in on oneself. "Anger externalized can turn to aggression and violence." "When Anger Pays." Though the Bible and Chinese philosophy warn against self-indulgent, uncontrolled anger, and anger held onto long, ie "don't let the sun set with anger in your heart," and the importance of forgiveness, the Bible is full of righteous anger expressed by Jesus and the prophets. Righteous anger can be energizing. Turning anger into positive energy is a great way to deal with it.

These principles make good guidelines for human relations. They don't always work, of course, and can be applied in simplistic, naive and ineffectual fashion. An absurd example is the suggestion that what Hitler and Nazi Germany needed were "validation of feelings" and accommodation. Obviously not. But the overly harsh Treaty of Versailles after World War I and the lack of concern for the conditions in Germany did contribute to Germany's aggression that led to World War II.

How to Define 'Happiness"? Are You Happy?

New research and recent articles inspire me to reflect on the definition of happiness. My mother used to say that in middle age, you choose whether or not to be happy, and she chose to be happy.

• "Money Can't Buy Happiness? This Blogger Begs to Differ," by Gretchan Rubin, who blogs at the Happiness Project and is writing a book on the subject. She cites a Pew Research Center 2006 report, the percentage of people who declare themselves "very happy" goes up as family income rises. "Twenty five percent of people with incomes of $30,000 or less said they're "very happy." That compared with 50% of people with incomes of $150,000 or more." The Pew Report says "about one third of Americans are very happy." Fifty percent are "pretty happy," and only 15% of Americans are "not too happy." Not having to worry about money can contribute a great deal to happiness, Rubin says. Richer people experience a "freedom from (financial) worry."
• Economist Richard Layard identifies the "big seven" of happiness as family relationships, financial situation, work, community and friends, health, personal freedom, and personal values.
• Wealthy high-achievers are not necessarily happy when their moods are measured every half-hour, according to Science Magazine. In fact, they are more likely to be anxious or angry. They also "spend more time working, commuting and engaging in obligatory nonwork activities, such as maintaining their homes. All of these are associated with lower happiness," observes Jonathan Clement in the WSJ.
• "Stumbling on Happiness" author Daniel Gilbert, a popular Harvard professor, tells Scott Stossel in The New York Times: "If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we'd be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning. But if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we'd be too deluded to find our slippers." Healthy people can be deluded into greater happiness when granted the mere illusion of control over their environment; the clinically depressed recognize the illusion for what it is. All in all, Stossel concludes, "it's yet more evidence that unhappy people have the more accurate view of reality — and that learning how to kid ourselves may be a key to mental health."
• "People misunderstand happiness. They think it's the absence of trouble. That's not happiness, that's luck. Happiness is the ability to live well alongside trouble...No two people have the same trouble, or the same way of metabolizing it." In defiance of Tolstoy's statement in Anna Karenina that happy families are all alike while unhappy ones are each different in their own way, in actuality, "no two happy people are happy in the same way." -- "Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story," by Rachel Kadish. Reviewed by Merle Rubin in Wall Street Journal, "The Subtleties of Happiness." (subscription required)

When Mental Illness Strikes A Family of Faith

Going through files from my work at NAMI in the 1990s, I found a brochure by the Rev. John Baggett, former executive director of NAMI of NC: "When mental illness strikes in a family, it is like being struck by lightening. It is unexpected and it is devastating. The experience can be like a death in the family. The family must cope with and adapt to a terrible loss. Because of society's misunderstanding of mental illness, it often can seem similar to an experience of some terrible event which brings shame to the family. It is a tragedy, and like all tragedies, it raises profound human questions for those who are affected by it. For a religiously committed family, it may, as other tragedies often do, initiate a crisis of faith." What can faith communities do to minister to families of people with mental illness? Click.

Trouble

How has this verse applied to your own life? Job: "For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came."

My Grandmother's Mental Illness

My first awareness that there was soemthing called "mental illness" came relatively early in life. When I was four or five years old, I remember visiting my grandmother. What a fun time we had together. She would put me on her lap, and let me "drive" her blue Chevrolet about town. With great enthusiasm, she would tell me stories with a lilt in her voice and eyes that danced with delight.

One day, however, my grandmother didn't seem to have any energy to play with me. There was no longer a lilt in her voice. There were dark circles under her eyes, presumably from lack of sleep or always feeling tired. She would sit in her chair and stare for hours. Her response to most everything was a mumbled word, a long sigh, or a grimace.

My mother explained to me that my grandmother was "depressed." The official diagnosis was unipolar depression. It seemed to be a clearly biological illness, and cyclical. Then, suddenly, she would snap out of out, and return to her "old self" -- quoting Shakespeare and Milton to us, impressing us with her German, traveling to foreign cultures and coming home to tell us of her interesting adventures. Through it all, she maintained her reputation in the community as a teacher, an intellectual, a political activist, and an all-around "grand lady."

Despite my grandmother's periodic depressions, most of the time I thought of my family as happy, close, loving, supportive. If you asked my siblings, I suspect they would have said the same.

My uncle wrote in detail about his mother's illness in his book, Curses and Blessings. Read about his experiences and how he became an advocate for people with mental illnesses.

Was the Apostle Paul Mentally Ill?

I have contended that mental illness has always been with us. The author Frederick Buechner has made the case the Apostle Paul was certainly neurotic, at least by any modern definition of neurosis:

"You don't have to read many of Paul's letters to observe violent swings of mood from deep depression to exaltation," Buechner wrote in Peculiar Treasures. "Pauls' passionate likes and dislikes. His boasting. His dark sense of guilt. Almost certainly it was some sort of neurosis that was bugging him. Three times he prayed to God to get rid of it for him, he said, but God never did. Maybe it's not hard to guess why.

"Paul's life would no doubt have [been] greatly enriched by a psychological cure. But such a cure would have greatly impoverished generations of his readers' lives."

Words from Isaiah 53 -- "Through his wounds we are healed" -- are "words to be reserved only for the most grievious Wound, the holiest Healing," Buechner wrote. "But maybe in some small measure these words can be applied to Paul. His very hangups and phobias and general quirkiness can give us insights into the human heart, and into ourselves. It was a high price for him to pay for our comfort and edification."