Why Empathy Fails Us
I think empathy and the Golden Rule are very solid places to build our morality. But what if I told you that I also think both of them can fail us?
There’s a story I know where a writer witnesses a father raising his son with military severity. The boy is ordered, drilled, corrected, and held to a standard that looks cold and unnatural to an outsider. The writer sees cruelty. He sees a child being crushed. And because he is a writer, he also feels the temptation writers sometimes feel: to turn judgment into a moral duty. He wants to expose the father, shame him, maybe even save the boy through the power of a story.
Later, the story becomes more complicated.
Years later, the writer meets the son again, now grown into a man. The son tells him what happened not long after that first meeting. While his father was putting him through another drill, the father fell into the pool and began to drown. The boy, who had been trained to stand at attention and had been punished before for breaking that command, remained frozen in place. He did what he had been taught to do, even when the person he loved most needed saving.
The father the writer saw only as harsh was still the boy’s father, and now the son’s grief reveals a love the writer had not fully imagined. The man he becomes carries both things at once: the discipline and character his father gave him and the wound his father left behind. But what haunts him is not the drills he was forced to run. It is the loss of a person he loved dearly.
This story is almost too moving for me. It catches something painful that is easy to miss: sometimes we can care deeply and still misunderstand what we are seeing. This is not a twist story in the way we think The Twilight Zone often is, but there is still a big turn. At first, the writer seems like the moral center of the story, the hero. He sees a child being treated harshly, and because he feels compassion for the boy, we may be tempted to see him as right.
But he is wrong.
Or at least, he is wrong in the way he judges what he sees.
He assumes the boy is suffering as he would. He assumes the father is only cruel. He assumes rescue would mean taking the boy away from that relationship. But what he does not see is the love between the father and the son. He does not understand that.
If he could have, he would have separated them.
Then he may have wounded the boy in the same way death eventually wounded him: by taking away someone he loved dearly.
This is one of the places where empathy can fail us. Not because empathy is bad. Not because we should stop caring when we see pain. But because empathy still passes through the filter of who we are. We do not see another person’s life. We only see the moment, and then we fill in the rest with ourselves. How would I feel?
The Golden Rule fails in the same way. Treating others as we would want to be treated is often a good start, but it still begins with us. We assume that what would comfort us, rescue us, or wound us would do the same to someone else.
We see this in everyday life too. We’re in a store and see a parent yelling at a child. We may feel the child’s embarrassment or fear. We judge the parent immediately. And we are right to pay attention. Maybe something is wrong. But we also do not know what happened before we arrived. We do not know what the child is struggling with, what the parent has already tried, what life is like at home, or what kind of love exists inside that family.
That does not mean we should turn away. No! It does not mean we should ignore cruelty. It means we should be more sincere about what we think we understand. We commonly judge too early. Then we base our opinions strongly on things we do not fully understand. And there are times we are looking at something we could never even understand. As the writer did in the story, which adds to the problem.
When we imagine another person’s pain, we are right to care. We are often right to pay attention. But our first feeling is not always the whole truth. Sometimes we do not see the relationship. We are seeing our own fears inside what we are witnessing. We are seeing our own childhood, our own wounds, our own idea of rescue.
The better question is not only, “How would I feel if that were me?”
The better question is, “What do I not understand?”
I still feel strongly about empathy and the Golden Rule. They are good places to begin. But they are not the whole journey. They help us care, but awareness helps us see.
Note: the story is By the Numbers by Ray Bradbury
Albert Jr.
Author of The Nature Within Us
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