Bottoms, Empathy and Globalization

24 Dec Bottoms, Empathy and Globalization

It’s become a tradition for faculty member Chris Helm to host the East Side Institute’s twice yearly Community Meeting and Fundraiser. Chris always gets everyone thinking with her educational and provocatively inspiring remarks that weave together current events, history, politics, science, and the Institute’s mission. This past November’s gathering was no different (watch here).

As I was listening to Chris, I was delightfully provoked when she told the audience about the recent Nobel Prize winning physicists and their quest to answer a question that goes going back thousands of years—“What is this world made of?”  “My, my,” I thought, “That’s such a different question from ours!” When it was my turn in the program to speak, I “completed” my thinking.

I told our Zoom gathering of people from dozens of countries that for the Institute and its global community, our question is not “What is the world made of?” Our question is, “What can we make? What can we human beings make together?”

After all, we made everything, including physics and its questions. We made that, we made every single theory, we made every single word. And if things that we human beings made have taken us to dark places, maybe we can make a crack and make some light. And to the physicists’ pursuit of getting to the bottom of things (to their essences), we say, “What if there is no bottom”?

We’re not interested in essences, but we are interested in “bottoms” because we believe that social transformation comes from the bottom up. Our bottom is the activity of people exercising their power to transform, developmentally and peacefully, the current world.

The origins of the Institute go back about 50 years. At that time and for decades after, the United States controlled the world militarily, economically, politically, and culturally—spreading its extreme individualism, consumerism, and its psychology across continents; suppressing people’s democratic uprisings; and instilling in its citizens an ideology of superiority and American exceptionalism.

Those of us who founded the Institute, along with many other organizations working to transform the destructiveness of American policy in the US and around the world, acted in support of struggles of peoples of other countries. But we believed our work was here in the belly of the beast. We believed that the US and its people would have to transform if the world was to become more peaceful, if we were to eliminate poverty. if people were to have the opportunity to create everything that they needed.

Beginning in the 1990s, social therapeutics in our development community became known in other countries, and we invited people to participate in its growth and to transform it with us into what was needed.

We held international conferences, our first one in 1997. Our books were being translated into languages other than English. We led courses online before there was such a thing as Zoom. In 2003, we began our International Class, bringing participants (small groups of 10 to 15 people from around the world) to New York for weeks of immersion in our social therapeutic methodology. We worked with them for nine months in virtual spaces. We were becoming an international, global community.

I paused my remarks to show a video of participants in five of the Institute’s international programs—The International Class, the Creating Our Lives Together Study Group, the Developing Across Borders coaching program, the All Power to the Developing! Podcast, and the Global Play Brigade emotional support groups. These people spoke of trust, respect, fun, fluidity, intimacy, how they are growing through being vulnerable with others and having assumptions they never even knew they had being challenged.

I related what they were saying about how they organize themselves be with each other in these ways to two things we usually don’t think about together: globalization and empathy.

First, globalization. The amazingly useful technological advances that have been made by human beings are creating new possibilities for how we connect and with whom. The corporate leaders, political leaders and elites across the globe communicate with each other about what’s going on in the world at their summits, through their media and virtually. While they have always found ways to do so, we regular people have not. But now we have that technological capacity. Now, not only can they do it—so can we—we the people and not only the ones who rule the world by virtue of their authority.

We now share our ideas, our emotionality, our histories, our cultures, our knowledge, and, most importantly, our creativity together. Those we met in the video are a miniscule part of what I’d like to call grassroots globalization. It’s not globalization as written about in the media and among academics and policymakers of both the right and the left where globalization is lauded or vilified.

I’m talking about grassroots activity up from the bottom?—not getting to the bottom—but beginning at the bottom.

Which leads me to empathy. For some time, I’ve been critical of the term “empathy” and the practice of trying to teach people to be empathetic. I have various reasons, which I will be sharing at a future time. About five years ago, a Yale psychologist named Paul Bloom wrote a book that made a little bit of a stir called Against Empathy: The case for rational compassion. He cited experiments and gave his views on the danger of empathy. He argued that if by empathy we mean feeling the feelings of other people, then that emotional response will lead us to make bad decisions. You see a picture of someone who is suffering, or you meet a homeless person on the street and—“feeling their pain”—you might reach out with money or a helping hand. Bloom argues that the better action, morally speaking, is rationally compassionate rather than empathetic, like finding an organization that will help the homeless and supporting that.

I don’t like Bloom’s argument at all, although I love his book title: Against Empathy! As thousands around the globe are finding ways for people to come together to create the activity of becoming together, maybe it’s time for a new slogan, a new movement. And a new book title, which would be: Against empathy: The case for doing and creating the day to day together; or if you prefer a more academic title: Against empathy: The case for grassroots globalization.