Excavating the Myth of Empathy

26 Aug Excavating the Myth of Empathy

I’ve been pondering the popularity of empathy for quite a while now, and I’ve been meaning to write something telling you why I find it so distasteful. As a way to ease into that create space, I share a bit of conversation “A Meandering Search for Method: Becoming Human in a Post-human World” that Bayo Akomolafe and I had (with the assistance of Jan Wootten) back in 2022.

Jan: Lois, you’ve talked about our human capacity to be the other – the capacity to perform as other; and Bayo, you’ve discussed the capacity to cross the line, to be touched by the monster – the monstrosity of our world — embracing the horror, drinking the poison, living in the cracks. Could we speak to these framings in relationship to each other:  the capacity to be the other and, the capacity to be touched by the monstrosity?…Does that make sense?

Bayo: It does, it does. It’s very generative for me. Yes.

Lois: Well, I think that to be other and to be touched by the monster — are so intimately close, that they may be descriptions of the same thing. Because, for me, to be the other is not equivalent to putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. It couldn’t be further from that…Psychology says we have to learn to be empathetic. You see empathy training for doctors. empathy training for teachers, research studies on empathy – on premised on the assumption that you could — not perform as other — but be the other. But that distorts our inherent relationality: how everyone is already other. Everyone is other. It seems to me that the notion of empathy is a way to avoid being touched by the monster.

Bayo: Did you say empathy is the way to avoid being touched by the monster…? Can you say more….

Lois: I think that empathy — in the sense of attempting to understand someone else by imagining yourself in their shoes– is not only philosophically and linguistically and bodily impossible, but it leads to a narrowing. Ultimately, it’s incredibly egocentric. Do I have to imagine that a tree has feelings before I decide not to cut it down? It’s all me-centered in the name of being other-centered.

Do you have to imagine what your [neurodiverse] son is feeling? You can’t. I mean, you can imagine [that you can], but you can’t possibly feel what he feels. And all that, assuming that he is neurodiverse in some way, and assuming that you too might well be neurodiverse (but not in the way he is)…There’s no necessity — no reason to assume that one has to either understand someone else or feel what someone is feeling in order to embrace our unity, and, for lack of a better word, to embrace our lovingness, our humanity, i.e., to be all the things that the three of us aspire human beings to be.

Your way of thinking about it, Bayo, is that we have a capacity to be touched by the monster…Maybe something new could emerge if we as a species recognized that. I think your approach to the monster is so similar to how I think about “performing who you’re not.” And I think both of those are not just alternatives, but antidotes to this egocentric empathy movement.

Bayo: That is shockingly insightful. No, I really, really, really love that. Janet’s question was about the capacity to be the other and crossing the line…and the effective conditions that prohibit that capacity to be the other, right?…I want to stay just a little while longer with that phrase: to be the other. What is being asked when we think about being the other, right? Lois, as you’ve said, it’s not about entering someone’s shoes. We cannot fully do that. It’s not embracing another’s experience, right? There’s something…theatrical about that. Almost like this very, very peculiar image of Nancy Pelosi kneeling with other Democratic senators wearing a Ghanaian/African outfit. It’s nice for the pictures, but from multiple angles, I read, that [this theatre] wasn’t really appreciated.

Well, my point is that if modernity is this effective condition that bottles us up, even though we’re already children of the monster, so to speak, we are already children of the interface. We’re not even fully ourselves, so there’s no “being authentically yourself.”…The claim that we can be “authentically ourselves” is a form of fascism, right? It’s too ideologically incarcerating to think that way.

Maybe then our turning away from being the other is really not an ontological negation, since we’re already touched by the other. As I’ve said earlier on, it is more a socio, material, performative, languaged, ideological, political commitment to our own centrality, to our purity, right? And then how we try to bridge the divide is with empathy. But empathy becomes yet another algorithm of our siloed situation.

Lois: Exactly!

And be sure to register for this upcoming conversation on September 27, 2025!