Empathy has become the hot new subject for social scientists. A relatively new term coined in 1909, it is defined as the ability to put oneself in another person’s shoes. More than sympathy — feelings of compassion or pity for the hardship of others — empathy is the ability to feel as the other feels and may be followed by some form of action — to support, assist or simply be available.

Identified as a fundamental skill in a world where businesses cross continents, migration brings cultures in proximity to one another, and religious polarisation generates wars with devastating consequences. Not restricted to humans, empathy also informs environmental policies to achieve human ‘progress’ without destroying nature and animal habitats that are shrinking with alarming speed.

Empathy is the ability to feel the emotional states of others. Leo Tolstoy wrote, “[the] Hamlet that I carry in me is mine and not Shakespeare’s.”

Rembrandt’s self-portraits from youth to old age, Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, Giacomo Puccini’s opera ‘Madama Butterfly’, Akram Dost’s new Gwadar ink drawings, Sadeqain’s crows’ nests, Khalil Chishti’s polythene figures, Francis Bacon’s tortured faces, Balchand’s dying Inayat Khan, Gandhara art’s ‘Starving Buddha’, Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’, Degas’ ‘Guitar Player’, Picasso’s ‘Weeping Woman’, are only a few of a long list of artworks that transport us into the world they create. As far back as 1435, Alberti writes in his book On Painting that “Art moves the soul, we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, grieve with the grieving.”

Artists stepping out of the studio and gallery have created the Empathy Museum. The exhibit, A Mile In My Shoe, quite literally asks people to walk in shoes belonging to a Syrian refugee, a war veteran, or a sex worker while listening to an audio of their story.

Empathy can also raise our spirits, listening to jazz, witnessing a flash mob performance or watching a stand-up comic. It can encourage better understanding such as the Gillette ad where a young man shaves his ageing father.

The new term ‘Conscious Capitalism’ which has been developed to ensure businesses serve all principal stakeholders, including the environment, uses empathy as the cornerstone of its communication strategies.

The docudrama has replaced the fly-on-the-wall format in new journalism with a subjective perspective and literary qualities. A history O-level paper may ask students to describe the WWI Battle of the Somme from the dual perspectives of a French and German soldier.

Museums, whether natural history museums using holograms of animals in their natural habitat through or new policies in art museums, attempt to foster empathy, to enable visitors to understand and feel the experience of others from a new perspective.

Dacher Keltner, co-director of the Greater Good Science Centre and professor of psychology at University of California Berkeley, has done research that speaks of the science behind empathy — lowering levels of pro-inflammatory proteins, the role of the vegus nerve in generating positive emotions. For him, its survival of the kindest, which he believes was Darwin’s conclusion rather than survival of the fittest which was Herbert Spencer’s analysis of The Descent of Man by Darwin. A year later, in 1872, Darwin wrote The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in which he says sympathy is the strongest of instincts.

School education theorists encourage activities that allow students to experience storytelling, crafts and culture of other social groups, especially in multicultural societies. Students are able to imagine and empathise with the emotions and values of other communities.

Fiction and storytelling is a powerful form for empathy and imagining oneself in another’s life. Another successful method is role reversal — as Faiz Ahmed Faiz asked ‘Yahan se shehr ko dekho.’ The Diary of Anne Frank cannot but move even the most belligerent of anti-Zionists.

Empathy can also raise our spirits, listening to jazz, witnessing a flash mob performance or watching a stand-up comic.

A collaborative course for medical students at UT Southwestern Medical Centre, ‘Art of Examination’ teaches compassion and empathy to aspiring doctors through viewing art. Students are required to slow down and think about each patient in their care the way an artist pays attention to each part of a painting or sculpture.

Edinburgh has established a Festival of Empathy. The Minneapolis Institute of Art has initiated a Centre for Empathy and the Visual Arts. More and more advertising relies on the viewer feeling empathy rather than the usual emotions of desire, fear and the traditional range of hard-sell emotions.

War is one stage where allowing empathy would make it almost impossible for soldiers to kill the enemy. Wilfred Owen’s poems written from the WWI battlefield show the anguish empathy can create for a soldier. The harsh training of a cadet is not only for physical fitness but to make a soldier obey orders without questioning. Nevertheless, the estimated statistics that 830,000 Vietnam veterans and 20 percent Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, and that, on average, there are 22 suicides per day amongst war veterans suggest clearly that it’s almost impossible to exclude empathy. The glib solution would, of course, be to end all wars. We can ask, like Yasmin Anwar of University of California Berkeley, “Can art penetrate the walls that divide us and make us kinder?”

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist and heads the department of visual studies at the University of Karachi
Email: durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 26th, 2018