Empathy is more straightforward. We ca define it as the ability to understand someone’s experience by sharing their feelings. One can have an empathetic understanding of parental love of a child only by having a child and loving it. Others can only sympathize with that feeling – to understand that parental love is somehow deeper and more unconditional than other types of love, for example, by relating it what one feels for one’s dog (which is not a child, by the way). Apart from life-changing experiences such as having a child, however, there isn’t much one can do to learn to empathize – to feel what another is feeling. It seems to be an ability that one has to a fixed degree from birth. Many psychologists agree.
Since the 1980s, psychologists have used the Big 5 model to measure and understand personality traits in a consistent way. The acronym for the traits is OCEAN (openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism). Once measured, the results are understood in percentiles, and the distribution among the data pool is represented by a bell curve where most people center around the average. These traits show that everyone’s personality is unique. They explain the ways in which my biological brother and I are so different despite our having been born less than two years apart with identical upbringings. They strongly indicate that one’s personality is more nature than nurture, it is thought, by about an 80-20 ratio.
The trait relevant to these purposes is agreeableness. This is the maternal aspect of personality that measures rates of aggression on the low percentile end and empathy on the high end. The average woman is over 20 percent higher than the average man in agreeableness. This trait difference explains why women are more likely to choose people-based professions such as health care and social work, why they are more suited (apart from obvious biological reasons) to care for infants and why there are 10 times fewer of them in prison. Men tend to be more thing- and system-oriented, dominating fields like engineering, economics and serial killing. In short, agreeableness measures one’s innate propensity to empathize, and that is a people-oriented matter. This trait cannot be changed throughout life – only managed. If we assume that compassion is a moral virtue, and if empathy and compassion are the same, then there is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that women are better people than men are. Of course, this is absurd.
If compassion is a virtue, as I think it is, we cannot equate it with empathy. No one is a better or worse person than anyone else simply because one is born with a particular temperament. A woman hears an infant crying and thinks, “What can I do to care for and nurture it?” A man in the same situation thinks, “How do I stop the crying?” Though the woman acts from empathy and the male more systematically, they can achieve the same positive result of giving the child what it needs.
Politically, to be more empathetic is to say that one sees the victimized and underprivileged as exploited infants. The resurgence of coddling, socialist political ideals in the west have been described as a “feminine philosophy” that is somehow preferable to the competitive, masculine capitalism that has brought the entire western world out of crippling poverty. Even masculinity itself has been described by supporters of this neo-socialism as “toxic.” It is assumed that maternal empathy is more virtuous than masculine rationale despite all of the 20th century history of communism and current socialist disasters such as in Venezuela. They mask these ideals as compassionate, but that is fake. Compassion, as I define it, must involve the feminine and the masculine.
Empathy is founded mostly in one’s biology, so it indicates how one reacts. It must, therefore, be tempered. Compassion is exemplified by how one willfully acts, so it must be cultivated. Men often have to work hard to act with care and gentleness. Having a daughter is one way a man can be forced into to achieving this. Imagine if Donald Trump did not have a daughter; he might have become an actual tyrant. Women have to learn to recognize contexts where empathy is not appropriate, so they can hold back from acting on it – such as in not sheltering their children into dependency and resisting the urge to vote Democrat. Cultivating compassion must come from both ends. There is a time and place for both maternal and paternal interference in society as well as in the family. Too much or too little of either can be fatal. Real compassion is the ability to find the right balance between the two.
, Houma Courier & Thibodaux Daily Comet
Overthought Consulting 