I JUST learned from a recent study that there´s something like a drop of 40% in empathy among American college students in the past 30 years, with the sharpest plunge observed since year 2000 when the Internet came to dominate people´s lives.
That´s, of course, a cause for grave concern. Empathy glues us together as a people, enabling us to enter into one another´s lives as we are supposed to do, edifying our sense of unity and solidarity despite the variety of our conditions and situations. And so anything that undermines it undermines us as a people, as a society, as a family.
Lack of it leads to conflicts and acrimony, poisoning and weakening our social fabric. We need to be more aware of building up this important aspect of our lives, knowing its true nature and character, its authentic source of energy and its real goal. At this time, we cannot afford to be naïve about our need for empathy, properly understood.
Our initial problem is that many of us understand empathy more as an instinctive and emotional reaction, and nothing much else. When you see someone stumble and in pain, you immediately mirror his condition by vicariously feeling the fellow´s predicament yourself.
When you see a beggar in tattered clothes or an abandoned child, or when you read in the papers about the earthquake victims of Haiti, you automatically feel something like empathy or sympathy, depending on whether you felt with them or for them.
We are in need of mirroring one another´s conditions, since this is how we learn, grow and develop. Thus, the importance of physical, face-to-face encounters, and of being wary of our tendency to just keep to ourselves, limiting our relations with others in the level of intentions.
Of course, we should be careful to avoid extremes—empathy either as only a physical and emotional thing or only as an intentional and disembodied affair.
Empathy is certainly part of our nature that indicates that not only are we individual persons, we are also social beings; not only are we spiritual and intellectual persons, we are also beings of flesh with feelings and emotions.
We need to respect, uphold and defend the requirements of each element that constitutes our being or nature. We have to understand that empathy has to draw its consistency from these constitutive elements properly ordered and pursued.
In other words, empathy should not just be an instinctive and automatic reaction; it has to be a deliberately cultivated trait. It should not just remain in the emotional level; it also has to be properly directed and driven by our conscious reason, then by our faith and charity.
It´s this wholistic grasp of empathy that would truly help us build the society that we deserve as persons and as children of God. We need to do everything to attain that understanding and the skill to live it.
Thus, we have to study it not only in the physical, biological and social sciences. It has to be studied also under the light of our faith and religion. Actually, the latter source of knowledge gives empathy its deepest moorings. It defines empathy´s ultimate dimensions. The natural sciences only give us the tools and techniques to develop empathy.
The Christian faith, for example, links empathy to the whole range of Christian charity that includes not only loving those who love but also those who don´t. It´s this faith where empathy breaks free from its usual confinement in the emotion level to enter into the world of the supernatural to which we are called due to our spiritual nature also.
As to the practical implications of this concern about empathy-building, I can mention a few ideas—to be thoroughly familiar with our Christian faith, to be vitally identified with Christ by always praying and developing the virtues.
We need to cultivate the desire to flood our surroundings with an atmosphere of goodness, kindness, understanding and compassion, complete with smiles, gestures of courtesy and gratitude.
We have to be judicious in our use of the Internet and other modern technologies such that they don´t take us away from direct contact with others, basic in developing empathy. Family and other social get-togethers should be fostered and made an integral part of our daily activities.
Every little act of reaching out to the others, even if only internally, will go a long way in building up empathy. We need to reverse the current disturbing trend where we seem to alienate one another.
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