Three Small Anecdotes, One Big Lesson
Empathy (noun): the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
We normally follow the consequences of “Big Policy” at the somewhat more granular level, that of communities, ethnic/racial groups, and so on. Over the past two days we’ve heard (read) three anecdotes, each of which illustrates in its own way a social-emotional trait that is absolutely critical to our survival and continued flourishing as a species, but which seems tragically absent from public political discourse and legislation.
We’ll start from the anecdotes themselves, which superficially bear no resemblance to one another.
Anecdote One:
Someone we know well works for a public agency in NYC. Due to the nature of the work, the agency was able to successfully transition to remote operations in March, and as of now metrics indicate that it is performing as well remotely (with circa 200 employees) as it was pre-Covid-19.
Now New York’s death toll is coming down, and its incidence rate is flattening to decreasing, albeit very slowly (there are reasons why flattening is about the best outcome one can expect in the U.S., but that’s a different topic). And, New York being what it is, talk about reopening the city for business (because, well, the business of NYC is business, aka money), the agency has formed a “reopening committee” to determine the stages, process, etc. of everyone returning to the office.
Challenges:
- The agency is located on the 16th floor of a large office building. Its layout is open-space, with few private offices – everybody’s more or less out on the floor working next to and across from one another.
- The windows don’t open, so all air in both summer and winter is recycled air
- The 20-floor building has three elevators, of which one is permanently disabled, and of the two remaining, one or the other is frequently out of service.
- This is not a “rich man’s” working environment – many employees live in other boroughs and must take public transport (in most cases, the subway) to arrive at the office.
Question: You’re the Director of the agency. Do you choose to reopen in line with the decision of the City of New York’s “reopen policy,” or do you take under consideration that your employees will be subject to no less than four risk factors for contracting the virus (public transport, over-crowded elevators, open-space office plan, no fresh air) every day, and allow them to work remotely for as long as necessary?
Do you follow the politically expedient or the morally imperative course of action?
Anecdote Two:
A couple with whom we’re close friends own a work flat – an office and living space, basically for use when the university here is in session – in the city center, near an old and famous square. Some months ago, the wife, who is an enthusiastic and experienced gardener as well as a champion of city beautification, began a small campaign to receive permission to plant a number of trees in the square near their flat. The species is a historical one, and she wanted to return the square, in some modest sense, to its earlier horticultural and arboreal identity. She ultimately received permission from the city (the bureaucracy here is creaky and fitful), and last week there was a mini-tree planting ceremony accompanied by photos. Of course we’re in the midst of a pandemic, so there were only about four people present, but her civic-minded deed was appreciated and lauded by friends and students alike.
During the months when the university is not in session, the couple lives at their main residence, which is at some distance from the city center. It won’t be possible for them to come in regularly to care for the newly-planted trees. And so the husband approached one of the numerous homeless individuals who live in the square, and asked him whether he might be willing to water the trees on a regular basis in coming months – until they “take root,” as we say. The gentleman accepted the offer willingly, despite the fact that water to the square has been cut off and he’ll need to go some distance to fill up a couple of bottles several times a week (probably daily at the height of summer).
What struck us most forcibly was our friend’s description of the gentleman’s reaction to his proposal about watering: he was eager to do something useful and productive and accepted the offer with alacrity.
Now you might object that his agreement to water a few young trees on a regular basis throughout the summer months won’t add much to the bottom line of this city’s – this country’s – failed economy. And yet, if those trees survive and flourish, they will add much-needed shade to this square, they will be lovely in and of themselves, and the man’s efforts will mean that the preceding effort to get the paperwork through to approval (which required many months of engagement) and the work required to obtain and plant the trees will not have been in vain.
Not everything we do in life can be quantified directly in monetary terms. This doesn’t mean that a particular action doesn’t have real and considerable value.
Anecdote Three:
We have long followed an academic blog called “Crooked Timber,” although we’re very infrequent commenters – many of the topics are abstruse and we’re neither knowledgeable enough or in some cases, engaged enough to comment. But yesterday one of the long-time bloggers, Harry Brighouse, a Professor of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, posted a very moving anecdote about, of all things, a concert that was cancelled due to Covid-19, and what happened next.
Professor Brighouse is a ukulele orchestra fan – okay, I know: “Huh? There are ukulele orchestras?” But there are, and he had planned to attend a concert in Madison in late March. He’d also persuaded quite a few of his students to attend (who in turn persuaded their fellow-students to attend – there’s a lot of class feeling in his classes); his faith in the greatness of ukulele ensembles seems capacious. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain couldn’t come to Madison, but they’d created a few lockdown youtube performances, so …
The professor sent the group’s management a super-polite note asking whether they might consider dedicating one of their lockdown performances to his students, because, well, they needed a bit of cheering up, and a few of them had been experiencing a really hard semester (unrelated to Professor Brighouse’s online class, which he wrote about as well, and which seems to have gone extremely well).
Eventually he received a short and somewhat cryptic note from the manager informing him that something would be up on youtube on Sunday, and that he should watch it.
We don’t insist you watch the video – although it’s great, and now we too are ukulele converts – but here’s what happened: Unbeknownst to Professor Brighouse, his class had also written to them, asking if they’d be willing to give a shout-out to their professor. And as a result, they decided to make an exception to their rule of “no requests – no dedications” for both the Professor and his class.
Actions like these don’t emerge from a vacuum. Professor Brighouse is a devoted teacher, cares deeply about his students (much of his posting on Crooked Timber is about his in-class teaching efforts), and clearly, his students care about him.
Question: What’s the quantifiable monetary value of any of the above?
All three anecdotes illustrate the invaluable, not-measurable-by-neoclassical-economics metrics human trait of “empathy.” The agency Director in our first anecdote will need to demonstrate empathy for his 200-odd employees, who at least initially will arrive at work having suffered exposure to two risk factors, and who will work all day exposed to two more. Should he follow City Hall’s directives for reopening, or should he resist them by arguing the morally imperative position, viz. that he not place 200 people in harm’s way every day, given that the agency’s productivity was unaffected by remote working? Will he heed the calculations of the City, or will he deploy empathy and argue against the reopening directive?
In anecdote two, both members of the couple demonstrated empathy and humanity – initially for a degraded public square frequented by the homeless, for the citizens of the city (which is financially precarious and bureaucratically cumbersome), for nature (the wife’s love of gardening and her knowledge about the square’s historic past gave her the idea), and ultimately for their fellows. Perhaps most interesting to us, the homeless man’s contribution to the trees’ survival will ultimately be as significant as the initiative itself, and the most durable.
In the final anecdote, Professor Brighouse showed empathy towards his students (a longstanding trait illustrated in his posts throughout the ten years we’ve followed the blog), they reciprocated, and the Ukulele Orchestra – located in Great Britain, knowing none of the parties involved, and with a standard policy against dedications – reciprocated. They had recognized that it was empathy which motivated both sides – which made exactly the same request, but for the other party – and it was their own empathy which urged a change in policy – resulting in a great performance of a song that was clearly chosen for the students.
In a time of great crisis such as that to which the coronavirus has given rise, we need leaders who will act early and decisively, who will take unprecedented actions which under normal conditions would not be considered desirable or even acceptable, and who have a vision for what the country (and the world) might become post-pandemic (as we’ve noted elsewhere, “back to the future” isn’t an option, pace our politicians and the legislation they’re ramming through Congress). All these are absent from the national political stage in the U.S., and that may prove an insuperable problem.
But we need something more from our leaders: we need empathy. In a crisis like this, which will destroy the U.S. economy (and not only) as we’ve known it since at least World War II, empathy isn’t an afterthought, it’s not a word to which we pay lip service. It’s the motivator for every single decision and action our leaders take. In other words, it’s the bedrock on which the structure of response must be built – and in its absence, that response will inevitably prove inadequate, chaotic, and ultimately failed. Empathy isn’t an obligatory marginal note for confronting the pandemic, it’s the prior which must determine the entire response.
One wonders whether this might be one reason why women leaders are proving more effective at dealing with the pandemic than their male counterparts. This piece from the NYT suggests that that may indeed be the case – although the word “empathy” (verb: empathized) is mentioned only once, in reference to NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.