Empathy and Hate

I can’t imagine how difficult being a police officer must be. But I try to be empathetic when I can. Even when an officer has done something apparently heinous, I believe that ignoring their experience and emotions at the time of their offense is not only ignorant but also unproductive. Instead of disregarding them as evil people lets try and compassionately understand what makes them do what they do.

We demand a lot of our police officers. We want them to have control of their emotions and their prejudices. We want them to act rationally in the name of justice. We want them to selflessly serve the people. Essentially, we want them to be more than human. But they are not. In certain situations for certain officers, fear and prejudice seem to guide their actions, rather than ideals of justice and equality. It is easy to blame them for their wrongful actions, but it is harder to try and appreciate the incredible stress that police can face; stress which can guide their actions in the heat of the moment. 

I also cannot imagine how difficult it must be to be black in America. So much so that I feel bad and guilty even trying to, for I know I have no memories to draw from that could match the pain and frustration that they face, especially when dealing with the police. But again, I try to be empathetic when I can. I am tired of hearing comments blaming black men and women for the police brutality that they unjustly face. I am tired of hearing out of context statistics about how black men commit a larger portion of crimes than other groups. These sort of comments fail to understand the incredible disadvantages that black americans still face. These comments lack empathy and are instead laced with subtle hatred. 

Being empathetic is much more than wondering “what would I do in that situation?” but rather “what would I do if I lived their entire life and then faced that situation?”. It is realizing that one’s choices are always constrained by a number of factors such an individual’s personal predispositions, their sociocultural background, or their prior experiences of success or failure. When I hear disparaging comments about an individual’s wrongful or criminal actions, I am always inclined to respond in a way that recognizes the lack of freedom that is almost always a precursor to such actions. 

Despite all the racism and subtle hatred in our country, I have still always been impressed by our human ability to care for others — strangers even. We can do this because we can understand that the pain and frustrations that one person experiences feel the same as the pain and frustrations that we have experienced in our own lives. We need this type of empathy to heal the divisions that our nation faces. But empathy can be blinded by a human emotion that seems more powerful: hate. It is incredibly difficult to be empathetic towards a person that you hate. 

There is a lot of hate in America right now. There is a lot of hate towards the police. There is a lot of hate towards black people. Our country is so divided by this hate that we cannot even imagine being empathetic. Often this hate is not unjustified either. How could the family and friends of Walter Scott ever look kindly upon police officers again after witnessing on video his incredibly unjust murder? How do we expect minority groups to love their country when we have organized our society to keep them from reaching true equality?

And there is hate on the other side too. Try and step into the shoes of a white person born and raised around prejudice and discrimination, whose family and peers held racist views, whose entire social group openly made racist comments and judgements, would you be able to defy their influences? I’m not saying that racist beliefs are okay in any way, I just think that we need to understand why people hold the views that they do, and try to appreciate how difficult it would be for an individual to rise above their defining influences and see and try to correct their moral flaws. 

We need a way to fix the racism in our country. The gut response to racism and injustice is to light the flame of anger and keep it going as long as possible until the object of hatred is burned down. We feel justified in the cause too, because our emotions tell us how wrong and how evil the other side is. Often this is how social movements proceed, yet time and time again we see the flame sizzle out and little progress is made. 

Maybe I am being unrealistic, but I urge us to use empathy instead of hate in our social movements. If we can understand one another and recognize the forces that create racism and prejudice, we can focus our energy on correcting those ideas, instead of focusing our energy on hating the people who are defined by them. It is really difficult, and it requires an almost unconditional love for your fellow man, recognizing that people you may view as “evil” are really just as human as you and I. It a shift from the emphasis on the person to an emphasis on their harmful ideas. Instead of hating the person, we should love them, and hope to find a common understanding out of shared human experience. 

Bar None reflections 2

A few days into my internship I developed a close relationship with resident CD (I’ll be using resident’s initials to protect their anonymity). CD is a thirteen year old boy who has been bouncing around different foster homes and group homes for his entire life until he finally got placed at our facility due to his mood disorders and sporadic aggression. At first glance, he seems like a healthy and well-functioning teenager who loves to goof off. He does magic tricks, tells jokes, and dances to michael jackson music, and always brings a lot of energy to our unit. 

He and I connected quickly during my first week with the boys. He showed me his magic tricks and then I taught him some of my own, making sure to tell him to practice plenty before attempting to trick his peers. I think he came to see as a friend he could trust. Often we would walk the grounds (Bar None is a large facility with acres of woods and little lakes) and his imagination would run wild and he would talk about how he could control the wind and communicate with the sun god who he called “Celante”. The vividness of his stories and the speed of his thinking impressed me, and I would play along with his imagination. I did not expect the residents to be so quick to accept me, and I was glad that I was forming real relationships with them.

When I talked with the other counselors, they described how CD was more stable than he had ever been in his life. His aggression was reduced, and he was a generally positive force for the other boys. Because of his improvements, they decided to try reducing his medications. CD was on Lithium, a mood stabilizing drug. The results were immediate. His irritability increased dramatically, and his imagination which used to be a positive force now seemed to captivate and control him. All day long he would spew gibberish about his imaginary friend, and CD would take on multiple different personalities, asking me to call him different names at different times of the day. His mood went from warm and trusting to angry and very untrusting of authority. 

Throughout the day his mood will change dramatically, so sometimes he welcomes me and at other times he will call me mean and a liar and will rant about how he is stuck in the most terrible place. It has been tough to keep my personal feelings out of this situation. At times it does hurt when he yells insults at me, but at other times we connect again and he sees me as his friend and as someone who cares. 

While the reduction in his medications revealed a sad truth about his mental state, I am still positive about my interactions with him so far. Our goal at Bar None is to ensure that the residents feel safe and cared for in their environment, and to get the residents to realize that they can trust adults despite their very difficult past experiences. I think I am in an interesting position, being the youngest counselor at the unit, and I hope to continue to develop caring relationships with the boys to help them heal.

Bar None reflections

Work at Bar None is extremely tough. It’s draining, stressful, and all the counselors work incredibly long hours including many all night shifts throughout the week. And on top of that, they’re only getting paid slightly more than minimum wage. The youth residents are often rude and unappreciative of the counselor’s work. At times I wondered if I could handle working here for more than just a summer. That worry was especially strong last week when one of the main counselors (who had been here for two years) suddenly decided to quit during her shift.

Additionally, being a residential counselor at a youth mental health center is not an elite job. My years at Carleton have provided me a wealth of academic knowledge, but little of it is helpful when trying to foster relationships with troubled boys. The best counselors are those who are naturally empathetic, patient, and resilient.  The best counselors are not the “smartest” ones, but the most caring ones, and the ones who have incredible interpersonal skills. 

Despite the difficulties, I find myself enveloped in my work. It is so different than anything I have ever done at Carleton or in previous summers. It is tough in a way I have never experienced tough before, and meaningful in an entirely new way. I have been watching teenage boys struggle with their traumatic pasts and their gripping mood disorders, yet it is hopeful more often than it is hopeless. Every now and then I connect with one of the boys and while my impact is little, it is still incredibly meaningful to me.

I know that this is a population that I want to help, but I also know that while I could work as a counselor in a similar institution for a few years, I could not do it forever— it is too tough. I imagine that I could work as a counselor for a few more years after I graduate. With those experiences I would be better prepared to dive into social work policy and/or research and try to make real changes in the structure of our communities to try and help these kids. These really are the forgotten boys — the ones society has left behind. Someone needs to care for them, but its so incredibly difficult. 

Why do we experience?

It was my kitty, aptly named Descartes, who first made clear to me the difficulty of the mind-body problem. The problem, I realized, has to do with explanation, and the fundamental limitations of science to explain the first person experience.

The modern age and its scientific glory often threatens to reduce all matters of the universe to simple physical laws. Such is the case for even the most complex interactions, such as that between me, a human being, and Descartes, my cat. As we cuddled one evening, I pondered using a naturalist perspective what exactly was happening in that instance – how could it be that the universe created two forms of life, and that although we are different species, we still cooperate, interact and have what I would call is friendship. I wondered how the feelings I was having in that moment could have arisen from natural causes. The answer to that question, however complex it may be, is, I believe, accessible through scientific analysis. But, in feeling the moment myself, I also realized that any explanation of ultimate causation, no matter how complete, would never fully explain the experience.

Today, science can provide a reasonable (although sometimes incomplete, but incomplete in the sense that we don’t have enough data, not incomplete in any seriously lacking way) answer to many questions about life. The theory of evolution provides a framework from which ultimate cause can be explained. By ultimate cause, I mean explanations to “why questions”, such as “why is it the case that I care for my cat, another species, whose survival means nothing to my own?”

The answer is complicated, and it involves explaining first why we care for other humans, and then why such care should extend to animals as well. Evolution explains that we care for other humans due to a phenomenon called the extension of kinship – it is clear from an evolutionary perspective why we care for our offspring, and from the fact that we care for our immediate offspring, we can postulate group evolution, which describes how we move from caring just about our immediate kin, to other humans around us (in tight knit communities, caring for non-immediate kin will lead to greater success for the community, thereby promoting greater success for oneself and immediate family). So with a couple leaps of evolutionary faith, we can see how compassion emerges in a natural way – we care for those who look like us, because they are like us, and doing so will be beneficial for everyone in the long run. This tendency becomes ingrained in our genetics.

So we are programmed to care for those that look like us. An evolutionary byproduct of this tendency is that we care for non-humans that have features similar to us. As a result, we feel more desire to cuddle with a cat (close to humans on the evolutionary tree) than we do to cuddle with a cockroach (farther from humans on the evolutionary tree).

These thoughts slowly formed in my head as I was petting my kitty, and I realized that I was still unsatisfied with the explanation I had come up with. Sure, I had explained why I have the feelings that I do when I interact with my cat, as well as the history of how such feelings could emerge from a universe with just physical laws. But this explanation does nothing to reveal what those feelings are like. The experience is fundamentally inaccessible to explanation. I can describe to you what it was like, using terms of friendship and love, and you, drawing upon your own similar experiences can reasonably understand what I was experiencing, but only because you have empathy and may have had similar experiences yourself.

Biology and evolution do not (yet) have the power to explain to me why I experience and feel consciousness. It is not clear to me why we are not conscious-lacking chunks of organic matter acting in the way we do due to selective forces of evolution, and without any feeling of experience at all. This, I believe, is the heart of the mind-body problem. To me it seems very likely that we are entirely physical beings, created from entirely physical forces; yet the first person perspective we experience in our minds is still a mystery. Something happened sometime in the last 4 billion years on earth, when stuff went from non-experiencing to experiencing, without any changes in the fundamental laws of the universe. This I believe this is one of the great mysteries of our time, one of the few questions that still leave us completely baffled. 

Golden Memories

Crystal clear. Like Sunday morning sunbeams through the windows. I think about the past too much, glorifying the golden days. I can’t imagine the future, and I wonder about who I am now. The vastness of the universe astounds me, as do the complexities of what it means to be a human being. I wonder why I worry when I know that my importance in the grand scheme of things is miniscule. I wonder why I worry when I know that  its all just neurons firing in a brain. I see the lies and the illusions. I see that I am being deceived. I think about how it’s a miracle that I feel anything at all. I see the silliness of my day-to-day fluctuations in emotions. And I feel how vividly these thoughts are rolling through my mind. But I pause. As I open my eyes I notice the green of the farm fields melting into the blue of the sky. It’s an artistic display of color and form by the greatest artist of them all. It must be magic.