By Lynn D. Lu, Associate Professor of Law, CUNY School of Law
Lynn D. Lu teaches at The City University of New York School of Law, where she co-directs the Economic Justice Project legal clinic devoted to expanding access to social support and higher education. She can be reached here.
As Americans warily awaited Election 2020 results, some pundits wondered which issue would prove to be voters’ number-one national priority: The Pandemic or The Economy. Upon hearing Kamala Harris’s inspirational words and Joe Biden’s inclusionary rhetoric, others declared victory for Empathy over Narcissism. In a political moment characterized by governmental dysfunction and ideological polarization, skeptics have reason to doubt whether increased understanding of other people’s feelings and experiences will translate into material improvements in people’s lives amid increasing rates of disease and deprivation.
Scientists have identified reliable ways to predict and measure individuals’ capacity for empathy, uncovering possibilities for anticipating emotional responses and evoking them on command. As a documentary-filmmaker friend once shared: “A surefire way to make someone cry is to show them someone else crying.” But it’s not enough simply to trigger a similar emotional response; in order to make a positive difference and relieve suffering, people must be moved to act. Conversely, antisocial behavior may not necessarily result from inability to recognize emotional responses in others; sociopaths or narcissists might understand the feelings of others quite well but seek to manipulate that knowledge for selfish reasons. In her memoir of life as the niece of Donald J. Trump, clinical psychologist Mary Trump recounts a litany of incidents in which her uncle has used his instinctual knowledge of what people care about most to get what he wants, for example, by endangering children in order to punish their parents.
Trump’s talent for inflaming his supporters’ deepest fears and basest desires in order to gain their loyalty or, failing that, compel their obedience, is frighteningly accurate and effective — in a word, it’s uncanny. Developers of animated entertainments and artificial intelligence have long elicited fascination by creating characters that look and act almost human. But creating something that looks and acts too human triggers revulsion instead. When tracked on a graph, this sudden drop in positive responses for increasingly human likenesses reveals an “uncanny valley” between us and not-quite-us that leaves full identification with others beyond our grasp. It’s human nature to seek connections with others, but also to fear what we don’t know and try to banish it from existence. How, then, can we tell which policies and reforms advanced by others will help or harm us — and who among us is friend or foe?
If we seek to live peaceably in community with others, we must start by finding ways to expand our knowledge of the experiences, feelings, hopes, and disappointments of those unlike ourselves. And then we have to find ways to flatten the uncanny valley that divides us — not by eliminating differences and alienating everything that makes us uncomfortable, but by recognizing a wider range of emotions, ideas, and lifestyles as undeniably human and unquestionably worthy of our attention, support, and care.
An empathy offensive to ensure material support for all need not even be kind, at least not in the conventional way we tend to think of kindness. Stand-up comedians are not known for their warm-and-fuzzy sensitivity. Indeed, some have built their careers on glorifying hateful offenses that go well beyond offensive speech. Case-in-point: Dave Chappelle, a comic widely criticized for misogynistic, transphobic, exploitative performances. Even toned-down for a broadcast audience, Chappelle’s post-election monologue for Saturday Night Live delivered a final radical punchline calculated to make people squirm. Chappelle plots a “conspiracy of kindness” in which whites and people of privilege should engage in random acts of generosity — but targeted towards Black people to counteract centuries of disempowerment reaching across generations. Crucially, Chappelle would target these windfalls towards the least deserving Black people to offset a long history of unearned privileges reserved for non-Black people recast as just reward for merit and hard work. This is deliberately subversive provocation, to be sure. But what keeps Chappelle’s proposal in check — and even worthy of serious attention — is its disavowal of finger-pointing, accusation, and blame. Through this proposal, if nowhere else, Chappelle seeks to cancel feelings, not people. He redefines and redirects kindness to eliminate stigma and bad feelings that should horrify anyone: the feelings of being hated, feared, despised, and dehumanized.
How far, in the end, does conventional kindness get us in the effort change more lives for the better? Service with a smile counts for little if the platter is empty. During the confirmation hearing for new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, her longstanding reputation for kindness was beyond dispute even as her controversial judicial opinions drew scrutiny. Fellow Notre Dame Law School Professor Roger Alford publicly circulated a letter he submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee chairs in support of Barrett’s confirmation. Anticipating the question: “How does she possibly do it all?” Alford attributed her professional success at a relatively young age to her close relationships with friends, neighbors, and colleagues in South Bend, Indiana, a “world of genuine mutual support within families, between spouses, across communities, and at work.” It is, according to Alford, an environment that “promotes human flourishing,” and “Amy Coney Barrett is the embodiment of human flourishing.”
It is, of course, possible that Barrett has never needed to rely on government-subsidized support for working parents such as paid childcare, paid leave, group health insurance, or tax breaks to homeowners in order to balance her high-powered legal career with the caregiving obligations of raising seven children. It is possible that she never directly benefited from societal institutions and networks built on inherited wealth, secrecy of information, or restrictive racial covenants that have excluded generations of Blacks and other marginalized people from full human flourishing. Even Barrett’s reported affiliation with the charismatic Christian community and tax-exempt organization People of Praise — including as a trustee of its private school that excludes people on the basis of sexual orientation — may not have diverted substantial public resources toward the organization’s private, exclusive uses.
If so, it is easy to follow Alford’s advice and “imagine the pride” Barrett’s colleagues feel in her enviable career ascent. It is harder to feel “the inspiration that Justice Amy Coney Barrett will provide to millions of working women — to millions of busy families — who are trying to pursue the good life.” “Millions” of other people simply lack the resources, educational opportunities, and sheer luck to thrive even in booming economic times. “Millions” of working parents, especially single mothers, struggle to balance work and caregiving obligations. They need more than the kindness of strangers to prevent hardship, let alone to help them to live their best lives.
Perhaps we do need a little kindness in more places, if only to inspire us to keep making connections with others and amplify all of the large and small ways our lives are improved by each other. If we could stop pitting those deserving of support against those who merit only disapproval and dispossession and recognize instead the full range of experiences and energies that make us human, we might go far towards valuing our worth as equals and as individuals, for true flourishing and shared prosperity. If we can convert kindness into acts of support, we might just be able to rebuild a society dedicated to the general welfare and care of all that is truly praiseworthy.