I was walking home from work today. I had to cross the street in a bit of a weird spot, where I needed to make choices to avoid being hit by traffic. There was a concrete meridian between the two lanes, so I decided to cross halfway when the traffic permitted. But this meant that the traffic in the other lane continued. A driver of a vehicle in that lane decided to alert me to his presence by honking his horn, startling me as I walked in the street. This angered me.
After I finished crossing the whole street, and continued my progress toward home, I considered the altercation and my reaction to it. My first response was that this person was rude to me. I was not impeding him, and so he had no reason to honk his horn at me. But with more consideration, the situation became much more complicated.
I started relating the situation to that of empathy, and realized that there were multiple ways I could do this. That empathy itself was unclear, especially given the circumstances. This is what I want to explain in this post. It is a serious problem of language and understanding, and I think I am both guilty of and naive of this issue with many more cases than just this.
The first thing I was thinking about with this driver was that he was not being particularly empathetic of my situation crossing the road. Surely he should have realized that I realized I would need to stop movement at the meridian and wait, lest I be clobbered by the driver’s vehicle. His honking was unnecessary and simply rude. Were he empathetic, he would understand this.
However, perhaps he really was being empathetic after all. As it is often described, to be empathetic is like “putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.” In this way of understanding empathy, what he would be doing is considering the situation of “what would he do if he were the one trying to cross the street.” That is, imagine that it was he, with his mind and his body walking across the street with traffic moving in the other lane.
Assuming he was doing this, then he was thinking about what he would be thinking about as he walked across the street. Perhaps he would be trying to cross the entire street, without noticing that there was still traffic in the further lane. Maybe he figured he didn’t see it. And so, he is assuming that as he would not have been thinking about the traffic in the further lane, I must not have been thinking about the traffic in the further lane. Thus, naturally, he ought to honk his horn to notify me of the situation. This would make sense, if that is how he thinks.
Thus, if he was exercising this sort of empathy, then I ought not be getting upset at him. He was not being rude, he was being sensitive to my plight. He was being cautious. He was actually expressing caring, of a sort. Caring for my well being. I really should not have been angry.
So this is one way of understanding empathy. To place one’s self into the position of the other. Being rather specific here, to place my mind and my body into the situation of the other, and analyzing the situation as I would were I in that situation. In other words, I pretend I am in their situation.
There is a problem, however, with this sort of thinking. For I am in a position of privilege. I have more information than the other person when this happens, because I see what is going on from the outside. This might be easier to understand with an example. Consider watching a person walking through a doorway that has a bucket of water precariously placed above it. As the observer, I can see the bucket of water because I am on the side where it is visible to me. The person walking through the doorway cannot see the bucket, as they are coming from the wrong side. This is how such traps are usually set up. The person walking through the doorway does not see the bucket and therefore does not make the decision to exercise caution, and generally ends up all wet.
If I try to practice this form of empathy in this situation, I might think it best to be cautious as “perhaps someone might have placed a bucket of water above the doorway.” But I am only thinking about buckets of water because I can see one from my privileged position. I can see that this is the case because I am outside the situation, from a vantage point that allows this privileged information.
This may lead me to think the other person, the one who really is walking through the doorway, is foolish for not being cautious. But I would be arrogant then, as how often does one find buckets of water above doorways?
This sort of reasoning is what happens to most of us when we watch suspenseful films. If you ever find yourself shouting at your television, trying to warn the character on the screen of impending doom, this is what is happening. As the audience, we are in that position of privilege. We see things, know things, the characters do not. So if we place ourselves in their shoes, clearly we ought to be making much better decisions than they make.
I am not suggesting we are wrong to practice this sort of empathy. Only that we ought to be more charitable and sympathetic in these situations. We have information that the other does not, so we should not expect the other to make the decisions we would make. It is good practice for us to do this, however, as we can learn from other people’s mistakes. It teaches us that we should be prepared for unexpected things sometimes. Or it teaches us to try and anticipate for those times we are the ones lacking that information.
This is all well and good, but there is another way empathy could be understood. Another way I might describe what empathy is. What if instead of placing myself in the other’s shoes, I try to understand what the other person is thinking. Instead of placing my mind and my body into their situation and pretending I am facing whatever they are facing, I instead take a moment to try to understand why they are doing as they are.
This likely isn’t coming out entirely as I want it to. Language is limited here. The idea is that it isn’t about me being in their situation, especially with my privileged information. Instead, I am trying to acknowledge that they do not have my privileged information, and I am trying to better understand the information they are working with. To understand them, and why they have made the choices they have made.
In the case of the person walking through the doorway, I might recognize how infrequent it is to discover buckets of water above doorways. As such, to understand that with the great unlikelihood of discovering such a thing, the other person would obviously walk through the doorway with great confidence. It is unfortunate that they get soaked, but it really isn’t their fault. It was not reasonable for me to expect that they would have prepared themselves for that situation. In all fairness, one might ask why I didn’t warn them of the potential problem they were going to encounter.
I am trying to describe a form of empathy where I don’t place myself in the other person’s shoes, but where I try to understand where the other person is coming from. Trying to understand their situation for what it is, including the information they have available to themself. For me to try and shed myself of my privileged position.
Putting this perhaps another way, a key here has to do with the significance of our lived experiences and the knowledge our experiences give us. I have lived a particular sort of life with a very particular set of experiences. No other person on this planet has had this very specific set of experiences. And as such, no one will every really understand what is going on in my mind. But this can be said about anyone. We all have our unique minds, with our own unique sets of experiences. It truly is miraculous that we are able to relate to each other at all, considering this fact.
But this is precisely why empathy is so very important too. For each and every one of us to recognize our own unique experiences, and to not raise such lofty expectations of each other. I’m not saying we should not have expectations of one another; only that we should be charitable and sympathetic when we do, recognizing that our lived experiences are not their lived experiences. And vice-versa. I know things you do not know, but you also know things I do not know. This awareness can improve our relationship, or it can cripple it. We have to decide for ourselves what we will do about it.
Which brings me back to the driver honking at me. I do not really know why he honked at me. Perhaps he thought I was going to continue walking into the other lane and hurt myself. Perhaps my actions were annoying him or inconveniencing him. Or, worst of all, what if he were not honking at me at all. I had committed the most egotistical reaction of all, convinced that his honking must clearly be related to me and what I was doing.
I thought about all of this as I walked home, and decided I ought to write it all out like this the second I was able to. I think it is critically important. Getting angry was a mistake on my part. Because there is one other aspect of all of this that I have not even mentioned yet: I assumed I had all the information as well. I thought I was the one in the privileged position, when it was entirely possible that I was the other person, and the driver may have been the privileged one. And, just maybe, he was trying to warn me of a bucket of water above a door.