Isegoria

Ryan Holiday presents a different take on empathy:

There was a moment in the Civil War where Ulysses S Grant found his legs. Although he’d had experienced leading men into battle during the Mexican-American war, part of his early stumbles can be explained by fear. Or, at least, the anxiety that comes along with being uncertain of yourself. In July of 1861 he was sent to break up a notorious group of guerillas led by Gen. Tom Harris. Grant hemmed and hawed in his mind — it wasn’t the fighting, it was the fighting as a colonel. If there was some way he could be the lieutenant-colonel, he later wrote, and someone else could be the colonel he’d have been fine.

And so, racked with misapprehension, he marched his men on their mission. But when he arrived at the Harris’ camp it was empty. They enemy had left, knowing Grant was coming. Grant changed in this instant. His fears disappeared and did not return. Grant wrote later in his memoirs “it occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him… from that event to the close of the war… I never forgot that the enemy has as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”

It’s probably a strange take on this, but such a realization — the power you have over your opponent — is deeply connected with empathy. It’s understanding and acknowledging that there is a world outside your predominant emotions. And that this is a logical world, one that is ripe with people who feel what you feel not because you are special and came to it first but because we are all the same. In a perverted way, it’s very hubristic to think only you would feel fear in this situation. It is to deny, essentially, the enemy a sense of personhood or self. It is to assume that your emotions matter and nothing else does — or rather, that they do not even exist.

One reason Holiday’s take is a different take is that most of us associate empathy with empathic concern, or sympathy. But a general, or common soldier, or competitive athlete, must divorce empathy from sympathy — and even invert it, using understanding to increase fear and pain.

A general like Grant had to learn this lesson in the middle of a war, and he presumably compartmentalized this compassion-less empathy, unleashing it only in his role as general. Juvenile delinquents learn it early and often and resort to it daily.

Cameron Schaefer, who recently read The Dead Hand, notes the lack of empathy between the US and USSR during the Cold War:

As I read about the escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the thing that stood out most to me was how little each country understood about the other’s intentions despite the massive amounts of data and anlysis coming in daily from the various intelligence agencies. Each was convinced that the other side was morally unnmoved by the prospect of a nuclear war that would kill millions of civilians.

In short, many of the tensions and misunderstandings that characterized the Cold War were due to a lack of empathy. Neither side could imagine that their opponent may be very similar to themselves. It was far easier to imagine the adversary as an immoral monster, void of feeling and emotion and hell bent on destroying civilization. Of course there were great differences in ideology, but both sides were filled with humans just the same, or as Holiday put it to me in an e-mail, “…boring, timid, self-destructive, stupid, loyal, lonely, scared and all that less than glamorous but uniquely normal human activity.”

Of course, the Cold War is famous for the cold calculations of the “rational” game-theorists, who could bring more rigor to the problem than intuitively empathetic strategists.

What could be less empathetic than a mathematical model? And yet such rationalist models often provide more perspective than simple gut-checks, even if the players aren’t intentionally playing out rational strategies any more than pool players are consciously performing Newtonian calculations.

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