The Outsourced Self.28 For example, a personal assistant working for an immensely wealthy employer was trying to help her partner work off $50,000 worth of graduate student debt and to pay for a caregiver for her dying mother who lived 500 miles away. “Every time I walked by his million dollar awful art collection, I thought about my partner’s school debt. I’d look at the ugliest piece and say to myself, ‘That piece would buy my mother excellent care, and that piece over there would cancel my partner’s debt.’ I had a hard time empathizing with them over their malfunctioning hot tub, you know?”
Some moral rules get in the way of empathy. In the pre-Emancipation South, for example, black slaves were held to be private property, and it was deemed wrong to steal or free them. To be sure, Quakers, free blacks, some indentured servants in similar circumstances, and sympathizers such as those who ran the underground railroad proved to be exceptions. But at that time, the idea of racial equality was largely absent, a point central to Mark Twain’s classic 1885 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.29
Twain famously juxtaposes the rule against theft and Huck’s great empathy for his beloved friend, Jim, a runaway slave. After a long raft trip down the Mississippi with Jim—“we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing”—Huck wonders whether to abide by the values he was brought up to believe in by the Widow Douglas and return Jim to his owner “like I should,” or protect Jim and “go to hell"?30 Huck struggles with himself:
Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.” That was so—I couldn’t get around that no way. . . . [I felt] bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong.31
Holding the deed of ownership of Jim in his hand, Huck said, “I studied a minute . . . then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.”32 Huck brought himself to trust his affection for Jim and tear up his society’s empathy map.
In his searing account of his horrific torture at the hands of Japanese prisoner-of-war camp commanders during World War II in Kanburi, Thailand, Eric Lomax faced a more difficult challenge: trying to empathize with someone he hated. In his book The Railway Man, he describes a change of heart about the Japanese interpreter who had helped those who mercilessly tortured him.33 Captured in Thailand, Lomax, a British Royal Signals officer specializing in railways, was found to have a forbidden map detailing the stations along the Thai-Burma rails. He was severely beaten, then locked into an oven-like cell with both arms broken. He was left thirsty and hungry, and as ants crawled over him he was forbidden to wash or visit a latrine. Later, water was forced into his nose and mouth until his belly swelled, and he was certain he would die.
Given all this, how could Lomax forgive the Japanese interpreter, a man named Nagase, who witnessed and aided his torturers with a mechanical voice “with almost no inflection of interest"?34 As Lomax recalls,
Then [the non-commissioned officer (NCO)] picked up a big stick, a rough tree branch. Each question from the small man by my side was immediately followed by a terrible blow with the branch from above the height of the NCO’s head on to my chest and stomach. . . . I used my splinted arms to try to protect my body and the branch smashed onto them again and again. . . . The interpreter was at my shoulder, “Lomax, you will tell us. Then it will stop.”35
Fifty years later, having survived his ordeal and retired from the army, Lomax was overwhelmed by fury at his torturers. He received psychotherapy and married a highly sympathetic woman. He also discovered a book describing his ordeal written by Nagase, the Japanese interpreter, who was now a devout Buddhist pacifist and antiwar activist. Lomax’s wife wrote to Nagase, who responded to her: “I will try to find out the way I can meet him if he agrees to see me. . . . The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.”36
The two men met in Kanburi, Thailand, the very site of Lomax’s torture. “He was kind enough to say that compared to my suffering his was nothing; and yet it was so obvious that he had suffered too,” Lomax respects. “In all the time I spent in Japan [as a guest of Nagase] I never felt a flash of the anger I had harbored against Nagase all those years. . . . As we walked and talked, I felt that my strange companion was a person who I would have been able to get on with long ago had we met under other circumstances. We had a lot in common: books, teaching, an interest in history.”37
At the end of his visit, Lomax asked to sit alone with Nagase one last time, a plan that frightened Nagase’s wife, who feared Lomax might finally seek revenge. But that was not to be. Sitting quietly alone with Nagase, Lomax “gave [him] the forgiveness he desired. . . . I told him that while I could not forget what happened in Kanburi in 1943,” Lomax recalled, “I assured him of my total forgiveness. He was overcome with emotion again, and we spent some time in his room talking . . . without haste.”38
Huck Finn empathized with Jim. He came to trust his empathy and muster the courage to act on it. Eric Lomax first prepared the way (through psychiatry, a sympathetic wife, and the passage of time) before coming to empathize with the transformed Mr. Nagase. Huck had Jim on his map; his challenge was to follow it. Lomax came to recognize Nagase as worthy of his empathy, and to redraw his map. Huck wanted to act on his love, Eric Lomax wanted to transcend his hatred.
GETTING THERE
So how do we expand the empathy zones on our maps? One way is via an unexpected personalizing gesture. Perhaps the most astonishing example is the famous World War I “Christmas truce” of 1914 on the Western Front. Huddled in deep trenches hundreds of yards—sometimes only fifty yards—apart, were British and German soldiers who had each undergone strict military training to despise and kill one another, and shared little by way of language or culture. But in the early hours of Christmas day, each side raised white flags of truce, climbed out of their trenches, exchanged cigarettes and other gifts, played football, and alternately sang Christmas songs. Some from each side even danced together. For this day, the truce extended along some half of the front line on the Western front and included a few officers up through lieutenant colonels. When generals on each side discovered this shocking breach of discipline, the practice was immediately stopped. But such a brave act of trust was based on some sense that “you guys must be feeling like we’re feeling.” Perhaps it was the daily touch with death; 9 million soldiers died in World War I, and many must have felt “What do we have to lose?” What had transpired, though, was a surprise attack of empathy.
Many also extend their empathy more gradually through the logic of the exceptional person. Some whites have one black friend about whom they say “he’s not like the rest of them.” Some Christians have one Muslim friend about whom they say “he’s an exception.” Some straight people have one gay friend, and so on. Such connections cross boundaries, but they also re-create them. For each person says to himself, in effect, “I can empathize with my friend because he’s so different from others of his kind whom I can’t empathize with.” But in other cases, empathy for one person becomes a pathway to empathy for others within a forbidden social category.
We can also expand empathy by establishing some practical common ground with people we have been taught to disdain. Summertime “Children Create Peace” camps have brought together 8- to 12-year-old Israeli, Palestinian, and Christian children
