☄️ A Man Who is Freezing
How do you get anything done when nerves are frayed, emotions are high, and information flys about in all directions?
In my life, I've found consistently that the thing that grounds me is thinking of others. Service.
When it comes to helping others, we talk frequently of empathy. Why?
At first blush, it tracks. Understanding the experience of others strikes us as a worthy endeavor. "Walk a mile in another's shoes" and whatnot.
But genuine empathy requires an extraordinary and rare emotional intelligence. Much as we would like to pretend that we can differentiate from what we feel, believe, and experience, most of us cannot actually make a clean enough separation to truly understand the experience of others.
Empathizing is, usually and unfortunately, an exercise in futility.
"Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?"
So asked dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel walking through a day in the life of a Soviet labor camp prisoner.
The implied answer is profound in its simplicity: no. The prisoners toiling outdoors in frigid temperatures have a fundamentally different reality from those in the fire-warmed guardhouse.
Even if you've experienced bitter cold before, you can't truly feel it if you aren't currently in that place. Once the warmth takes you, you lose some amount of that visceral perspective. And if you've never experienced it, you have no frame of reference to know what it feels like in the first place.
But even someone in warmth can acknowledge the limitations of their perspective and appreciate the challenging position of those on the outside. They could acknowledge their comparative advantage and lend a hand to those less fortunate.
That's not empathy, it's compassion: "the feeling that arises in witnessing another's suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help." Compassion doesn't require some vicarious transference of an experience, as empathy does; rather, it facilitates enough of an understanding that it can drive action to change the situation of those who are suffering.
This is what we should strive towards.
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There is much talk right now about understanding those of different shades of the electorate. There is anger. There is jubilation. There is sorrow. There is relief. There is apathy. There is conviction. There's also an ongoing assessment of how we got to this particular place.
If we seek to grow, we should orient around compassion. We put upon ourselves an unreasonable burden if our quest is measured by achieving something close to a complete, actual understanding (empathy). If we attempt to experience the feelings of someone with whom we vehemently disagree as if we were actually them, we cannot succeed.
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Some have no interest in trying to understand where others are coming from. They wholly reject the mere suggestion of trying to do so. That can be a rational response, especially for those experiencing harm. It may be healthy, perhaps even necessary, to put up a barrier when emotions are especially raw.
But progress cannot happen if we abandon any attempt to understand the lives and beliefs of others. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty speaks to the value of doing so:
"He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that… He must be able to hear [the opinions of adversaries] from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."
We should strive to grasp the reasons others arrive at conclusions different than our own. And we have to listen — really listen — to have a fighting chance at doing so. When someone expresses a point of genuine suffering or discontent, we shouldn't dismiss it simply because it's something we're uncomfortable with, or because it's something that adds perspective which cuts agains one of our own beliefs.
We should listen openly, evaluate honestly, and make informed choices without purporting to understand those reasons as if they were our own.
Compassion leans into this limitation. See the root of the differences, see that you cannot completely understand where others come from, and still work towards supporting those out in the bitter cold.
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Compassion is scant in Solzhenitsyn's novel. The entire thing is, in a sense, an exploration of the uncrossable gulf between those in warmth and those in the cold. The prisoners' fierce determination to survive requires a focus that clouds out everything else. They are motivated to produce what the guards demand because it determines whether they receive enough food to live to the next day, with barely enough energy to reflect on the wrongful reasons they were imprisoned in the first place.
You may now feel as if you are one side of that chasm or another. If you are warm, or even comparatively warm in relation to others, take this as an opportunity to genuinely connect with those who are decidedly not. Listen to them, and find ways to help them. That is your duty as a compassionate human.
I suspect that you will find this practice not only feels good, but actually helps ground you in a shared sense of humanity. You may just find yourself back on track to get things done.