Empathy Walls and Why Objective Reality Is Hard, Especially When It Really Counts
In Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild defines an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding…[of] those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.” Empathy walls cause us to “feel indifferent or even hostile” towards those who are politically, culturally, or physically different.
Understanding empathy walls is obviously important when communicating about the climate crisis. In fact this book came across my radar because Hochschild based her research in Southwest Louisiana where the small-government Tea Party is strong even though government assistance in the state is high with 44% of the state’s annual budget coming from the federal government. Hochschild was interested in the paradoxical voting of Louisiana’s political supermajority where constituents are on the receiving end of some of the country’s worst pollution yet they continue to vote for industry deregulation and subsidies. She wanted to understand how someone could deny the existence of climate change while living on the front lines of the climate crisis. To understand people who regularly voted against their own interests and even their own religious beliefs, to understand the people who lived beyond her own comprehension, Hochschild decided to lead with empathy.
Climbing an empathy wall is an energy-intensive endeavor, and it’s become more strenuous thanks to the social expectations of cultivating and performing our political identities on the internet. Reposts and retweets help build those walls higher as we make snap judgments about the people on the other side of them; on most issues, we typically categorize each other and ourselves into one of two groups: conservative/liberal, anti-abortion/pro-choice, pro-gun/pro-gun-control, racist/anti-racist, climate-change denier/environmentalist, pro-war/anti-war. These either/or identities are inaccurate because they don’t tell the whole story. The small, digestible nature of shared information and the quick pace of social media make it difficult to communicate the nuance of our personhood beyond these politicized identities; as a result, most of us online are flattened into something that might be easier to communicate quickly, frequently, and loudly but is not actually substantial enough to stand up on its own volition.
As our empathy walls get higher, it becomes more exhausting and time-consuming to climb up and meet each other on the narrowing common ground that exists between us. We are not only pushing against our preconceived notions of people on the wall’s other side; we are also pushing against the oversimplified selves that our screens constantly project back to us through algorithms and targeted marketing.
Even if we climb the empathy wall and straddle common ground, the conversations that happen here rarely feel safe. We’re balancing on an edge at dizzying heights with someone who fundamentally disagrees with us and might want nothing more than to push us over to prove a point. That’s why climbing an empathy wall will require an understanding with the person on the other side. If we are meeting them in the middle to sit on that wall together, we must be willing to hold on to each other and promise not to push even if we don’t like what we hear. If others aren’t willing to meet in the middle, but still want to engage, we might have to scale the wall, rappel down into unknown territory. Once there, we must be willing to listen without any agenda beyond understanding. Not listening to respond or rebut, but simply listening, actively hearing and seeing the person that is opening up to us.
And here’s where my own eye-narrowing/head-tilting starts to kick in with this metaphor. During Hochschild’s research, there were certainly moments that were uncomfortable, but she was never in any danger. She is a wealthy white woman with the support of an elite institution, the University of California, Berkeley where she is a sociology professor. She had a contact in Lake Charles, LA, who was willing to help her up and over the empathy wall. Once there, Hochschild met with people who were most likely on their best behavior considering her status as a mutual acquaintance, if not a well-respected professor and published author.
I’m not trying to diminish Hochschild’s patient research. The open-minded conversations she had with near-strangers who are her political opposites are truly inspiring in times like these. But there are so many invisible walls that are simply too high, too fortified, or too dangerous for many of us to climb alone. When the people and ideas on the other side of those walls no longer recognize my humanity or actively seek to hurt me, then climbing the empathy wall becomes an act of martyrdom at best, foolishness at worst. And nothing in Hochschild’s book claims that it’s our moral duty to martyr ourselves in the name of empathy. She seems more intent on proving that most people—despite which deep story shapes their version of reality—simply want to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. For the far-right Republicans that Hochschild encountered in Louisiana, they were defensive and tired of being called stupid, backward rednecks by liberals that looked and sounded a lot like Hochschild herself. Having her empathy was no doubt a validating and empowering experience. But Hochschild was only able to offer a listening ear because she felt safe to do so.
And while I do believe that empathy is a very powerful force, I don’t think it’s the panacea it’s often made out to be. Empathy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Like so many other forces, empathy leads a very different life in theory than it does in practice; its success is entirely dependent on its environment.
One variable that cannot be separated from our capacity for empathy is the language we use to describe ourselves and each other. The binary terms we so often depend on, the violent rhetoric we engage in, and these invisible walls that separate us are all connected. When we use language that flattens our identities into collections of political, religious, or cultural beliefs, we aren’t just building higher empathy walls; we’re convincing ourselves that the people on the other side of those walls aren’t even human.
In the horrifying Shock and Awe moment where we now find ourselves, this brutally simplistic rhetoric becomes more dangerous since more is at stake. We aren’t just throwing around the problematic binary labels pro-Israel or pro-Palestine. People are either pro-terrorism or pro-genocide, anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, pro-Hamas or pro-apartheid. This language makes it difficult for us to step back—away from ourselves—and see that war crimes are in fact happening. That refugee camps and mosques are in fact being targeted by military strikes, and that hundreds of hostages are still being held captive, that civilians are being blocked from fleeing the bombardments, that thousands and thousands of children are dying horrible deaths. It’s much easier to interact with or digest the name-calling in the comment section than to process the massacres happening right in front of us. Our shared either/or rhetoric raises our defenses and makes it difficult for us to see beyond ourselves and the others who live behind the same empathy wall which protects our shared vision of reality. We lose sight of the world and each other’s humanity.
While I know this type of centering comes from the self-preservation we engage with during awful moments when neither looking or looking away seems possible, and when we feel powerless to effect any change. But it’s also most important in these horrible moments to seek beyond the personal and social realities we prefer—the ones that reflect back to us the world and the deep story that we want to be true. Instead, we need to seek out objective reality, even if it turns our stomachs to see so much suffering or to accept that we’ve possibly been wrong. This objective reality is so important because it is the only type of reality that can re-establish everyone’s humanity despite the walls we’ve built between ourselves.
Because once we’ve lost sight of each other’s humanity, climbing these metaphorical walls can only serve one purpose: to destroy whatever is on the other side.
