Empathy and Vulnerability in the Digital Age

While the technological advances of the 21st century have brought us unparalleled ways to connect with each-other through social media, they may also be producing a greater sense of isolation. We are drawn towards feelings of loneliness as we navigate an increasingly digitized world, even though the vulnerability of human life is on full display: from cell phone recordings of the murders of Americans of colour to videos from those who are documenting their precarious existence in the rubble of Aleppo; from the Facebook livestream of the torture of a Chicago teen with special needs earlier this month to the video-recording of the infamous ‘Coffin Assault,’ in which two South African farmers forced a man into a coffin while threatening to toss a snake inside and set it ablaze.

Not only do we have more real-time glimpses into the horrors of human savagery, but we also feel an increased intimacy to the victim’s vulnerability. These developments could, in theory, promote greater empathy and more empathic action, but responses to such horrors more often take the form of voyeurism, victim-blaming, shock, momentary outrage and pity, none of which are sufficient motivators for the kinds of activism that are required.

The crafting of empathic responses is necessary in building and sustaining meaningful political resolve, but empathy requires both patience and hard work. The active creation of empathy supports communities as they hone in and focus on long-term structural challenges while sustaining the difficult emotional work of collective and personal introspection. Identifying with the needs and perspectives of others allows for openness and learning, as well as the incorporation of new approaches and ways of thinking. These are crucial tools in building new social movements, alliances and coalitions.

But where empathy is demanding, these other responses to suffering on the internet are easy. Take voyeurism, the easiest response of all. The victim’s pain, suffering and humiliation are transformed from the visceral to the spectacle. By extension, the victim is transformed from a living, breathing and feeling human-being deserving of dignity into an object of entertainment. The dangers of this response aren’t new, though the technology may be. They echo the workings, public nature and souvenir-hunting of lynching in the United States, which necessitated an intimate proximity between the victim, perpetrator and spectator—forming “boundaries of fear and loathing within and between communities.”

It’s in this context that social media are extremely important. The cyber-world collapses the distance between the spectator and the scene of brutality, increasing both the power and position of the observer and the vulnerability and disempowerment of the victim. Any agency gained from such interactions is futile unless it is converted into empathy and on to action in which others are seen and treated as full and equal human beings.

Victim-blaming operates in much the same way as voyeurism, except that it also attempts to reinforce the perceived normative power of the accusers and perpetrators, a form of power that’s legitimatized by the victim-blamer through their relationship to the victim. This power imbalance is justified by the delusion that the victim deserves the treatment they receive as a result of their actions or beliefs: they become collateral damage in the quest for a greater good, a sentiment reflected in a comment on the Coffin Assault video that claims that “[t]his is the culmination of years of people killing farmers in South Africa and taking over their land.”

Shock is another, malleable response to such horrors. Naomi Klein has written extensively about the ways in which neoliberal institutions utilize collective shock in their efforts to increase their power to transform society. But momentary shock can also be used to heighten empathic action if exposure to human vulnerability is crafted in effective ways. This requires building communities of social and political practice in which shock, empathy and collective action are continuously connected. HandsUp United’s Books and Breakfast program provides a good illustration of what this means in practice. Over the sharing of meals and literature, a politics of solidarity and responsibility can be formed.

On the surface, the next reaction to horrific events witnessed on social media—momentary outrage—has more merit, because it lends itself to some level of identification with suffering. However, the empathic nature of this response is often limited by the sheer immediacy of digitized interaction. The duration of an event’s discomfort and thought-provocation is cut short by the new and intense stimulation that is brought directly to our cell-phones, tablets, laptops and digital watches. In the process, our outrage at injustice is often too fleeting to allow for any meaningful reflection or the organization of considered responses.

However, the pragmatism of centrist politics demands that leaders follow the logic of momentary outrage in their actions. Promises to rectify injustice are rarely followed by long-term or structural changes. This leaves space for reactionary politicians to tap into genuine pain that has not been translated into action. In this context, such reactionary figures come across as truth-tellers even if their arguments are devoid of factuality. For example, the Danger and Play website claimed that the perpetrators of the torture of the Chicago teen with special needs came from the #BlackLivesMatter movement and reflected their values. These claims were proven to be nonsense, and the alleged perpetrators have rightly been charged with hate crimes on the grounds of ability.

Pity may be the most damaging of all responses. At worst it is used condescendingly in projects of social stratification, utilizing a victim’s distress to essentialize and stabilize their vulnerability while empowering the observer. At best it is misguided, robbing the victim of their experience and transferring pity onto someone else and the group they represent. One only need look at the comment section of the right-wing Breitbart News website to witness human vulnerability transformed into pity for the sake of power—for example, the oft-repeated line that  “[i]t’s time to stop pretending that white people are the problem.” Pity also manifests itself as a passive recognition of suffering, an acquiescence to current conditions that prevents any meaningful action. Personal feelings of helplessness and temporary political solutions like humanitarian aid without any structural changes both reflect and reinforce the power of pity.

The increased proximity to suffering that’s offered by social media provides a mirror of our own vulnerability, and thus humanity. Undoubtedly, this can be frightening, but instead of running away from this experience we should embrace it. We must refrain from shielding ourselves from the suffering of others because doing so limits our capacity for empathy, action and inspiration. To be human is to be vulnerable. We are all prey to unpredictability; tomorrow is not promised today.

Meaningful action and empathic construction require hard work—intellectually, emotionally and practically. Such labours demand strength, and they cannot be completed alone. Technology can interfere with these labours but it can also support them, if we can find ways of binding together our fractured sense of self and community instead of allowing social media and the internet to splinter us. To do this, we must find ways of recombining the real and virtual elements of how we respond to suffering, and shift our sense of time and distance. We must challenge the instantaneous nature of social media that disable meaningful reflection while actively expanding our sense of togetherness, for we are stronger in unity than in isolation. 

*First published by the Open Democracy's Transformation section.

We are talking at rather than to each other

Marx was right, modernity is mirrored by the inherent contradictions in capitalism. Capital moves in ways that both dazzle and menace, jerking us into complex, often challenging realities to navigate. With this understanding, Marshall Berman in his classic All That Is Solid Melts Into Air correctly raised the question “[h]ow can any lasting human bonds grow in such loose and shifting soil?” If we are to formulate meaningful political communities in the Trump era, we must consider this issue.

Nowhere does Berman’s question ring more true than in the realm of truth. We live in an era wherein our understandings of reality vary to the extent that we no longer share any sense of basic actualities. Accordingly, Donald Trump embodies a pathos-heavy truth fueled by rage, disaffection and chauvinism. Meanwhile, an elitist political class has taken stewardship over a different kind of truth, one perceived to be cold and objective, reflected in the boom of purported fact checkers. Jason Hannan correctly notes our unusual paradigm; as many disregard conventional factuality, others are fixating over who is fact checking the fact checkers?

The failures of this self-professing rational or empirical truth in its universality echoes in the shock many are feeling after recent successes of reactionary politics. Countless other-wise insightful people have been rocked by Brexit, the rise of Filipino President Duterte, the failure of Colombia’s peace referendum and most recently, the election of ignoramus-at-arms, Donald Trump. The polls were wrong, how could so many people be irrational enough to support such dangerous jingoism? These sentiments reflect both a false consensus of an overly technocratic sense of truth as well as the fractured nature of our (political) communities; for many Americans this reactionary wave could happen there, not here.

The fallout of disbelief has resulted in many establishment Democrats accounting for Clinton’s loss by playing the blame game with a host of actors from Bernie Bros, to James Comey to as Politico correctly noted everyone but themselves. While this certainly reflects the hubris of the Clinton campaign, how could the Democrats, perceived to be "the party of facts," have such a poor understanding of the contemporary political context? It is simple, as a society we are talking at as opposed to each other. This has left many Democrats asking how so many Americans missed the memo; Hilary, as the first woman to almost be President was inevitably supposed to be next in line, the logical realization of Progress.

The seemingly seismic and irrational shift towards Trump and his ilk the world over, cannot simply be explained by its appeal to our worst (and deeply rooted) sensibilities – chauvinism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism or the like. We certainly cannot ignore these elements as they have always existed in our societies. However, highlighting them as the sole reason for the recent anti-democratic surge is insufficient and irresponsible; these elements are energized by pain, rage, suffering and a lack of hope in more traditional politics.

Centrist leadership has been ineffective at engaging with and speaking to the struggles of everyday people, a purported objectivity (which as Fanon taught us, is never neutral) is a culprit; raising the question, what does a singular truth look like in a world of “…different collectivities with different conditions”? In other words, how could the Clinton machine, with a platform predicated on the professed universality of rationality and empiricism, conceive of respectable alternative visions for society other than their own? Embodying a perceived inevitable Progress Clinton was paradoxically producing truth while intellectually reliant on its independent nature.

            As efforts to stop the Trumps of the world are failing we must recognize that orthodoxy in otherwise conventional realms such as truth are destabilised if not collapsing. As our dominant institutions fail to reflect and produce consensus, perhaps we should problematize them; to what extent do they (continue to) reflect foundational tenants of dignity, fairness and justice? Moreover, are they sustainable, at least in their current forms? Such institutional inconsistencies generate disaffection, disillusion and rage; reactionary winds caught by the sails of demagoguery. Meaningful resistance requires that we address such cleavages.

Sisonke Msimang makes a compelling argument for the collapse of compromise in South African politics reflected both in student movements as well as reactionary politics. Key to Msimang’s argument is that compromise has vacated political discourse, a trend recognizable in the American political sphere. Within the polarisation that is American politics, there is a progressive movement viewed as holding political correctness as the finality juxtaposed with a reactionary right viewed simply to be jingoistic mouth-breathers. While undoubtedly such actors exist in both communities and it may be expedient or easy to simply label the other side, ideologues do not make up the masses. Looking upon large segments of our societies with condescension reflects that we no longer understand each other nor do we care to; perversely, we are more isolated in an increasingly interconnected modern world.     

In trying to regain a common language we must actively seek to understand how competing social actors conceive of notions we all hold dear; truth, compromise, dignity, agency and prosperity. For without this, we cannot articulate a coherent alternative to the reactionary backlash facing us in the age of Trump. Our times are marked by contradiction, meaning we must accept that our grasps of reality are not the only ones. If we want to put forward an effective resistance platform, insularism and a perceived ownership of truth must be abandoned while humility, reflexivity and empathy must be adopted.

Article was originally published by Daily Maverick.