Bringing Emotional Cognition to Deep Time, by archaeologist John Hawks. A recent paper looks at evidence of giving care to family or tribe members, both infants and mothers, and those who have been injured. Because of our recent discussions of empathy, I might be tempted to switch to the word compassion, but looking at it as piece of the social interaction of a connected band is different than a political use of the term, and I think appropriate. Not that empathy cannot enlarge and might be the mark of a great soul, but I believe it has to expand naturally according to situation, not in forced imitation.*
Why do we care for the sick? I don’t know how many times I’ve read previous writers suggesting that ancient people were sneakily rational: Sure, they cared for aging individuals, but their real motive was that the cultural knowledge of older people had great value. But I think it is short-sighted to see Pleistocene healthcare as a quid pro quo. Empathy is a building block of social cognition in hominins. I doubt that it’s possible to build a system of social collaboration without that empathy sometimes manifesting as care.
Notice the context here. This is empathy for those we know and can actually see. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years and is part of an overall social communication that binds people together.
It is fascinating that some ancient people and other hominins ventured far into caves to make marks on their walls. But the important bit is not the marks—which are, after all, found fairly widely across the Pleistocene world. What’s actually fascinating is the shared journey.
*The theosis of putting on the mask of a god in order to become like it, or the mind of Christ, or the whole armor of God is real. Making someone else put the mask on has a different history in paganism, of preparing them to be a sacrifice. For those who have read Lewis's Till We Have Faces the painting and sacrifice of Psyche might come to mind. We are not bound by what pagans have done with their symbvols and enactments, for we see them as precursors. But it pays to have a look at what the meaning was to those who believed in them.
Nope. Empathy is still either a toxic word or a meaningless one used by those wanting to sound so much more caring, sophisticated and/or intelligent than they are. If sympathy, compassion, caring, or any other word can be substituted for empathy without sacrificing meaning, then what's the reason for using empathy?
ReplyDeleteAs for toxic use, a friend of mine has an adult daughter (in her 40s) going through some kind of mental crisis and decided that it's her mother's fault. She told her mother "you have no empathy for me" and that is true. What this daughter wants is to punish her mother for some real and more imagined pain... she truly wants her mother to suffer.
To expand, this daughter is an educated woman with a lucrative career, married to a man with the same. They are living what some would call a charmed life.
Delete