On the importance of bumping shoulders with people unlike ourselves.
Ken Stern, in his recent op-ed in The Atlantic, strikes a forceful blow to a widely held preconception Americans have about the rich: they are more generous than the poor.
When we think of wealthy philanthropists, we think of the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the Gilded Age and the libraries, museums, and colleges they funded from their own fortune. In recent years, a more strategic effort to engage the the world’s billionaires in philanthropy is underway. The Giving Pledge, championed by Bill & Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, has mostly dominated our understanding of the part today’s billionaires play in giving back to the world. We tend to operate under the assumption that because the rich give so much money to charitable causes, they are, on average, more generous than poorer individuals (and, we may say, so it should be).
Yet, if we have the perceptiveness to look past the seven, eight, and ten figure dollar amounts donated by the rich to charitable causes, we see the data telling us a different story. Stern notes that while America’s wealthy citizens give more in terms of total dollars to charitable causes, they give proportionately less (1.3% of personal income) than their poorer counterparts (3.2%).
Stern notes this charitable disparity between total dollars and percentage income begins to make sense in light of current research, which suggests that those who live in socioeconomically diverse neighborhoods tend to express a higher degree of empathy than those who live in homogenous communities. As the wealthy, unlike the poor, have both the capacity and exhibit a tendency to cloister themselves off from people different from themselves, so it is that, comparatively, they are less prone to empathy. Likewise, because poor people live in close contact with the disadvantaged, they are more likely to empathize with the afflicted in their sufferings and therefore tend to give more of their personal income to help those around them.
So why does our ability to empathize correlate so closely to interacting with people different from ourselves? I think it’s because personal interaction causes us to enter into another’s story and understand more of who that person is. Through relationships, we begin to know someone in the deepest of ways. The more we avail ourselves to others, the more capable we are of sharing in their stories; of celebrating in their joys and sharing in their sufferings.
Knowing a person doesn’t come about best by analyzing data on his or her situation. Nor does it necessarily come about by reading one’s story. It comes about most fully by entering into a relationship with someone.
Consider this: if your objective was to know a person, someone whom you’ve never met, and you were given the option of a) reading a 500-page biography about him or her, or b) spending an hour with him or her in person, which option do you think would help you get the best sense of who that person is?
If we really want to know who someone is and what he or she is like, it’s hard to think of anything that substitutes for face-to-face conversation. While you would surely glean more “data” about that person in the former scenario, nothing could replace spending time with him or her in the flesh. This is because “data about” someone abstracts reality, whereas “personal contact with” someone forces us into reality.
What do I mean? Exposure to reality can be, and often is, uncomfortable. We all have narratives that we tell ourselves about the world around us. Life is terribly complex, so we attempt to simplify it through infinite assumptions. We do this out of necessity, because we can’t know everything. The only way to find rest and order amidst such complexity is by assuming various things about the world, even if we have no direct experience with it.
We usually make it through daily life just fine on these assumptions, but when our preconceived notions about the world begin to grate against our own experience, we are forced to rethink the truth of our assumptions. This tends to cause cognitive dissonance, which can only be resolved by adjusting the way we think about the world around us. We make uncomfortable deletions to the narrative we’ve written and replace it with somewhat unfamiliar language that seems to align more with reality. It’s hard work, and we often resist it.
Thus, the research on empathy points to a penetrating fact: we become most acquainted with reality through relationships.
Relationships force us into reality. The further removed from reality we are, the less able we are to experience empathy. In other words, our inclination to empathy correlates directly with the diversity and depth of our relationships. When we intentionally cordon off certain people from our lives, simply because they make us feel uncomfortable, we are creating a fantasy world of our own desires. The more we do this, the less we know the world as it truly is, and, I would argue, we become less human. It’s a vicious cycle.
If empathy is “the ability to understand and share in the feelings of another,” then I would say that relationship begets understanding, and understanding begets empathy. But we should remember that we are all tempted – rich and poor alike – to cut certain groups of people out of our lives; it is just that the wealthy have the means to do so geographically.
If we want to know reality and the world as it truly is, there can be no better way than by bumping shoulders with people unlike ourselves. This takes an intentional mentality that impacts where we live, who we hang out with, and how we use our free time. It is a lifestyle choice. We at once resign ourselves to the discomfort of relationships while reaching out for the hope and promise of a truer understanding of the world. Truth is known by and through relationships, for truth, at its core, is relational.
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Amazing insight…One solution that our local government has brought in last year is economically inclusive education, where children from low-income background will have a few seats reserved in each class of expensive schools. Education in empathy should start young. Economically insular minds seldom step out of their comfort zone, except when they want to feel philanthropic. Most of it is aimed at gifting, of one sort or another, not understanding it is empowerment which is required, but that requires donors to engage, think through economic plans to make them geared towards employment generation and self-sustaining development, which would not make… Read more »
“… a widely held preconception Americans have about the rich: they are more generous than the poor.”
Perhaps other rich people believe that. Those of us closer to the other end of the pay scale have the (probably more accurate) preconception that the rich are stingy (relative to their means) as well as greedy.
Not only does bumping shoulders with people unlike yourself give you greater empathy for their lives, it enriches yours. There are parts of ourselves—most of ourselves, some would say—that we can only know in relation to others. If everyone around you is alike in values, background, education, and so forth, then you don’t get to develop parts of yourself in as much complexity. Consistently, those who are open to more varied experiences, are also those most illuminated by genius.