the ends of empathy

sentimentality, psychopolitics, and the paralysis of "empathy for all"

This is a big long essay (so soon???) expanded from some thoughts I had after reading The Invisible Man, an essay by Patrick Fealey about his life as a homeless man in Westerly, Rhode Island. (More accurately, these are thoughts I’ve been having for a long time, and am continuing to struggle with; I hope the sense of struggling, rather than knowing, is palpable here.) Fealey’s piece has gone very viral over the last few weeks, so I’m sure many of you have read it already. If you haven’t, you should read it right now. It’s beautiful and completely overwhelming and one of the best pieces of non-fiction I’ve read all year.

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Like many people, I felt destroyed by this essay. Fealey has a talent for making the realities of poverty, typically held at a comfortable distance by the middle and upper classes, seem incredibly, unavoidably close. His writing made me think of the sick people I know and love, the series of clandestine miracles and overt privileges that have kept them safe and warm; I thought of my mother, who grew up lower-middle-class and has been on disability since she, like Fealey, became seriously chronically ill in her twenties, who has said to me that she still sometimes feels overwhelmed by echoes of a parallel life in which she ended up on the street. Many people expressed similar feelings in the wake of this essay’s publication; this, in part, was Fealey’s goal. “Many of you could be where we are… but for some simple and not uncommon twist of fate,” he writes. “This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you. You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us. And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need.”

My best friend, whose family lives in a wealthy subsection of the town where the article takes place, was also deeply emotionally affected by the piece. I’ve spent many summers in Westerly since I met her, which gave the story an even more destabilizing closeness—I learned how to drive in the same Walmart parking lot where Fealey describes being harassed by cops while trying to find a place to sleep. I’ve been to the same beaches, driven the same roads, witnessed firsthand the unimaginable wealth that striates the area in clear, harsh strokes. My best friend grew up on the more normal end of the income distribution of an exorbitantly wealthy community: her part of town has private roads, private beaches, old-money mansions with open front doors, bikes left unlocked at the yacht club. I remember the shock when I first visited, having never seen anything quite like New England wealth—the strange combination of comfort and unease, everything beautiful and too clean and too bright, the proportions slightly off, like Disneyland, where no one is allowed to die. (The first time you go to Disneyland as a child, you might wonder: if no one dies here, who takes the extra death? Where does it go? And then you go on a rollercoaster or whatever and forget about it. Here, you don’t have to wonder.) The poverty outside sets in quickly, as it does in so many places like this: you were just at the tennis club, in Kennedy country, and suddenly it’s all crumbling bungalows, busted cars, visible need. This disparity is jarring, until you’re back in the white-fenced backyard, the little dogs jumping beneath the American flag, the ocean peeking out over the hydrangeas, where everything feels like it’s yours, or ought to be.

It is strange to think about how empathy might operate in this community, or in any community like this: what it means, where it flourishes, what it hides, who it includes and for what reasons. It’s the most exaggerated version, I think, of an emotional dialectic that undergirds much of modern life: our comfortable existence relies on a systemic emotional detachment, an enforced separation from the sick and suffering; simultaneously, empathy and sympathy persist, and are regularly painful, and have nonetheless been made congruent with—rather than threatening to—the political status quo.

In her book Tough Enough, about unsentimentality as a literary and political style in the work of Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Diane Arbus, Deborah Nelson writes that these women “imagined the consolations for pain in intimacy, empathy, and solidarity as anesthetic.” Despite the virtue often associated with empathy and sensitivity, they believed that deep emotional feeling can and often does coexist peacefully, even generatively, with inaction and self-delusion; Nelson draws from John Berger in writing that the shock of encountering suffering through image “produces… either despair or a compensatory penance, like donating to charity, but it does not produce political will.” In contrast, the ethical project that these women attempted to develop, one that deprioritized empathy, sympathy, and sentimentality as necessary or even productive moral-political tools, “attempts nothing less than an active, expansive, and transformative relationship to reality.”