The Nature of Sympathy

Recently, at the end of a work day, I parked the company car at a public parking lot. When I exited the car I happened to notice, just in front of the left rear wheel, a curled-up baby mouse. I knelt down and saw that its eyes were closed and it was periodically shivering. I wondered whether I’d struck the mouse with the car, but there was no sign of blood. Perhaps the mouse was cowering before the giant vehicle, as I had only nearly crushed it. More likely the mouse had been abandoned by its mother, since there were no other mice I could see nearby. I wondered whether there was anything I could do to help. But I quickly realized I might do more harm than good, since as soon as I left with the baby, its mother might return to fetch it. Cynically, I reminded myself that the world is cruel, that untold millions of animals everywhere suffer unspeakably, that the mouse might carry some disease, that even if I did somehow rescue it, I’d thereby be depriving some other hungry creature of an easy meal. In any case, I didn’t have the time during the day and night to care for a baby mouse. Later, I checked the internet and there are indeed steps that could be taken to rescue an abandoned mouse, one of which is to drop it off at an animal shelter, which I didn’t think of at the time. In any case, I left the shivering baby to its devices, my rationalizations overcoming a pang of anguish I suffered on the mouse’s behalf. 

The next day, I returned to the car, expecting to see a tiny corpse in front of the wheel, but there was none. Had its mother returned? Had a raccoon gobbled it up during the night? I’ll never know.

This raises several issues, but I want to focus on the nature of that spasm of pity that provided the backdrop for my musings on what to do as I stared at the helpless rodent. What exactly is sympathy? The least helpful answer is the rationalist’s, which is that sympathy is in recognition of the golden rule that we feel for others in need because we fear to contradict ourselves. Ethics in that case would be a matter of logic. We ought to help others, because we’re no better than they and we would want to be aided in return or if the situation were reversed. All of this may be so, except that it has nothing to do with logic. Instead, it’s based on the implicit social contract: if I scratch your back, you scratch mine; otherwise, society breaks down and we all lose out. But the free-rider, who takes that chance, violating social expectations such as by accepting a favour but failing to return the good deed, hasn’t acted irrationally by gambling, since the odds are indeed in his or her favour. Society likely won’t crumble as long as the majority dutifully respects the social contract while only a minority has the audacity to be selfish. Indeed, in so far as logic is at issue, unethical behaviour has the merit of being supported by that probabilistic inference. The free-rider (the con artist, sociopath, or criminal) who excels at pretending to care about others or who is protected from the victim’s reprisals, by wealth or social connections, can have the best of both worlds, including society’s protection from the elements and the benefits of enriching herself at everyone else’s expense. Life is short and so a pragmatic decision might well be in favour of selfishness, in which case the Golden Rule is for dupes who are merely lacking in self-confidence.

In any case, even the free-rider may sympathize with a stranger in need, which suggests an evolutionary origin of the emotional reaction at issue. Sympathy for the helpless likely began as an instinct that compelled adults to care for human infants, since the latter happen to be almost entirely defenseless (unlike the young in many other species). An infant’s only defense is to scream or cry when danger approaches and that noise is intolerable to adults, compelling them to aid the baby. This mechanism for protecting the species, by shielding the infants who carry the next generation of genes is then extended, as any sort of helplessness comes to remind us of an infant’s pitiful state. This would certainly include a shivering baby mouse, but it would include also an adult whose predicament renders her dependent on others.

Once again, all of this seems so, but a causal explanation of pity and sympathy is incomplete, since the long series of causes and effects shows only how it came to be that we universally suffer when confronted by a stranger’s plight. This answer doesn’t touch on the meaning of this fellow-feeling in the context of an up-and-running culture which didn’t exist when the instinct was first formed, hundreds of thousands of years ago. When we ask, “What is pity?” we needn’t mean only “What is pity for the genes?” and are free to ask what pity is for us who occupy our jaded, late-modern vantage point. We can see that the scientistic gambit of theoretically reducing an autonomous human adult to a robot controlled by genes is ironically undone by the science that’s thereby worshipped, since our autonomy is itself a genetic strategy for ensuring our global domination in the Anthropocene. This is apparent, for example, from the development of the cerebral cortex, which services language and abstract thinking; those traits, in turn, liberate culture from the narrow confines of the biological life cycle. Moreover, we can appreciate the lameness of the religious rationales for pity, since the likelihood of supernatural rewards for ethical conduct is now widely understood to be negligible. What is it, then, for a scientifically and philosophically-informed individual to feel disgusted with himself and with the world at large, when, for example, he almost accidentally crushes a baby mouse and then abandons it a second time, to its fate?    

We can approach this question indirectly by considering a context in which sympathy is unwelcome: a courtroom juror’s deliberation. The juror’s role is only to consider the evidence and to follow the law. Sympathy for the defendant would count as emotional bias. You might think that this expectation for jurors conflicts with the need for them to be the defendant’s peers, and that a computer would be more ideally rational. However, what human jurors are supposed to contribute isn’t emotion, but commonsense reasoning which computers lack. Certainly, if a juror identifies with the defendant’s race, religion, age, or with some other irrelevant detail of her background, and lets that sympathy affect her judgment of the facts, the juror isn’t discharging her duty.

Suppose, though, a saint were called upon as a juror, and the saint’s sympathy for the suffering of all creatures prevents her from neutrally weighing the facts. Even when confronted with the evidence of the defendant’s alleged violent crime, the saintly juror can’t help but reflect on the hardships that led to the crime, such as the adversity the defendant failed to overcome in her upbringing, which formed her character that lashed out in the case of this particular violent act. The saint interprets the act not in isolation, but in a collective, even mystical context in which every event is tragic in a fallen, inhuman cosmos. The saint might have failed even to condemn Hitler, were Hitler to have been dragged before the judges at Nuremberg. If the saint wouldn’t be positioned to forgive Hitler, she would still regard his monstrous acts as sorrowful outcomes of a much larger catastrophe such as the continuity between the two world wars.

This suggests that respectable sympathy may be rooted in a holistic, rather Gnostic perspective on life, according to which all living things are united in the misfortunes of finitude. When one creature suffers, all ought to suffer along, assuming the others comprehend the larger processes at work in that suffering. If, on the contrary, we don’t sympathize, because we’re caught up in our egoism or even in our sociopathy, as in the case of individuals lacking any moral center or capacity for selflessness, we betray our myopia. We don’t see the event in its metaphysical or mythical context, but are blinded by our narrow-minded preoccupations. As I said, the Christian basis for sympathy is antiquated, but there may be a naturalistic sort of mysticism or pantheism that supports a viable, spontaneous (and sometimes debilitating) reaction of sympathetic suffering.

As with the saint’s irrepressible sorrow on behalf of everyone struggling beneath the veil of tears or in Plato’s cave of ignorance, the naturalist might sympathize with all sufferers, regardless of the circumstances. The sympathy might flow from the pessimistic outlook, which needn’t regard us as slaves, as in the case of scientistic reductionism, but which could juxtapose a hope for a progressive future with tragic knowledge of that future’s improbability, given our animal limitations. Whereas the implications of scientistic worship of science and of physicality are just nihilism and the baselessness of caring about anything, pantheism may entail sympathy much as comedic paradoxes provoke laughter. When we appreciate the humour in a situation, we laugh involuntarily, and when we perceive a situation’s tragedy, we might naturally feel sad for those caught up in it. The deeper the sense of humour, the more cause for laughter until the humourist might become mad from an overdose on the world’s absurdity. Likewise, the more profound the naturalist’s enlightenment, that is, the more uncompromising the sympathizer’s subversive awareness of our shortcomings in the existential scheme, the greater her inclination to suffer in response to what she would have to see as a world overflowing with senseless wrongdoing.

Let’s return to the cowering baby mouse. The immediate causes of its suffering are almost insignificant compared to the total, holistic cause, which is the mouse’s role in the universe as a whole. While we can’t fathom the entirety of that role, we can surmise that the mouse’s position is at least absurd in that there is no redemption for that hapless animal. Ultimately, the mouse shivers, abandoned by its mother and left to be eaten on dusty asphalt, because the mouse’s whole life is accidental and at odds with uncaring broader forces which inevitably win out against all organic anomalies. All animals are hungry, because the genes mindlessly and thus tirelessly replicate themselves in competition with other lineages (species), which necessitates animals’ war over resources. Thus, an unenlightened omnivorous animal couldn’t afford to gawk at the mouse and feel appalled by its helplessness, but could only exploit the situation and accept the free meal. The baby mouse shivers and dies because life only evolves, meaning life creeps onto a stage on which it doesn’t belong. An individual who is awakened to this existential context will suffer alongside tormented strangers, because the cosmic tragedy is a sorrowful affair and she sees that tragedy whenever our pretensions give way to the monstrousness of the underlying natural processes.

In my case, I suffered a pang of enlightened sympathy when I saw the shivering mouse, but my reaction wasn’t saintly because it wasn’t one-sided. My sorrow for the mouse was informed by disgust for the world that’s metaphysically responsible, but I had room also for mundane, pragmatic and selfish rationalizations. What, then, is sympathy? When we’re saddened by a stranger’s misery, we’re thinking not as animals but as transcendent, withdrawn observers of the misery. We attain something like Kohlberg’s universal perspective, at which point we can step outside our egoistic concerns, however briefly, and interpret the event in light of a myth that speaks to the paradox of natural tragedy and progress: we suffer with the baby mouse because the mouse had a chance for a better life, but the inhuman odds decided against that happier outcome. Moreover, when nature displays its godlessness and there is, then, no remorse or apology from the heavens, when the forlorn creature is left to a gruesome fate, the musings of an overly-philosophical passerby notwithstanding, we’re burdened by our understanding of the wider malady. We may cry for the mouse not because reason dictates any such reciprocity, but because sympathetic grief amounts to an existential battle cry, to a futile but noble gut reaction against the world that unveils itself in that particular affront.