On Empathy

by Sara Flitner

My brother called from his ranch in eastern Oregon to catch up on my visit to the base of the Big Horns, where we grew up on the ranch now owned by our older brother. There are four of us siblings, with our older sister, and we share a code, indecipherable to others who don’t share a set of memories and experiences braided together like the bailing twine we’d pick up as kids. “I took the dogs out past where I begged you to let me sleep in the road after senior prom,” I told him, the only living soul who knew the spot. He had been my chaperone, all those years ago, for trailing some horses out to spring pasture at 5 a.m.—an early morning and a big job, a consequence enforced by my father anytime we (I) stayed out past curfew. 

“I must have heard thirty different birds this morning,” I went on, “and I saw the most amazing hawk, a roughie, on the Pavillon Cutoff on the way over.” The landscape is ground for what is common between us, an awe for everything we see, hear, have privilege to witness. “There were a few more antelope this time, too.” Signs of resurrection, after the severe winter kill two years back that took 90 percent of Wyoming’s pronghorn herd. 

My brother and I cover ground as we keep talking, probing around the edges of chaos that we both want to avoid. We stay with sky, the return of spring grass, the birth of things. 

I was sure I’d gotten it wrong, I told him, breaking our pact to avoid news and headlines. Evidently, a leader on the global stage had sparked headlines by stating that Western civilization had a problem with empathy. The problem, so said this leader with more power and money than most countries on the planet, was that we had too much empathy. This sounded to me like another version of, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” something only said by those who never had to, or no longer do. If one has power or a king’s ransom at their fingertips, they need not rely on the empathy or kindness of others.  

Civilization – yes, even Western Civilization – is defined as a society that has advanced to navigate complex social structures and has developed specialized labor. A key feature of any successful civilization is its adoption of common social norms, especially collaboration and cooperation. Throughout history, the citizens of communities and societies with strong empathy didn’t necessarily like each other more. But they understood each other enough to cohere. Even today, communities with more empathy – just the ability to see the farm from the farmer’s perspective, even though you’re not a farmer – do better. They attract good doctors and good teachers. Their businesses are more productive and their crime rates are down because their “pro-social behaviors” are up.  

Civilizations without empathy beget political extremism, costly gridlock, and dangerous “in-group” and “out-group” thinking. This tribalism is a precursor to dangerous things, because it allows us to see the suffering of others as somehow less than what we would feel in the same situation—if we were the one losing a job, scrambling to afford medicine, or going hungry more often than not. These things are happening all over the world, sadly, including right inside our country.  

Volumes have been written about the decline of the Roman Empire, the fall of Athens, the predictable and complex cycle that convolutes a fundamental truth: things are born and pass away.   

Humans oppose change, especially decline, misinterpreting the rhythms of nature as loss. We suffer when we  ignore our true destiny, which is to notice with as much precision, integrity, and neighborliness as possible the heartbeat of the life we are granted. Too soon, it will be over and everything we have ever thought or done will fade, whether we are called President or pauper, teacher or taker, prankster or peacemaker. We should care and we should try and we should remember where the birds took flight and which fields, under care, yield the most crop. We should not expect to deserve more than others who also wish to live in community or civilization. We cannot outrun mortality or nature, whether we’ve yanked our bootstraps up or not. 

My brother and I spend a few more minutes reminiscing. “Remember when you got stuck in the cattle guard and that beet truck almost ran over you?” “Remember when I about tore the flesh of my arm off getting that gate closed?” Even at 60 pounds (at age 10), I knew the gate had to be closed.   

We grew up in the lap of Wyoming’s sky, clouds, hawks, and nothing about it, or us, was soft. What we try to do now with our strong lessons is challenge each other to listen, to soften, to make way for another. We see how it is when we are so “strong” that we become rigid, and we break. 

My brother and I laugh at the idea that our hard-won empathy might make us “go soft.” We remember the truth of seasons, of daybreak, of how inhale becomes exhale, and we don’t speak for a few moments, feeling lucky to know in our bones how much these cycles take and give. The moment the colt is born still and the weight of death hits the ground is the same moment one of my siblings finds my hand and air re-enters my lungs. The breath reminds us we are alive, the hands clenched reminds us we are bound. We are connected. 

“Why are we more intent on saving the Western world than saving ourselves?” my brother asked, and he meant this in a noble way.  

There is no work-around to this fact: we will all draw a last breath. The potential for civilization – for being the one to reach out the hand – is what gives meaning to the allotment of breaths we inherit.