Culture of Empathy Builder: Arianna Huffington

2012-07-03 - Arianna Huffington and Edwin Rutsch: Dialogs on how to build a culture of empathy.
Here is a text based interview I did with Arianna via email.

Edwin 1. Was there an 'aha' moment when you saw or experienced the power of empathy or was it a more gradual evolution?

Arianna It's always been an important subject to me, but if I had an 'aha' moment it was speaking to Jonas Salk, just before he died. Salk defined the transitional period we're in as moving from Epoch A (based on survival and competition) to Epoch B (based on collaboration and meaning). It put the idea of empathy into a much larger context for me.

Years later, in the 1990s, I wrote a book called The Fourth Instinct, which explored the instinct that takes us beyond our first three -- our impulses for survival, sex, and power -- and drives us to expand the boundaries of our caring to include our communities and the world around us. That instinct is just as vital as the other three but we rarely give it the same kind of attention.

2. What is personally your most important value?

Empathy is certainly among my most important values. And it's a quality that gains value for me as time goes on. In a world facing multiple crises, where we are paralyzed and polarized in our politics, there is an urgent need for us to summon our better angels and master our own gifts of identifying with other people's feelings. As Jeremy Rifkin wrote in The Empathic Civilization, empathy is not a quaint behavior to be trotted out during intermittent holiday visits to a food bank or during a post-disaster telethon. It lies at the very core of human existence. It's a value that’s vital both on the small personal scale and the large public scale.

3. How can we build a culture of empathy?

To a physicist a critical mass is the amount of radioactive material that must be present for a nuclear reaction to become self-sustaining. For the empathy movement, a critical mass is when the empathy habit is cultivated by enough people that it can begin to spread spontaneously. I think of it as an outbreak of a positive infection. And everyone has the potential to be a carrier. So one thing we can do is to spread it as widely as possible.

4. You said at Davos 2012, "we need a dramatic increase in empathy. There is a race against time at the moment, between the forces and voices of fear mongering that are appealing to our worst parts, to our lizard brains, and the forces of empathy." The relationship of fear and empathy seems to be at the heart or crux of the so many of our personal, social and cultural problems. Do you have stories of how you have taken a fear and empathized with it? What happened?

It is natural to have fears. And fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of fear. Empathy is just one of the tools we can use to arrive at that mastery. Fear and empathy really are mutually exclusive. If we choose to connect, to understand, the fear just disappears.

5. How can progressives deepen their empathy for the fears that conservatives may have?

I don’t believe in seeing everything through the outdated prism of left vs. right. What's left-wing about caring for the middle class, or the kids graduating from college and unable to get jobs? There are many politicians that use fear for political purposes, and exploit the entirely legitimate fear that millions of Americans have about their economic stability. They use it to divide us against one another with the idea that the American Dream is a zero-sum game. So it's important to realize that the way these fears manifest in a lot of people may be different than how the fear started.

6. Typically, empathy is defined as the metaphor of; 'standing in someone else's shoes' or 'looking thought someone else's eyes.' For me empathy is like a cornucopia. What is your metaphor of what empathy is like? And would you elaborate on how your metaphor illustrates empathy?

President Obama put it nicely in his speech responding to the shooting of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, asking us to "expand our moral imaginations" and "widen the circle of our concern." We all have circles of concern -- our partners, our families, our communities, our country. And widening those circles should be a lifelong effort.

7. What do you see as the opposite of empathy and what is your metaphor for that?

I think the opposite of empathy is the projection of our own fears onto others. We've seen this over and over again throughout American history. In times of economic upheaval, when huge numbers of people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, and feeling powerless to do anything about it, it has always been the case that people look for scapegoats. Empathy is the antidote to that.

"Empathy, compassion, and giving -- which is simply empathy and compassion in action -- are the building blocks of our being. With them we flourish; without them we perish...

Last week a few HuffPost editors and I were treated to a visit by Bill Drayton and Mary Gordon. Bill Drayton is the founder of Ashoka and a longtime champion of social entrepreneurship, a term that he coined and that has now spread across the world. Mary Gordon is a former kindergarten teacher who founded Roots of Empathy, an organization dedicated to teaching emotional literacy and promoting empathy in children. She was also one of the first Ashoka fellows.

Our visit started with talk of the newborn recently welcomed by one of our editors, Gregory Beyer, whereupon Mary presented him with a onesie with "Empathy Teacher" emblazoned on the front. But as Mary -- a great empathy teacher herself -- told us, it's a two-way street, and empathy is best nurtured by example. "Love grows brains," she told us. "We need to show children a picture of love as we raise them.""