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Empathy and its Limits

2023-02-28 · letter vlog · John · 3:45 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Health (also: Philosophy & meaning) · mode: Personal essay · tags: recurring series, heavy topic

In a loose Format video, John says empathy must have limits but his is too limited; the 19th-century word 'invalid' for people disabled by tuberculosis shows how language limits empathy, illness is universal rather than a moral narrative, and though we cannot know others' pain, we can listen and believe them: we validate each other.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Not knowing what it is like to be a bird; the limits of empathy; 150,000 deaths a day; a sycamore older than film

  • ★★ John knows little about what it is like to be a bird, though he is more like a bird than almost anything, more than a bacterium or a tree. — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ John says he has been thinking a lot recently about the limits of human empathy. — 00:00:00 · empathy
  • ★★ John says over 150,000 people are going to die today. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ John says if he felt all those deaths as strongly as a death in his family he couldn't function, so he understands empathy needs limits. — 00:00:29 · empathy
  • ★★★ John feels his own empathy is too limited. — 00:00:29 · empathy
  • ★ John says the sycamore tree he is filming is older than the moving image, so he is filming something that predates the idea of filming. (playful) — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — Bird questions, the rainy weather postcast, and 'invalid' as a word that limits empathy

  • ★★ John wonders whether birds dwell on past failures or feel low-level background anxiety, and says he doesn't know. (unsure) — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ John says strategies for limiting empathy are built into language, like 'invalid', the English word for people in the 19th century disabled by tuberculosis. — 00:00:58 · empathy, invalid, tuberculosis

00:01:27 — Invalids' memoirs; nothing invalid about illness; most people die of illness, called natural causes

  • ★★ John says invalids often couldn't get out of bed, making it hard to join social interactions deemed essential to humanity, from worship services to physical chores. — 00:01:27 · invalid
  • ★★★ John says 19th-century invalids' memoirs often express feeling ignored and left behind, as if their community's empathy could not reach them because they had become invisible. — 00:01:27 · invalid, empathy
  • ★ Filming far from the camera, John calls buying a 30-foot microphone cord the single best decision of his life so far. (playful) — 00:01:58
  • ★★★ John says there is nothing invalid about living with illness except that our social order makes it so. — 00:01:58 · invalid
  • ★★ John says writing about how badly 19th-century people listened to the sick has emphasized for him how bad we still are at it. — 00:01:58
  • ★★★ John says about 93% of all humans currently alive will eventually die of illness, so commonly that such deaths are called natural causes. — 00:01:58
  • ★★★ John says being sick is not unnatural or invalid but universal, yet we still try to explain away or deny other people's suffering. — 00:01:58

00:02:47 — Illness is no moral narrative; listening to people as we cannot to birds; meningitis; we validate each other; sign-off

  • ★★★ John says we blame illness on people's heads, smoking or diet, but illness is not a moral narrative, and seeing it that way is another barrier to empathy. — 00:02:47 · just-world hypothesis, empathy
  • ★★ John says we can't yet listen well to birds, but we can listen to other people, as 19th-century people could have listened to invalids. — 00:02:47 · invalid
  • ★★ John says he has just read a bunch of 19th-century invalids' memoirs. — 00:02:47 · invalid
  • ★★ John says there is probably something inherently isolating about illness. (hedged) — 00:02:47
  • ★★ John recalls that when he had meningitis he was rarely alone, except in his fear and pain, where he was always alone. — 00:02:47
  • ★★★ John says he can't know what it's like to be a bird or to have someone else's pain, but he can listen to people when they tell him of their pain and believe them. — 00:02:47 · empathy

  • ★★★ John concludes, playing on 'invalid', that we validate each other. — 00:03:37 · empathy

    “In short, we validate each other.”

In the description and comments

  • ★ The description says the video uses a format called The Format. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: bird · disease · empathy · invalid

Also: Concepts: compassion fatigue · just-world hypothesis · memoir · meningitis · pain · Platanus occidentalis · tobacco smoking · tuberculosis

Products: iPhone

Also centred on disease: What to Get for a Cancer Patient

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