As would
probably be expected, we don’t socialize, but this doctor and I have come to
share some fairly personal experiences and insights. This meeting was really no
exception except that I’d had an experience just earlier that morning that
struck me. It was an experience of profound sympathy.
What I
revealed to the doctor – and it was cogent in the sense of recent reading he
had been doing and my own professional insights into it – was that I don’t
think of myself as a particularly “sympathetic” person. I seldom, as had been
the case earlier that day, found myself preoccupied by feelings of sympathy
toward others except those to whom I’m very closest – not even as a
professional counselor. I don’t happen to find the apparent disparity
troubling, partly because this is an aspect of myself that I accept quite
easily – as is the case with most aspects of myself. The doctor may have
thought that this made sense from a different perspective; I’d assumed that
such a perspective had something to do with professional objectivity.
Compassion is a core value for me – meaning that it is something that I see
working at and toward as worthwhile. Being overwhelmed, or nearly overwhelmed,
by sympathy is not an experience that I normally find valuable – or desirable.
I think that my doctor identified and saw that a tendency away from being
overwhelmed as a characteristic that led to a more perfect exercise of
professional objectivity.
I’ll take a
moment to give a short description of my doctor. He is a very compassionate
man. This is at least partly reflected in the time that he takes, not just with
me, but with all of his patients. He values all of us, sees and communicates
with us in individual, non-paternalistic terms and expresses what looks like
genuine pleasure each time we meet. It is a quiet, deliberate, warm pleasure
with something of the sterile Buddhist about it on the surface (though I know
that he is most definitely not a
Buddhist and, indeed, he holds the popular Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias
in high esteem.). I say “on the surface,” because this is how Buddhist compassion
or compassion exercised more generally as a core value can look from a
distance. I might as well refer to the compassion exercised by a trauma nurse.
He or she might work hard in helping us – harder than almost anyone else, out
of proportion to the rewards that they receive – but we might still lie there
without knowing them or their thoughts or their deeper, more concealed feelings
and find ourselves asking quietly inside, Don’t
you care about me? (That this expectation that others must suffer for us in some way – at least if
they are to convey a sense of caring – is a subject for its own blog post.)
I’m
convinced, for the most part, that the answer to that question is almost
certainly, yes, where my doctor is
concerned. I’m going to surmise that
this is a “yes” without guilt – without guilt for its appearance; without guilt
for what might be seen as the misleading nature of the exercise of such
compassion; without guilt for the limitations of his exercise of compassion and
without guilt for the sake of the “self” through which such apparently
impersonal compassion is exercised. This surmising is connected to the other
striking aspect of the sympathy that I felt that day – the powerful guilt that
accompanied it.
Sympathy and
compassion – as concepts, as feelings, as motivators – are often conflated with
one another. Psychologist, Paul Ekman and the Dalai Lama synthesize some good
definitions and distinctions in “Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the
Obstacles to Emotional Balance and Compassion.” Ekman’s research has additionally been significant in not merely
identifying the biological correlates of emotion (facial expression, in
particular), but conceptualizing the distinction between emotions, feelings and
moods. (Neurologist Robert Burton
also delineates some meaningful distinctions between these.)
In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson made
note of Adam Smith’s use of the term “sympathy” which we would normally hear
used as “empathy” or “compassion.” I
won’t try to make any more distinctions with regard to what I’d felt that
morning except to say that my “sympathy,” was distinct from “empathy,” because
I never took the step to imagine what my friend must have been feeling or how
that felt. I had a strong sense of his distress as well as my own
undifferentiated guilt.
Emotionally
powerful experiences are not unusual for me. Emotional experiences in which I
don’t have a sense of immediate insight are. Note that I’m being careful to use
the term, “sense of immediate
insight” here. I wouldn’t claim that all such insights are accurate or always
point to a single emotional cause. In fact many may not. The Tibetan Buddhist
teacher, Chogyam Trungpa, may have referred to this as an experience of
“neurosis,” in the sense that “neurosis” was not necessarily a reflection of
mental or emotional pathology, but something arising from “delusion” or a deluded state, in the, again, Buddhist
sense of the word – a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the reality
of the world. Nearly all such misunderstanding will necessarily derive from
misconceptions of the “self,” what it is and whether or not such a thing even exists
in the discrete sense.
Of
particular note in this – and how guilt would come to be attached to sympathy –
would be how Trungpa came to view “original sin” as integral to Western
thinking and feeling. From a religious perspective – and perhaps the only
meaningful perspective in the West, at base – original sin began with a single act… a single defilement or act of
disobedience whose repercussions would be passed down not merely spiritually,
but physically (Thomas Aquinas, theologian of the Catholic Church, believed
that original sin was passed down via the semen – hence the “sinlessness” of
Jesus via the virgin birth.). It is a
remarkable example of a hierarchal oversimplification of human imperfection. This
state is also often called “total depravity” – particularly by Reformed
Christians or Calvinists. Theologically, the state of original sin implies not
merely an intrinsic unwholesomeness, wickedness, evil or – as Leibniz held, a
privation of good, but an inability or helplessness with regard to the
rectification of this condition. (It is all but impossible to imagine that the
similarity to Wilson’s and Smith’s original 12-Step
recovery programs and the helplessness
emphasized in every kind of addiction, as indicated in the first two steps,
is merely coincidental.) The concept is so important that some conservative
Calvinists have found it necessary to integrate the concept into the nature v. nurture debate. An
acquaintance of my own, the wife of a local Reformed pastor, held forth once
that she had proof of the intrinsic depravity or original sinfulness of
mankind. Utilizing the otherwise intellectually post-modern concept of the blank slate, she told me in no uncertain
terms that the proof lay in the “selfishness of infants.”
In more
strict theological interpretations this actually means that not only is there
nothing that can be done by anyone but God, but that the logic of God’s will is
followed back to the idea that he, therefore, intended the individual depraved
states and has made or allowed to be that such individuals irredeemable from
the outset (“Outset,” in this case, meaning “before the beginning of the
world.”) However, the idea of an event that has made us permanently and
intrinsically “bad” without outside, supernatural intervention holds. (This
explanation of original sin, depravity and predestination is extremely simplified. It is not my
intention to give them unfair treatment. So, while I know that some of my
Reformed friends will be anxious to offer technical corrections and a more
nuanced explanation, understand that this simplification is not for clarifying
a theological point, but how the idea of original sin relates to feelings of
guilt.)
Put more
succinctly, there is always something
to feel guilty about and often there is simply nothing. This generalized
feeling of guild is sometimes referred to as “free-floating guilt,” which is not
merely a guilty feeling but a disposition to guilt. (For more narrow instances
of free-floating guilt in which there is generalized guilt over the course of
hours or days, Paul Ekman might call this a kind of “mood,”
distinct from “emotion,” not necessarily natural, and potentially destructive.)
A long-term disposition to guilt – a long “guilty mood,” if you like, might
even be described – as we might a disposition toward anger – as a “trait.”
(See, trait theory) Free-floating guilt is sometimes confused with
Martin Buber’s conception of “existential guilt,” a non-neurotic form of guilt
resulting from actual harm done to others.
Again, from Trungpa’s Buddhist perspective, we might counterbalance this neurotic, free-floating guilt with a realization of “basic goodness… [goodness] without reference to bad” – a non-dualistic perspective on human nature:
“Trungpa Rinpoche felt that Western
practitioners of meditation, as well as Western therapists and therapies, were
often affected by a subtle, or not so subtle, hangover from the belief in
“original sin.” He talked about this as a preoccupation with guilt and a
feeling of being condemned, feeling that we did or are doing something bad or
that something bad has been done to us, which is the source of our problems. In
contrast to that guilty feeling, which he felt was quite foreign to Buddhism,
he spoke of “basic goodness” as the foundation of experience and of meditation
practice. Basic goodness is good without reference to bad, goodness as the
ground of experience before the dualism of good and bad ever occurred. From
this point of view, some sin or crime is not the fundamental root of our
problems, although it may be a contributory factor. We don’t have to fear that,
if we open up, we will discover some terrible inadequacy or secret about
ourselves. When we clear away the clouds of confusion, we find that there has
simply been a misunderstanding, which turns out to be our mistaken belief in a
solid self or ego. We discover that our nature is like the sun shining in the
sky: brilliant and fundamentally unobstructed… “ (As conveyed by Carolyn Rose
Gimian in Trungpa’s, The Sanity We Are Born With, p. 329)
As do many naïve
psychological realists, Christian teachers like Greg
Koulk hold that if we feel guilty it’s because we are guilty – in the theological sense – though his apologetic tactic
is to manipulate his partner in conversation into saying it rather than say
it himself. He doesn’t, unfortunately, tease apart what this feeling of guilt
points to in his own worldview and how it can be derived culturally. The confounds for this claim remain intact and
largely ignored.
In terms of original sin, I often – usually – find that
we proceed from basic misunderstandings; specific, cultural or existential.
I’ll throw into this misunderstanding as
that which proceeds from making premature or unnecessary judgments. The nature
of such misunderstandings is usually broad, as opposed to complex. Though the
idea of original sin or depravity have been convoluted via Judeo-Christian
theology, the basic idea is fairly simple; inheritance and “essentialism.”
Inheritance in the sense of Aquinas, as referred to above, and essentialism, not merely as material
attributes, but spiritual characteristics (as in, “… created in the image of
God,” defining a basic human characteristic). Our common self-description as
“created in the image of God,” can be seen as integral to a fundamental mistake
of ego – of the dualistic nature that we are broken into pieces psychologically
nearly from the outset. I think that this is the mortar in the foundation of
“the first mistake” of ego – the mistake of pride.
This pride can probably be seen as analogous to what I’m coming to feel is the “sympathy/guilt
mistake.”
It’s time to
circle back away from theological and philosophical convolutions. I had
wondered at three things: 1) my sudden experience of an unexplained sympathy for a new friend; 2) the common
attachment of guilt to that sympathy and 3) what I’ve come to see as my
comfortable lack of sympathy.
I think that
the answer to the first point is quite straightforward. Sympathy occurs not
merely in my intentional conscious mind, but in what any number of computer and
neuro-scientists – as well as psychodynamic psychologists – might call the
“hidden layer,” or as the result of hidden layer processing; in other words, my
subconscious. My body and mind responded in a way that I neither predicted nor
could trace directly backward to my circumstances. I think that, perhaps,
somewhere in this hidden layer, I’d passed an emotional tipping point that
tripped faster than my conscious insight. Part of the exercise of insight in
this would have been the realization of the inappropriateness of the guilt that
I felt (which certainly came just a little later) as opposed to the initial
surprise and confusion that dominated. An analogous professional explanation
might be described in terms of my work with sociopaths. I’ve worked within a
variety of professional psychiatric and psychological professional circles. If
not in terms of time, in terms of intensity, forensic psychiatry has probably
figured among the most significant of these. To oversimplify, working with
those who are unambiguously sociopathic can have no emotional impact only if one is sociopathic oneself, with no
sense of embarrassment, self-consciousness or guilty social reciprocity.
Appeals to sympathy are extremely common.
Denying oneself a response to sympathy is a sometimes wrenching experience,
often fraught with guilt. An experienced insight into my own feelings – whether
within a professional or personal context – must give me momentary pause in the
here and now to consider the possibility that what I’m describing as of just several
weeks ago is a response to sociopathy or narcissism, characterlogically
disordered states that are sometimes best viewed on a continuum with one
another. I prefer to lean toward trust, but cannot responsibly neglect
justifying that trust – which I have to a point. For now, I’ll go with the
working hypothesis that this experience of the pairing of sympathy and guilt
are like many others with those I know to be possessed of normal conscience.
Again,
feeling such guilt precipitates a kind of reasoning backward from the result,
though, as this guilt – I believe – was of the “free-floating” sort, as
discussed above, there was really nothing specifically and clearly personal to
reason back to (Part of the justification of trust that I’d mentioned just
above; no specific appeals to reciprocity or connection.). There was only
cultural history to draw on and how that history had been affirmed and
supported through, in particular, my early life. (I held a tension or, if you
like, dissonance regarding my relationship
with my mother between the ages of eleven and thirteen. On the one hand, “Why
does she hate me?” – the “why” in this indicating that I’d done nothing that I
could “reason back to” to deserve her hatred – and the feeling of rightness that such hatred should be
directed at me. Much, if not most, of this was religiously driven and I would
go on to my early to mid-twenties causing some very kind Episcopal theologians
to suffer terribly for not being capable of providing a satisfactory answer to
this offense for me. It is a true regret.).
Answering the
second question – as does the question itself – might suggest that there is
some utility in guilt or remind them that guilt suggests a kind of nobility. We
have to suffer in order to drive that
which is best in us. We often seem to believe that we must sacrifice and we
must feel pain because being good hurts.
We lose more in virtue than we immediately gain, which is why the attainment of
virtue and virtuous states is difficult and one of the reasons that delaying gratification is seen – often
rightly to make matters more complex – as an indication of good judgment and
character. Suffering is part of a process of justification, not just in a
personal, but theological, and hence ultimate, sense. It may lie at the heart
of the sense in Christianity that if you are not suffering persecution, for
instance, you are doing something wrong as a Christian. I have come to see this
theistic tenet as somewhat perverse.
The backlash
to all of this, of course, lay in the overused, “I have no regrets.” Or, if there are regrets (and hence, guilt) it
is over something quirkily trivial as from Peggy
Sue Got Married.
“Grandpa, do you have any regrets?”
Grandpa responds distractedly and in a way that indicates that the question is
so irrelevant to his now wise and profound existence with, “Well, I wish I’d taken better care of my teeth.”
Lacking the
profundity of Peggy Sue’s grandfather, my response to this backlash is with the
certainty that we will attach to regret and guilt in the same ways that we will
attach to anything that welds together the edifice of a self – particularly if it is a virtuous self. It is fairly popular
not merely to embrace disproportionately, but to exclude things like regret and
guilt from our emotional repertoires. As
exclusions, I usually hear such points made as, “____ is useless;” or “there is
no such thing as ____.” If a rebuttal to the latter is pressed, an appeal will
often be made to the former in the sense of, “What I meant was…,” and the
discounting of the state continues. Backlashes of any kind lack subtlety. A
backlash against regret and guilt is no exception.
This doesn’t
tell us that people – either individually or collectively – are stupid. It
merely tells us that most of such reasoning is done publicly and under the
pressure of challenges as simple as, “What
do you mean by…?” So, discussion is
important, not necessarily for the pedantic opportunities that it provides
unstoppably excited talkers like me, but because we put this stuff together in
community. That community can be defensive and insular; it can be oriented toward
a desire for justice; it can be a bull-horn for a few charismatic or aggressive
individuals. But even with this combination of hazard and justifiability, it is
worthwhile. We can utilize still another psycho-cognitive analogy in the form
of transactive memory. While
originally meant to flesh out a social psychological/cognitive issue like group-think, transactive memory has
taken on a broader definition in the cognitive and neurological sciences as
simply memory stored outside of the human central nervous system. A broader, transactive cognition might be seen as
the formation of not merely memory, but of thought and the formation of belief
in a public or community context. (While only one of these books refers to transactive memory explicitly, both
access the concept: On
Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee and Accidental
Mind, The: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
by David J. Linden.)
This is
something more than simply a declaration of the importance of community, but a
deeper, more integrated functionality – as might be indicated in Ralph Waldo
Emerson’s Each and All… “Nothing is fair
or good alone.” Extended, this might be taken to read that there is little
of meaning – and perhaps nothing real worth considering – in isolation.
My guilt,
while not meaningless, is much like my pride or anyone else’s. On reflection, I
care little for it, and I care little for yours except to the extent that it
indicates that we suffer, we have suffering – and its basic causes – in common. This could be described,
appropriately, I think, in Buddhist terms. However, as Trungpa indicated to
Daniel Goleman (of “Emotional Intelligence” fame), “Buddhism will come to the
West as psychology” [emphasis mine], I
won’t give the egoistic valuation of guilt a strictly “psychological” name, but
give it a psychological (and perhaps more descriptive) referent –
“desperation.” My use of the term comes not from the appeal of the word itself
(I can think of any number of words in the past that I’ve wanted to use because they would sound cool as part of a unifying
psychological/philosophical edifice.), but from my memory of my feelings in
thousands of sessions with my therapy clients and still more countless
“sessions” of confidences with friends and acquaintances. There is a tone to
the building and driving of “ego” or “self,” for lack of better terms. That
tone is “desperation,” and I’ve come to realize a certain narrow range of
triggering events in the realization, whether a close friend or someone I’ve
spoken to briefly with waiting on line at Starbucks.
The realization of desperation is not unlike the realization of psychopathy
in my early years of mental health practice.
As a
psychiatric RN had advised, “Look at your
own feelings. If you find yourself reacting to someone as ‘creepy,’ or you find
the hairs on the back of your neck standing up, consider psychopathy as a
diagnosis or, at the very least, a strong possibility even if not diagnosable
strictly by the standard criteria.” I found this to be an incredibly
helpful recommendation on a dangerous, maximum security forensic psychiatric
ward.
It would be
easy to reason backward from the realization of such a feeling or feelings; That feeling was immediately preceded by a
certain kind of gesture or facial expression or tone of voice. Though this
reasoning may be accidentally valid
at times, it often reflects something illusory; a perception driven by bias –
for the same reason that there is no such thing as a “shooter face” in a crowd
at a political rally, only out of place postures, gestures, and facial
expressions for a given context.
As with all such things, the triggering event in me is emotional. One day we’ll talk about how even the most rational of realizations possess this indispensable component if they are to be, in fact, realized as knowledge even in the most rigorous epistemic sense. That rational realizations are emotionally isolated or bereft of an emotional component is another of those deep – and often tragic – misunderstandings of human existence.
Guilt is one of the most profound indicators of not merely desperation, but of despair itself. It’s that, “I’m running – or have run out of – time” feeling; “Maybe I can’t go back and fix this… maybe there is nothing that I’ve broken that can be fixed.” There are no realizable options. This is the quintessential core of despair itself, particularly as represented in what we’ve come to understand as depression. I believe that, in these cases, there is often not enough maturity or remaining emotional wherewithal to make this a realization about something existential like mortality. There is not enough energy to drive that kind of breadth of consideration in real depression. There is, instead, a kind of childish narrowing or closing in – as in the representation of Hell in the Robin Williams film, What Dreams May Come.
I’m using the
term, guilt, while at times not
precisely, often synonymously with regret,
not in its theological sense. In other words, I’m using the term as
representative of an emotional state, not as a condition of metaphysical gracelessness.
Regret, obviously, could not be used
in this sense, as in, “He felt the regret
of the sin that he inherited from Adam.”
With regard
to the question of why I don’t sense a great sympathetic core within myself,
there is this: I do feel warmth
toward others… a genuine interest and affection for others. Given this, I’m not
sure that I find it necessary to find
a place for sympathy. It has, perhaps, found its own place without being named
or categorized. It’s true; I seldom feel a great swelling of sadness for
others. However, I do often feel a great swelling of emotion over our
connections. This presents me with a dilemma – though not a dilemma, I think,
that we don’t all contend with in one way or another. The difference in the
character and presentation of the dilemma is in what we need to do in order to
remain attentive to the important issues around it. People like Adam Smith have
written for many, many years that our most pressing concerns are those that are
most immediate and – in the language of cognitive and social psychology,
“available” (as in availability bias).
What follows is taken from Adam Smith’s The
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759):
“Let us suppose that the great empire
of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an
earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no
sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving
intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all,
express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he
would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life,
and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a
moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many
reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the
commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And
when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had
been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take
his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such
accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself
would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger
to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he
will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions
of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an
object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To
prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity
be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren,
provided he had never seen them?”
One of the
things that this suggests – along with what it means for a “connexion” to be available, is that, for those things
that we find worth valuing – whatever the reasons – such as the sympathy noted above Smith’s
speculation, we create a structure for maintaining such attention to sympathy or
we borrow one from a tradition or institution. Buddhism and Christianity, for
instance, both have extensive – though highly divergent – traditions for
maintaining that attention which is a deliberate making available of. Each, in its own way, can be compared to the
priority and emphasis that we give to certain memories. We do this by rehearsal
and association – each of them both deliberate and reflexive activities that
indicate the priority we give to one thing or another. Given what we often
think of as our “fallen” nature, we find it difficult to relax mindfully into
an appropriate sympathetic mode without such structure and rehearsal. The
petitionary prayers of Christians and the meditations, vows and prayers of
Buddhists exemplify such structure. The various Buddhist traditions that orient
one toward sympathy, compassion or lovingkindness
(Mettā in Pali or maitrī in Sanskrit), more specifically orient
practitioners to a natural experience of such feeling. Beyond early to middle Christian
contemplative practice – as in the Christian mysticism of the Middle-Ages –
awareness and orientation toward such feeling takes a more legalistic approach
in prescriptive terms and genuine feeling and expression tend to occur in a
less structured, individual way.
The
predictable outward manifestation of a Christian movement toward sympathy – as
an institution – is a strong perception
that it is work against our
individual and collective metaphysical fallen natures as opposed to toward a naturally occurring
manifestation of basic, non-dualistic goodness and Buddha-nature (Buddha-dhātu
in Sanskrit) that is supported by the
contemplative practices noted above. One frees, expands and focuses attention;
the other ties it up. In this sense, the diminishment and marginalization of
the Christian contemplative traditions could properly be seen as tragic.
As I think
of this thesis I am reminded of modern mystical theistic traditions like Jewish
Hasidism with its strongly contemplative and
legalistic, or orthodox, aspects. Such a tradition should challenge the
idea that a tradition cannot be both
contemplative and legalistic and that each is mutually exclusive. If it seems
that I’ve suggested that such exclusion is the case above, the dichotomy was
for the purpose of illustration.
So, is there
anything prescriptive that can be drawn from all of this? Is there a practical
point? It depends on whether or not you find value in the idea of concepts like sympathy, empathy or compassion and what they
imply about and between us. Without a practice – such as meditation or
contemplative prayer – that connects us to an honest view of what we are –
internally and in relation – we will have nothing but external referents; those
things that drive philosophies like objectivism,
the driving force behind the legalism of the great monotheistic moral systems.
This touches on much of what I’ve come to think of as “heartless” in those
traditions.
So, even if
the conventional, guilt-associated conception of sympathy isn’t a priority for you… enjoy the warmth and the swell
of feeling that comes with appreciating that warmth. A more appropriate and
realistic sympathy may follow.
