Empathy is not just “good for” nice, fuzzy things like peace, and harmony with our friends and kumbaya circles. Empathy is good for keeping us safe in situations where someone (a person, a group of people, a country) is acting in a way we don’t like. It keep us safe because it illuminates why they are behaving the way they are behaving, which in turn allows us to communicate differently than if our only knowledge was their (offending/confusing) behavior and our only goal was stopping it.
It is not our first response. Our first response is to react to their offending behavior. “Panic! Make them stop that thing I don’t like.” But that choice just pits my behavior against your behavior; we still don’t know what each others’ wants are. I think, better, is to get at the wants and the emotional, cognitive experiences that give rise to the wants: to keep drilling down, and down, and down until we can see why the other person’s or group’s wants are their wants.
Armed with the internal experience that motivates their behavior we can then have a very different conversation. Maybe it will still be a violent conversation. Maybe it will lead to making the choice of greater estrangement. The point is that, whether it is international or interpersonal conflict, we are choosing our actions based on information, instead of our actions being chosen for us based of wanting to feel comfortable and wanting things our way. Really what it does is to regulate our emotions. So, choice is one thing empathy is good for.
Another thing empathy is good for is creativity. In the experience of understanding another person’s motivations on a biochemical level, we are changed.
If one way to think about creativity is the merging of divergent or contradictory things -in this case, perspectives- we have done just that. The result of which usually surprises even ourselves, which is what makes it a creative act.
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