The New York Times published a provocative op ed piece on May 5 by Michael Ventura (author of Applied Empathy) called “The Dark Side of Empathy”. It asserts that there are two kinds of empathy: “affective empathy (the ability to feel what others feel) is distinct from cognitive empathy (the ability to understand what others feel). Many people have both. Others, like narcissists and sociopaths, often possess only the cognitive sort, if they have empathy at all. And this is where things can get dangerous.”
Generally, when people think of empathy, they are talking about our response to understanding the other’s feelings: our own feelings of compassion and connection with that person. But this op ed piece says that without the connection component, we have a person who can read other people and use that to manipulate the person(s) to get what they want, without caring. And it further warns that this cognitive empathy is increasing, as seen in people like Elon Musk. Mr. Ventura says, “We’ve heard the ideological dog whistles. We’ve witnessed the fearmongering and overreach shrouded in the guise of protecting democracy. President Trump has long derided empathy as naïve, casting strength as synonymous with domination, suggesting that to care is to lose — and to control is to win.”
Mr. Ventura offers this thought-provoking conclusion: “Empathy that connects, that builds, that heals requires a code of ethics. It requires restraint. It requires trust. It asks the empathizer not just to understand others but also to honor what that understanding unlocks. When empathy becomes unmoored from ethics, it becomes coercion with a smile.”
Many of the comments to this article disputed whether “cognitive empathy” is true empathy, or something else. The common usage of empathy involves relating to the feelings of the other with compassion. When someone listens to an immigrant describing their experience and the feelings that go along with that experience, an empathetic response involves the listener trying to understand the whole person, including their feelings, and then feeling an emotional connection to that person. In other words, narcissism, and it’s extreme form, sociopathy, are all about a self-centered orientation, while true empathy is all about an other-centered orientation. That’s what makes sense in general usage, that’s what is commonly understood as empathy, and that’s the empathetic response we should be striving for.
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