Suppressing Sympathy

"Being human, their moral sense requires them to manage distress by reinterpreting the situation so as to justify the cruelty or indifference."

This is how James Q. Wilson summarizes in his book The Moral Sense a discussion of the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram.  In those experiments, unsuspecting participants were asked to administer increasing dosages of electrical shock to a subject (really an actor; no one was actually harmed) if the subject answered questions incorrectly.  These words by Mr. Wilson appear in the context of his arguing for an inherent moral knowledge and impulse in humans.

Professor Wilson's point is not Professor Milgram's, namely, that humans will commit despicably horrendous actions against their otherwise closely held moral convictions if they believe that they are aligned with some authority in doing so.  Although this seems true, Mr. Wilson's larger point is that people justify these actions in various ways precisely because they have a moral sense by virtue simply of being human.  One reflection of this moral sense is sympathy.

Mr. Wilson notes that in the experiment, "[f]or most people, only the objections of other people like themselves (that is, like them in being 'ordinary people,' not 'scientists') made them inclined to ignore the instructions of an authority figure" (52).  Authority can be so strong an influence that we need to feel solidarity with others like us and to know that someone is sympathetic to our controversial viewpoint in order, sometimes, to act in accordance with conscience, or our natural moral sense.

But also because a natural human sympathy for the victim butts up against the compulsion many feel at the direction of an authority figure, in all manner of situations we tend to distance ourselves from the victim in order to suppress our sympathy for her, that is, someone with whom we might otherwise identify:  "When we need to reassure ourselves as to the propriety of following orders that require us to inflict pain on others, we denigrate the victims. ... We often attribute to people qualities that make them appear to deserve a fate that has befallen them" (52).  We might call them "scum" or "racists" or "animals" or "deluded religionists" or "backward."  We might assert that they are "doing this to themselves" or "she was asking for it."  Whatever the form of denigration, what occurs is a conscience-alleviating shifting of culpability through a distancing of their persons from ours.  Hence the statement that opened this post:  "Being human, their moral sense requires them to manage distress by reinterpreting the situation so as to justify the cruelty or indifference" (53).

I have recently pondered how other people, regular people, if you will, not just those in experiments or engaged in criminal activity, justify actions such as cruelty or indifference to which outside observers may legitimately object as unethical -- and how routinely this occurs.

For instance, I have friends who work in business.  Many report working in environments of demoralized culture and high turnover.  This combination creates a negative feedback loop of increased demoralization, which leads to more turnover, which leads to increased demoralization, and so on.  Although these firms attract, surprisingly sometimes, talented individuals, most end up leaving.  One friend, who is employed by a small firm of less than 25 people, reports that over the last four years 22 employees have left for one reason or another.  The number leaving per year has been mostly consistent.  If you assume a constant figure of 24 employees at the firm, that comes to 22% turnover on average per year.  Somewhere between 1 out of 5 and 1 out of 4 employees pass through the revolving door each year!

What is most noteworthy, however, is not just the staggering rate of employee turnover but rather the employers' justification for it.  It is always the employee's fault.  It is repeatedly asserted, I am informed, "There's nothing we could have done."  "It just wasn't a good fit."  "She left in order to shorten her commute by 5 minutes; that was really important to her."  "We did all that we could."  Even in the case of terminations, the euphemism is culpability-shifting, or a reluctance to assume full responsibility:  "We had to let her go" -- as if an outside authority compelled them to fire an employee who was disgruntled like all the rest.

A couple of illustrations make the same point.  From horticulture, although many and different types of employee apples are grafted into the firm's tree, it is, my friend is told, that all of the apples went bad, not that there is anything wrong with the tree.  At what point should one rethink that thesis?  From literature, no matter how many people tell the employing emperor that he is naked, he refuses to believe it.  But refusing to believe something does not mean that the proposition is false.

Why do people refuse to suspect that something might be unhealthy with the tree?  Why does the emperor refuse to believe that he is not wearing clothes?  Why does this happen routinely in our daily lives?

If Mr. Wilson is right about human sympathy and the tendency to suppress it, then it is perhaps because deep down, in the recesses of humanity, people are wrestling with a tension:  the impulse of sympathy, on the one hand, to other people whom the first group is hurting and the horrible realization at some level, on the other hand, that they are to blame.  And this realization is too much to bear for an unrepentant heart.

Where does this happen around us?  It does not only occur in exceptional instances, as the workplace illustration above makes clear.

Where does this happen within us?  After all, it is not only someone else's problem.  If we say that it is, we might just have evidence that some other suppression is at work.

Phronēsis, practical virtue, requires each of us to cultivate the natural sympathy with which we may be endowed, to avoid suppressing it unjustly, and to be vigilant to discern -- and quick to repent -- when we fail.