How we can address our empathy problem

India’s privileged have an empathy problem. Here’s how we could start addressing it

By now, amidst the pandemic-induced lockdown, it is evident, that is if it wasn’t already, that India’s elite are mostly heartless when it comes to the country’s poor. Rather than lament the situation (laments have their value in this context though), let us reflect on how it can be remedied.

A first step would be to understand why we, the privileged, don’t feel enough for our suffering compatriots, certainly not enough to confront our own culpabilities or prod our governments into meaningful action. As supposedly educated, thinking people, surely we should be doing that.

Wrong conclusions

The apathy emanates from a notion seeded within us early in life, that misery is inevitable in India. We grow up learning that India is large and poor. This becomes the peg for adults to explain tales of starvation, violence, and exploitation reaching young, inquisitive ears. Since we are a large and poor country, we unfortunately house a disproportionate share of the world’s suffering and bad eggs, they tell us. The point rings truer after every encounter with misfortune.

In time, sitting in cushy perches, occasionally perturbed and guilted but unwilling to concede that our station is anything less than hard-earned, we fortify the inevitability theory with other positions. Namely, that the poor are lazy, alcoholic, unhygienic, etc. and have only themselves to blame for their situation. The castigation comes easily. The poor are often from another social group.

Or we tell ourselves that having done our bit as voters and taxpayers, possibly even as volunteers and donors to sundry public causes, there is nothing more we can realistically do. And then finally, there is the idea that we must cut the government some slack. After all, India isn’t an easy nation to run. This line, of course, is selectively deployed, only when the party in power happens to be one we endorse.

All this, mind you, is when we are still capable of mustering a semblance of compassion. Things get worse when ivory towers are high, when claims of recaptured national glory are loud. The woes on ground appear exaggerated, even staged, the handiwork of anti-national, anti-investment, poverty-peddling forces in politics, media, and civil society.

Developing empathy towards our co-citizens

Clearly, we need to find our empathic side. In this endeavor, one piece of encouraging news comes from the field of psychology. Empathy deficits, research suggests, are not hardwired into humans and can be overcome with sustained effort. Even if this insight seems inconsistent with the insensitivities and cruelties we are aware of, let us repose trust in it. Not believing in redemption would be an unconscionable surrender to darkness.

Moving forward, we need to abandon our core beliefs and re-center our moral core with two fundamentally changed positions. First, that poverty and its pains aren’t inevitable; they are avoidable, addressable. Tragedy does not happen because we are a large and poor nation. It happens because we are an underprepared and insensitive one. As Odisha with its handling of natural disasters and Kerala with its handling of COVID-19 have shown, loss of life and livelihood need not be a fait accompli even in the most catastrophic of circumstances.

Second, having established that many a loss we have hitherto considered providential are attributable to failures of society, markets, and the State, it is necessary, indeed patriotic, to ask inconvenient questions, seek answers from those we have chosen to represent us, seek greater bang for our (tax) bucks, and locate our acts of giving not in frameworks of charity but in frameworks of rights and empowerment.

Challenges and solutions

What will constrain us from embracing these positions? The idea that poverty and injustice are man made conditions will not be easy to wrap our heads around. It runs contrary to a long-held, bias-affirming, self-absolving understanding of India. The point about being more questioning is probably more acceptable in principle, but one imagines punches being pulled at crunch time. It is someone else’s fight, it could embarrass political parties and leaders we support, and there is no predicting how far an establishment with a bruised ego can go.

The central challenges then to our empathy-building project are those of imagination and citizenship. We need to imagine an India where every citizen feels secure and respected and enjoys a decent quality of life and safety nets. We need to believe this is possible, not in incremental, dithering steps but in rapid, purposeful strides. And we need to push ourselves, our communities, our enterprises, and our representatives to work on this dream, and interrogate them when they falter.

This is onerous – but doable. Provided the right policy framework and attitude-shaping cues, we have, both as individuals and a social class, found the incentive, will, and enterprise to reshape our relations with family, society, business, knowledge, governments, politics, tradition, environment, technology, almost everything. There is no reason why this cannot extend to co-citizens. As for whether we can manage the spine to demand answers, we have to re-discover our famed argumentative side, recognise that national interest is better served with searching queries than in indifferent silences.

That still leaves us with the ‘what is in it for me’ question. Here, it is useful to remember two things. One: Nations, like workplace or sports teams, are as strong as their most fragile links. The pains of malnutrition, disease, skill shortages, and social unrest may be borne disproportionately by some but are inescapable for everyone in the long run.

Two: It is in the nature of unquestioned power to subjugate. A foothold on a higher rung of the food chain only marks a graduation to a relatively safer place. Predatory instincts are better reined in when underlying structures are safe and just.

Imagine two office towers. One fire-proofed through and through. Another where only corner offices have protection. Where would you rather be when the flames rise?

(Manish Dubey is a policy analyst and writer)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.