Empathy at Scale

Seventeen years ago I fired a teacher everyone loved.

Mr. L. was four years in to his career, young, calm in a way most young teachers aren't, and he shared cultural roots with our kids. They saw themselves in him, and he knew them. He knew which boy's brother was courting him for gang life and which girl didn't have breakfast. When you walked past his room you heard laughter in it.

But his students could not do the math. At the end of his first year, his ninth graders moved up to tenth-grade math further behind than they should have been. I hired him a world class math coach, co-planned with him weekly, and gave him another year. The gap didn't close. I looked for other positions, but nothing was a fit. When I finally sat him down to let him go, the air in my office felt thick, like molasses — and he was heartbroken, and surprised, because he could not see past his own love for the kids to the level where that love wasn't enough.

I've been thinking about Mr. L. since reading Peg's recent piece on empathy — the capacity, she says, to feel another's experience as if it were your own. The not two that separates real attunement from the safer distances of pity or sympathy. Her piece opened a question in me: what happens to empathy when the other isn't a person? When it's a classroom, a school, a sangha still trying to work out what it is?

Joanna Macy uses the term holon. A holon lives as a whole and a part at once. A cell holds together, complete in itself. It also belongs to an organ, which is whole, which belongs to a body, which belongs to a community, nested up and nested out, no floor and no ceiling. No single level counts as the real one. They all do. Macy puts it this way:

As open systems interact, be they atom or organism, they form larger self-sustaining patterns, which in turn relate to build yet more inclusive and more varied forms. Each level is irreducible, and each whole is a holon — comprising subsystems, it is itself a subsystem in a larger system.

This does something to not two. Not two rests on anattā,¹ a recognition that allows you to feel another's experience as your own. But something else is also true: not two doesn't stop at the boundary of a person. There's no sealed self at any level. The classroom is not two with the school; the school is not two with the neighborhood it sits in. Empathy runs not only between people but between groups, communities, whole nested orders. And it feels wildly different at different scales.

At the scale of a person, empathy is fast. You feel it in the body. In a hard conversation, across a kitchen table, in practice discussion — when someone finally says the true thing, something resonates — visceral, immediate, impossible to fake. It's an experience multiplier, as Peg says.

At the scale of a system, empathy does not arrive that way.

You could call the difference speed — you meet a person in a moment and come to know a community only across years. But time explains only part of it. The difference is one of gaze. Empathy at the scale of a person turns you toward the face in front of you. Empathy at the scale of a system turns you away from that face, toward the people who aren't in the room at all — toward how this one choice will settle onto someone you don't see, or haven't met, or won't meet for years. It's a harder kind of attention to hold, because there is no face to return your gaze.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman, drawing on a long line of empathy research, separates "affective empathy" — feeling another's feeling, the not two in the body — from "cognitive empathy," the slower work of discerning how someone got situated and shaped by the forces around them.² The research is blunt about the cost of leaning too hard on the first kind: favoritism, burnout, the person in front of you filling the entire frame until you can no longer make a fair call for the whole. I have read that and thought of Mr. L., and then thought of myself across the desk from him, my own affective empathy going off like an alarm — this is a good man, he loves these kids, do not do this — and beneath it, fainter because it had no face in the room, the ninth graders who could not yet solve for X, and the tenth grade they were walking into unarmed. The very attunement that is gorgeous at the scale of a person can mislead you at the scale of a system.

In Macy's understanding of dependent origination, a person "exists as a process, a pattern of psycho-physical events enmeshed with a societal context." You cannot find them apart from the conditions shaping them. The old image for this in the texts is a sheaf of reeds, leaning against each other in a pile. Each reed holds the others up. Pull one and the lean shifts across the whole. Mr. L. was a reed. So was every kid in his room, and every kid in the rooms down the hall, and the ones not yet enrolled who would inherit whatever lean I left them. Not a picture of harmony, but one of weight, and of how the one choice I could make would press through the entire bundle whether I meant it to or not.

The holonic view will not let you settle. The person and the whole are both real, both ask to be met, and neither cancels the other. Mr. L.'s grief was real and deserved to be met. It was loss. And the kids two doors down, inheriting the gap, were owed something too — something that had no voice in the room, because ninth graders don't write the principal to say they're falling behind. The willingness to engage, the presence without agenda, all the ground Peg names — these don't get softer at scale. They get harder.

Empathy at the scale of a system sometimes asks you to do, to a specific person in a specific moment, something that does not feel to them like care at all. It felt to Mr. L. like betrayal. And it was, at the same time, the deepest care I could show the kids he loved. Both were true. It took me years to find words for it: what looked like the withdrawal of empathy was empathy, one level up. Not its absence. Its enlargement, to a scale that had no face in the room to plead for it.

I have gotten this wrong more than right. The wrong times were almost always the times I let the face in front of me talk me out of the pattern, or let the pattern talk me out of the face. I have sat across from someone's grief and lowered a standard I should have held, and told myself it was kindness. I have held a standard and gone home hollow, sure I had protected the whole and unsure I had protected anyone. You can fail this in both directions.

The seeing, the willingness, the presence, the curiosity — none of that changes when the scale does. You just stop being able to feel your way. Up close you find a person by instinct, fast, in the body. A whole you can only garden: on your knees in it, tending and tending, learning the ground the slow way, across years of working it and failing it and working it again.

We will get this wrong in the sangha too. The stakes are only easier to see in a school, where you can point to the kid two doors down; here they hide better, but they are the same stakes. A practice kept when it would be kinder to loosen it, a form held, a way of meeting one another changed — it lands on particular people, often the ones most devoted to what they are losing. Someone will feel the weight of a choice made for the whole and feel it as a turning-away, and they will not be wrong.

Mr. L. came to the graduation of our first class. In the thick of crying students and parents, we hugged. I loved the man. He'd gone back for his master's after I let him go. He chaired a math department, at another school. It was a relief to learn he didn't loathe me.

I still think about the molasses air in that office. Knowing the words for a thing is not the same as being at peace with it. I can say empathy one level up and mean it, and still feel the pull of the man across the desk, still wonder in the odd hour whether it was empathy at all or just a shape I gave the loss so I could carry it. What I made was a call that owed him a grief I could not spare him.

That is as close to peace as I have come, and it is not very close.

Footnotes

¹ Sometimes I think that anattā is the first of the Buddhist teachings to arrive as an idea and the last to arrive as an experience.

² The split is cleaner on the page than in a chest. Goleman himself adds a third strand — compassionate concern, the impulse to act — and most days the three don't wait their turn.