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. He knew which boy's brother was luring him into trouble and which girl didn't have breakfast. When you walked past his room you heard laughing. And 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 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. after reading Peg's piece on empathy. She defines it as the capacity 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 deftly opens a question it doesn't close, one that has run underneath most of my working life: what happens to empathy when the other isn't a person? What happens when it's a classroom, a school, a community, a sangha — a whole trying to figure out what it is?

Joanna Macy, the Buddhist scholar and systems thinker, 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." Peg's not two rests on anattā, the teaching of no-self. The reason you can feel another's experience as your own is that there was never a sealed self to wall it off in the first place. 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 kids who haven't arrived yet. Empathy doesn't only run between individuals, but between groups, communities, and countless other levels. And it feels completely different depending on which level you're standing on.

At the scale of a person, empathy is fast. You feel it in the body. In practice discussion, in council meetings, across a kitchen table — when someone finally says the true thing, there's a resonance that's physical and immediate and impossible to fake. Peg calls it an "experience multiplier." That resonates. Mr. L. had this attunement, and in abundance.

At the scale of a system, none of it arrives that way.

You could call the difference speed — that you meet a person in a moment and come to know a community only across years, but time is an incomplete description of the difference. Sightlines are better. Sightlines point you to the question of your gaze. Systemic empathy points your attention away from the face in front of you and toward the people who often aren't in the room at all, toward how a choice will shape conditions for someone you don't always see or haven't met yet. 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 different work of discerning how someone got situated and shaped by various forces. The research talks bluntly about the cost of leaning too hard on the first kind: you get favoritism, you get burned out, you get someone who can't make a fair call for the whole because the person in front of them fills the entire frame. The very attunement that is gorgeous at the scale of a person can mislead you at the scale of a system. And the redirection of your gaze, however much care drives it, often feels to the individual standing there like coldness.

In Macy's understanding of dependent origination, an individual "exists as a process, a pattern of psycho-physical events enmeshed with a societal context." You can't find the person apart from the conditions making them. The old image for this in the Buddhist texts is sheaves of reeds, leaning against each other in a pile. Each reed holds the others up. Pull one and the lean shifts across the whole. The reeds are not a picture of harmony, but a description of weight and dependence — of how every choice presses through the entire bundle, whether you meant it to or not.

The holonic view doesn't let you choose. 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 tell him they can't solve for X. Peg's "willingness to engage" and "presence without agenda" 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. But the standard he couldn't meet was the floor every kid in the building stood on, and a floor that bends for someone you love bends for everyone who comes after him. That isn't the absence of empathy. It's empathy one level up. I have gotten this wrong far more often than I've gotten it right, and 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. You can fail this in either direction, and I have flopped in both.

What survives the change in scale is the ground Peg names: clear seeing, willingness, presence, curiosity. Those don't bend. What bends is where you have to point them. At the scale of a person you feel your way toward them. At the scale of a system you tend it, as you would a garden, slowly, across a hundred small moments — the way you come to know a patch of ground not in a season but in years of tending it, failing it, tending it again.

Both are Dharma gates.

I share this school story in the hopes that school makes the stakes legible. In a school, you can often see the need, point to the kid two doors down. Sometimes, a sangha hides them better, but similar challenges arise. A practice kept when it would be kinder to loosen it, a form held, a way of engaging changed — these land on particular people, often the ones most devoted to what they are losing. Tending the whole sangha and tending the person in front of you are not the same act, and most days they do not point the same direction.

So we will get it wrong sometimes, in this sangha practice, in both directions. Someone will feel the weight of a choice made for the whole and feel it as a turning-away. That, too, is the practice — to stay close to the one it falls hardest on, and to not pretend it fell lightly.