Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

It is very easy for contemporary students of history to condemn past generations for their crimes against humanity.  How could not the people who legally, socially, politically, economically and religiously institutionalize chattel slavery in the United States fail to see moral repugnance and insidiousness of their actions?  How did Jefferson fail to comprehend the inherent and seemingly very apparent contradictions between his grandiloquent words in the Declaration of Independence and his status as a slave owner?  It remains startling to consider the historical reality that women were deprived of the right to vote from 1607 to 1920.  John Winthrop, the second governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Puritan clergyman, who penned the immortal words referring to the burgeoning settlement as “a city upon a hill” also characterized the annihilation of Native Americans as service in the name of Almighty God. 

For a century following the abolition of slavery in the United States, the Southern system of legal and social segregation, undergirded by an uncritical acceptance of White supremacy, persisted without any formidable challenge from the federal government.  It created the conditions in which nearly four thousand people were lynched without any adjudication of those murders.  Perhaps one of history’s starkest ironies is found in the documentary accounts of White Southerners leaving church services and then attending a picnic in an open field where someone was lynched.  Consider the smell of burning and searing human flesh permeating the air as people ate fried chicken and potato salad.  Incredulously, countless murders of African Americans in the South during the height of segregation remain unsolved.  Nevertheless, as we evaluate those dastardly deeds, we quickly and facilely pass judgment upon the perpetrators and other people who indirectly supported their actions.  Yet, a frightening question remains.  Would we have chosen and acted differently?  Were we in the same set of circumstances, how would we have responded to the predominant worldview?  Moreover, are we any different than those persons?  Are our contemporary moral, ethical, legal, economic and political choices any different than theirs relatives to circumstances of a twenty-first century, global economy and village?

A scholarly consensus amongst historians posits the necessity of a minimum of a quarter century’s distance from an event in order to analyze it without emotion and undue influence from one’s personal prism of experience.  When we are too close to a situation, personal feelings and preferences inevitably invade our perspective.  Even in the grand academic discipline and study of history, without distancing one’s self, depersonalizing the topic and emotionally detaching from the object of study, any student will surrender fallaciously to moral superiority and arrogance in his or her assessment of the past deeds of humankind.  The benefit of hindsight fuels this myopic analysis in which a student of history fails to appreciate the inherent limitations of his viewpoint as he or she condemns historical persons for the same offenses.  Rather, as he or she grapples relentlessly with the hard facts and factors which reliable and authentic evidence demonstrates with which historical persons lived, sympathy if not empathy might taper the intensity, breadth, depth and certainty of analysis and judgment. 

I hasten to state and accept the formal and socially scientific respectable methodology of the discipline of history which insists upon requisite evidentiary standards as one analyzes the record of past events.  The historical method first requires thorough research and gathering of extensive and relevant evidence. Second, you evaluate the evidence for its reliability, authenticity and relevance.  Third, a historian synthesizes evidence thereby drawing logical, factual and collegially and intellectually respectable conclusions which instruct our understanding of past events.  Historical methodology does not permit historians to extrapolate a comprehensive understanding from a past era or event from meager evidence.  Erroneously, a historian attempted to detail the lives of wives of slave owners solely from the diary of one woman who acknowledged the fictionalization of certain details.  Parallel to the necessity of maintaining a chain of evidence in the practice of law, historians discard embellishments, hearsay and fictional details.  Conversely, an embarrassment of riches in which a historian peruses bountiful documents does not necessarily yield a more insightful or correct analysis. 

Mostly, historians detach emotionally thus they resist any statements of feelings and personal outlook as these undoubtedly skew anyone’s evaluation.  They restrict themselves to the hard facts, reliable documents and reasonable evidence.  Historians seek a logical conclusion based primarily and fundamentally upon foregoing methods.  Like scientists who submit willingly to peer review, historians offer logical assessments of the data that any reasonable, impartial colleagues can corroborate independently.  Assuredly, historians resist the superfluous notion that their analyses are “the truth.”  The historical method, properly employed, yields “a truth” which future discovery of evidence and release of relevant documents may expel, expand or revise.

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis - Part Two

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

Part Two

I suggest we employ these lessons and techniques from the study of history to personal development and spiritual growth.  As we learn to forgive people, an appreciation of the vivid circumstances and hard facts in which they made choices that harmed us may help us to sympathize and even empathize with them.  An easier and less difficult assessment makes uninformed judgments of the actions of the people who have harmed you.  Immediately, we condemn them for hurting us and being insensitive to our feelings and pain.  Yet, if we exchange places with them, would we choose differently?  Are we better able to defeat our self-centered fears and self-seeking motives?  Do we possess a steadfast and formidable character whereby we are able to choose morally and ethically correct actions despite the hard variables in any situation?  Isn’t it less painful emotionally and spiritually to digress to moral pragmatism and utilitarianism in which we assure ourselves that we seek the best outcome for the most people using favorable and practical means?  In contrast, do we not possess the same moral cowardice and constitutional incapacities that we observe in others?

Consider a specific example.  Approximately forty-five years ago, a grandmother faced a critical decision relating to seven of her grandchildren.  They had been abandoned by their mother in the middle of a winter’s afternoon.  The mother left under the pretext of running an errand at a neighborhood store.  She never returned to her family.  Instead, she left to live with a common law husband with whom she carried on a relationship for the next thirty-eight years.  Her husband and the father of the seven children arrived home that night after a long day of work to discover that his wife and their mother had left them.  An abusive alcoholic, he knew he could not rear his seven children. 

He summoned his mother-in-law to the inner city public housing complex where they lived.  She assisted him and transporting the children to a Southern state where both sets of grandparents resided.  The father asked his mother-in-law to assume custody of his children and her grandchildren considering the fact that her oldest daughter and child had abandoned them.  The maternal grandmother said “No” in response to this request which probably was made as a conditional arrangement until the father could return to assume custody and care of his children.  Parenthetically, he never did.  In fact, he proceeded to acquire a common law wife with whom he would have two other children in addition yet another son with a third woman.  Nevertheless, the maternal grandmother straightforwardly refused to assume custody of the seven grandchildren notwithstanding the fact of her daughter abruptly abandoning and leaving them helpless.

Before rushing to judge the grandmother for her indifference to her grandchildren, pause and consider the very hard facts and context in which her decision was made.  Her husband was an active alcoholic who was not a professional man but the equivalent of a day laborer or tenant farmer in a rural Southern town.  They had late adolescent children who still needed a lot of resources and care as they had not yet graduated from high school which was the requirement for civil service and other jobs at the time.  Plus, they had already assumed custody of a niece and nephew meaning there were four teenagers in their household.  Even with public assistance such as food stamps and supplemental security income, it would have been very hard to provide food, clothing, transportation and other necessities for thirteen people not to mention the lack of healthcare, entertainment and adequate living space. 

If you are a parent of just one child, you can imagine how hard it would be to say “Yes” to the father’s request whether temporary or permanent.  Without any of the advantages or opportunities of middle strata and formally educated American citizens, how do you double the size of your household and provide sufficiently for everyone?  Honestly, would you have been able to say “Yes?”  Further, reflect on the possibility of extensive mental, emotional and psychological damage to the seven grandchildren had their maternal grandmother said “Yes” but eventually was unable to fulfill the obligations.  As wards of the state and rotating within foster care, they would have been prime candidates for criminal activity and other types of deviant behavior.  Notwithstanding her clear alternative to the contrary, arguably the maternal grandmother made the correct choice.

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis - Part Three

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

Part Three

For anyone who disagrees, the burden of history with the hard facts delineated above challenges you to consider if you could have chosen realistically to assume custody of those seven grandchildren.  Switch places with the maternal grandmother and genuinely ascertain whether you could have assumed the responsibility of eleven children in your early sixties.  If you were confronted with a similar and contemporary dilemma, would you be able to say “Yes?”  If you are a spouse and parent, whether you agree with the maternal grandmother’s decision, presumably you can sympathize if not empathize with her.  In November 1967, life’s complexities coerce you in deciding whether you will double the size of your family without any additional resources.  These emotionally intense conditions are compounded by your oldest daughter’s incapacities; you wonder whether you are abandoning these children a second time.  Will they hate your daughter and you? 

Pragmatically and practically, does it make sense to assume an obligation that you are unsure whether you can meet it?  The social and cultural milieu in which you were reared and reside insist that you have unconditional faith in Almighty God who will provide faithfully were you to say “Yes.”  However, you must wrestle with the inflexible and wooden facts which are not in your favor.  You sense your son-in-law is constitutionally incapable of returning to assume custody of the children as he fervently declares he will.  If you say “Yes,” you are committing the balance of your natural life to rearing another family beginning in your sixties.  Will anyone really understand the authenticity of your answer? 

Heretofore, one of the seven grandchildren actually assumed his maternal grandmother was as indifferent to the pain and suffering of his siblings and him.  If asked, he venomously quipped, “She didn’t give a damn about us either.”  Conversely, with forty five years of distance from the experience inclusive of seventeen years of marriage and fourteen years as a parent of two children, he presently feels substantial sympathy and empathy towards his maternal grandmother.  As he emotionally detaches from his unrequited personal pain and depersonalizes the experience through the prism of marriage and fatherhood, he sympathizes and even empathizes with his maternal grandmother.  He realizes he probably would have done exactly what she did.  If challenged with a parallel situation today, he does not know if he could assume such a tremendous responsibility albeit he possesses a stalwart faith in God’s unquestionable faithfulness.

The preceding personal interlude instructs students of history to lessen the forthrightness and ferocity of their analyses of past events.  Like the grandson who arrogantly judged his maternal grandmother over the course of many years, contemporary students of history superfluously believe in their moral superiority when compared with any litany of historical crimes and scandals.  Each subsequent generation deludes itself into believing they would have made more just and moral decisions than their forebears.  Ponder the historical judgments of future generations when they evaluate the use of economic resources, technology, science, the sole superpower status of the United States and her increasingly religious, racial, ethnic and cultural pluralism in the second half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century.  The “Iron Curtain” fell decisively and irretrievably in 1990.  Communism failed without question as a means of maintaining a state and creating flourishing society in which the average citizen enjoys life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Rather than foster relationships with Middle Eastern countries and Third World nations that furthered democracy and individual freedoms, the United States arguably sought economic and cultural imperialism as she strove for control of oil reserves and an unfair advantage in the global market.  Domestically, the last decade of the twentieth century, “The Clinton Years,” was the most prosperous era in human history as no other people have enjoyed the riches and blessings of money, technology, science and political power relative to their historical context. 

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis - Part Four

Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis

Part Four

Yet, there is not one single social or political dilemma that the United States resolved given the seemingly limitless resources at her disposal.  Women still die of breast cancer at alarming rates in this prosperous nation which appears to lack the moral and ethical character to distribute its resources to benefit its most vulnerable citizens.  At the dawn of a new millennium, possibly intractable arrogance and incivility in American international policy contributed to the insanity that yielded the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.  A protracted war of more than a decade costing more than ten trillion dollars and creating longstanding deficits of greater sums was the reaction of the Bush Administration.  There is not a single social ill to which the United States has ever committed similar resources. 

Notwithstanding her premiere status in the world, the United States lags behind as it relates to public education, public healthcare and other societal challenges relative to the resources of other countries and their use of them.  Future historians may justifiably and harshly condemn this current generation of American citizens for formulating and financing a culture of individual and collective narcissism.

Summarily, as we mature spiritually and develop personally, extending unconditional forgiveness towards anyone and everyone who harmed us is a necessity step in achieving wellness, authenticity, integrity, healing and wholeness.  These enduring riches of life will not emerge in the life of anyone who intractably refuses to forgive.  Instead, he or she will suffer greatly with resentment, bitterness and strife.  Those emotional and psychological toxins eventually poison a person’s heart and mind.  An existential and spiritual death results albeit the continuance of physical life. 

Nevertheless, a very helpful, pragmatic and practical method of attaining forgiveness is detailing the hard, raw and complex facts that influenced the decisions of the people who harmed us.  If we switch places with them, perhaps we discover that we would have chosen similarly.  Should we maintain that we would have made more moral, ethical and just choices, can we authentically posit that we possess the courage and character to defeat personal fears and selfish ambitions.  Conceivably, were we in parallel circumstances, we would have done exactly what our perpetrators did.  Acknowledging this stark reality affords us the divine, gracious and compassion opportunity to sympathize or even empathize with the people who harmed us.  As we extend this generosity toward them, we assuredly forgive them following the example of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who prays on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”