PROF SHAZIA CHEEMA
Humans are the only animals hav ing unique phenomenon of empa thy. We generally think of empathy as the capacity to place ourselves in another person’s shoes. It is an innate ability built by nature and nurture. By nature every human being supposes to share same amount of empathy, however, this is not the case because the role of nurture as a major contributor to develop empathy. Deprived and troubled nurturing hamper the empathetic progression, we experience that there are people who care and, on the other hand, there are people who don’t care much. Feeling others’ suffering, pain, loss, joy, achievements, embarrassment and confusion is auto-programmed but at the same time it does not work automatically. The difference in velocity depends upon how we, as human beings, have been treated, how much our fear and fright mode was in our control during the course of living; in the case of fear and safety mechanism if our experiences are more in terms of trying to be safe and freightless then less active our empathy will be. As societies developed the individual safety in regards to food, shelter and physical harm got regulated with com munal effort which eventually lay stone for a system that we are experiencing now. Efficiency of the system depends upon efficient mechanism which requires efforts in terms of kind and cash. Societies with low-efficient communal mechanism experience discriminatory distribution of food, shelter and other basic human needs, therefore, deprivation from primary human needs and inaccessibility to control fear and fright mode stops the transformation of cognitive empathy into effective and somatic empathy. Empathy in not genetic, however, programmed in cognitive system for survival and evolution which required a secure nurturing to convert into effective and later into somatic empathy. Excessive exposure to fearful and unsafe conditions reduces the intensity of empathy and continuity in the same pattern can create minimal reactive response to one’s own as well others sufferings and pains. Third world countries are laboratory to study this phenomenon. Continuous encounter to death, hunger and deprivatio n make s us irr ele vant and affectionless. Trouble being part of day to day life, thinking how to feed ourselves and insecurity about what if the situation gets worst has phenomenal effect on our life. The sheer anger triggered by the deprivation could create havoc for society, self- isolation and self-pitying are a binding force for empathetic decline. This does not stop here, it harnesses the fright and flight mode in full momentum and put us in continuous defending mode, where joy feels suspicious, pain feels ironic, helping hand feels hypostatic, kind words sound like malicious trap. The ability not to express empathy for others and not to feel for one self is near being animalistic. We don’t need to imagine a society going through this transformation as we are experiencing it right away, we are experiencing on a daily basis that deprived are getting more deprived, hungry is in constant struggle to earn food, sick helplessly seeking for cure; on the other hand, we are also experiencing uneven distribution of community resources resulting a few getting the maximum share and many are not even acquiring them. For this ruthlessness anybody or everybody could be responsible, state could be blamed, political system, judicial system, police/security system, education and health sectors everyone could be responsible for that. However, playing blame game can only reduce empathy further below level, which is already taking last breaths in our society. The only manageable action could be individual practice at the moment. Practice of feeling others pain, sharing others joy, maximizing others hope, minimizing others embarrassment, supporting others rights and accepting others perception, this practice will not only help us transforming our cognitive empathy into somatic but also give others some breathing space, a kind moment, an instance to ponder and gather hope; which can create some balance and regenerate the urge of coexisting, that for sure is the first step to restore empathy, which ultimately means restoration of humanity. If our state is weak than let our faith on each other be strong so that our humanity could be kept intact. —The writer is associated with the University of Lahore.
