As a consequence of my father being a psychoanalyst, empathy was a frequent topic of conversation in our house and, oddly perhaps, a target for my ambitions. After college I explored that ambition on a children’s psychiatric unit in Minneapolis, where at one point it dawned on me that empathy is an act of the imagination. We hope that our invention gains validity through observation and reassessment, but we can never really be sure how connected we are with another person until that connection is tested. And the nature of a connection is that it is continuously tested. Of course, now that I have two young boys of my own, testing has become a way of life.
Empathy was on my mind this morning as I rode my bike to Darden. Every day I ride past scores of young students on their way to class, and I ride past John Paul Jones Arena, where Morgan Dana Harrington was last seen five days ago. I found myself scrutinizing shrubs and culverts, looking for a clue, knowing full well the area had been searched by professionals. We don’t want to grow accustomed to such stories, but then we grow accustomed to them.
Having just encountered this blog, the idea of difference was fresh in my mind, and I became aware of the armchair profiling I had been indulging in — paternal wariness about a young woman at a heavy metal concert, theories of likely scenarios and perpetrators — and I remembered the important questions that have been raised when others have disappeared: Would we be as aware or concerned if the young woman were African-American or Asian, or a young man? What constitutes vulnerability? Have my perceptions been dulled by bias or media cliché or honed by my wife and coworkers? Do some efforts come naturally while others require us to push through with professional discipline? Can we ask these questions enough?
And that was when I returned to the idea of empathy as an imaginative act, and the idea that we are obliged to constantly scrutinize, disrupt, and prod our imagination to expand further. Dialogue can do this. Art does this. The best leaders do this. This is more than a soft skill; it is a critical means of maintaining one’s ability to perceive one’s world. Wallace Stevens put it best: It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
by Don Stevenson
Senior Editor
Darden Business Publishing
stevensond@darden.virginia.edu
