Empathy is, once more, a capability we share with our non-human relatives and ancestors. But because of our extended hyper-development of language, humans have consciously articulated and extensively examined this quality in ourselves. Like everything else we've taken up to think and talk about, we continue to expand not only our conceptions of but our capacity for empathy.
Yet even the capacity for empathy, in and of itself, will not automatically generate a universal mutually accepted standard of ethics. Humans, like many other species which have developed social structures, communication, and complex mental maps, are born with many capacities which require training from the community to become active. Without the training, the capacities remain dormant.
Language and conceptual skills have continued to evolve and develop over the malleability of our human history as have many of our other capacities such as empathy. But unlike the evolution of physical capabilities, which are largely unconscious, the evolution of ideas and language has moved into the area of conscious and deliberate construction.
As humans we can learn in many different ways; we can teach others verbally, kinetically, visually. We can use demonstration, explanation, experimentation, repetition, conceptualization, memorization. The numerous and varied ways of teaching and learning are unending.
And like everything else we've taken up, we have tended to become particularly absorbed with teaching and learning. We don't just do it, we do it a lot - a whole lot. It is the sole life goal of many people. In fact we have elevated both learning and teaching to the level of one of the essential, primary, and preeminent characteristics of our humanity. It is what we admire, desire, aspire for, and delight in doing.
I'm not talking about getting degrees. I'm talking about people teaching other people how to cook, fix cars, swim, fish, fly a kite, program their DVR. We even feel compelled to "teach" our companion animals all sorts of stuff - mostly our dogs of course since they seem to share our love of learning.
Empathy is one of those human characteristics like language, abstract thinking, math, and riding a bike, that if you don't learn it, you don't do it. We have to be taught how to do it, and we have to engage our mind, emotions and body in learning how to do it. And, like language, abstract thinking, math and riding a bike, the more we learn it, practice it, apply our interest and our effort in improving our ability, the better we get at it.
Each of us has a different style of learning, a different way of becoming engaged and interested, a different rate of learning, a different sequence of learning. But when we become focused, we are very very good at learning stuff and incorporating it into our daily life. We just have to believe that it really matters to us.
Empathy has the capacity to be the key ingredient in a natural sense of morality. But we have to learn to do it; we have to consciously and deliberately foster and develop it. We have to value it, preserve it, strengthen it, care for it as a treasured defining quality of our humanity.
see what happens when we put all the pieces together in the next post
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