An "Ism" for Everything...

"IN THOSE YEARS, we lost the meaning of we, of you", Adrienne Rich writes in one of her recent poems. Chararterizing the past decade, Rich joins the chorus of those for whom the 1980s became a symbol of indifference, a time for selfishness, an era of greed. This perception has now gained wide acceptance and expression-even to the point of redundancy and triviality.

Looking beyond this anti-eighties rhetoric, though, there would seem to be a deeper and more enduring loss to our society and our lives. It is the disappearance of something fundamental to this civilization, the abduction of a virtue essential to the civil society we have come to know and appreciate. It is the loss of empathy.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines empathy as "the power of projecting into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation." Another way of expressing this would be to speak of human transcendence-the ability, and most importantly, the willingness of individuals to transcend their own sphere of interest or private life in order to gain greater understanding of another's situation. It is a fundamental sort of generosity, a generosity of spirit and mind which allows the embrace of another's problems, an understanding of another's agony.

Empathy requires from the individual within society a sense of common purpose and destiny, and a commitment to succeeding as one or not succeeding at all. People have to believe that they could have been in the shoes of others, could have been suffering as others are, and could be in need as much as others are. Then one would or could understand-the first step on the way to feeling some sort of compassion, some kind of desire to help.

The difficulty in attempting a discussion of empathy, the loss of it (whether real or imagined) and its significance in our lives, is that one is constantly hovering at the edge of sentimentality, self-righteousness and utopianism. Empathy is about "putting oneself in someone else's shoes," of seeing things as the other might see them. It is a moral imperative which has been an essential part of most of our childhood commands and exhortations.

There occurs a moment, though, when we begin to be told that the pitied no longer deserve our pity, and to be taught that if only everyone "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps," we would all become splendid examples of individualist accomplishment.

The current political climate is filled with exited obituaries for Great Society Liberalism, about how government aid-that is, our aid-to the needy,the unemployed and the homeless is wasteful, inefficient and ultimately incapable of making any real difference. Freed from the shackles of empathy and compassion, many have begun to ask, Why should I feel obligated to support (in form of taxes, for example) the poor or the homeless? Why don't they make it on their own? I did.

IN THE PAST DECADE, this deceptively sensible and reasonable, if not selfish disposition has been elevated to the level of ideology, to a starting point for decisions about state and society. Largely untested and unchallenged, this individualism has been to the '80s what JFK's call to "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can d do your country"was to the '60s. His idea has simply been turned on its head, and has been done so for two equally potent, yet flawed reasons.

The first is the absurdly anachronistic idea that people make it comletely on their own in late 20th century America; the second, that we as individuals find our sense of belonging only within a particular and exclusive environment, whether it be economic, sexual, ethnic, religious or racial.

Insisting that personal success is simply a question of pulling hard enough at one's bootstraps (ignoring, obviously, the cases where there are no boots to be found, much less bootstraps) betrays profound ignorance of the challenges and obstacles facing the poor of this generation. A generation, which, incidentally, is the first to expect a lower standard of living than that of its parents.

Lives, jobs and careers have simply become too interdependent, too interwoven for anyone to claim pure self-reliance (even Clarence Thomas needed nuns, Yale's affirmative action plan and the patronage of Sen. Jack Danforth to succeed).

The days are over when a family could rely on its own efforts to provide food, shelter and clothing. Daily life has been inextricably linked to common societal efforts-from law enforcement, transportation and employment to education and health care.

It may require the collapse of one or several of these common goods for the public to grasp the essential nature of communal efforts and shared sacrifices. When that happens, though, we can begin to hope for a renewed sense of mutual interdependence, a belief that the success of one depends on the security of all.

Empathy has also suffered from what has been called the "disuniting" of America, the balkanization of our ethnic melt, the belief that each group should seek its own interests in the zero-sum game of political power. This rising cult of ethnicity is promoted by intellectual ideologues of different nationalities who insist on defining community and belonging strictly in terms of religious, ethnic or sexual identification.

THIS MOVEMENT has promoted a litany of fragmenting "isms"-from bilingualism to lookism. In most cases these campaigns for particular rights are expressions of genuine suffering. These are not bogus concerns. But the cumulative effect has been to divide Americans into smaller and smaller interest groups.

Militant gays seek power and protection by outing "closet" homosexuals; Afrocentrists, in extreme cases, speak of standard English as the "oppressor's language" advocating "culturally relevant curricula" in which the "home and community dialects" are recognized; Jewish extremists denounce the Christmas tree as a symbol of oppression and insensitivity. Segregated into these enclaves, the victimized (both real and constructed) not only contribute to a culture of separatism, but inadvertently play into the hands of those who would deny them any retribution or justice.

The proponents of individualism with all their exhortations to self-help and self-reliance will point to the separatists and argue that universal aid programs and communal solidarity are rendered superfluous by the efforts and gains of advocacy groups. Any sense of common responsibility will be deemed inappropriate and inefficient in this state of ruthless competition for political power. And the consequence will be disastrous to the poor and genuinely victimized of those very groups.

The great potential for communal achievement will be squandered, and the whole that once was greater than the sum of its parts will be shattered into a thousand pieces.

Empathy, then, is twice cursed. Not only does it suffer at the hands of conservative proponents of an outdated individualism, but it is also fractured by the surge toward particularism in what was once to be the great amalgamation of innumerable peoples and cultures. Empathy has been lost between these two mutually enforcing powers, and the result has been a growing indifference to the plight of the millions who genuinely suffer in this country.

IT WOULD SEEM naive to suggest a way out of the quandary, given its deep ties to the most important political and cultural forces of our times. But a reinvigorated sense of empathy, reflected in a greater degree of communal solidarity, is the only way to help those truly in need. Only then can a sense of communal solidarity regain meaning as a strengthened social contract rebuilds the ties between rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed, empowered and powerless.