Leadership and the Need for Empathy

On the evening of April 4, 1968, presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy made a campaign stop in Indianapolis.  Informed that the mixed race crowd was unaware of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Kennedy told them.  He abandoned his planned remarks and shared this with the crowd:

"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

While anger-fueled riots broke out in other cities, the crowd in Indianapolis responded not with fury but with forbearance.   Kennedy, who knew so well the pain of loss from an assassin’s bullet, met the crowd not just on the ground of facts but on the higher plane of feelings.

Kennedy sympathized with his fellow mourners.  But he did more.  He empathized with them; he felt what they felt.  It’s the difference between “I’m sorry” and “I’m hurting, too.”  Both are important and helpful expressions, but empathy requires more and is a step toward doing more.  

We all have the capacity for empathy.  We are social creatures or we would lead solitary lives.  Neuroscientists are exploring what they label the brain’s “mirror neurons” to help explain empathy.  A “mirror neuron” fires when we act but also and when we see someone else engage in that same action.  Mirror neurons explain why we may tear up when we see someone cry and why we grimace when we see a sports hero grimace at a loss.  Mirror neurons enable “theory of mind” – being able to think about what someone else may be thinking and feeling.  The science of mirror neurons is not without experimental questions, but it’s useful even as metaphor.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a student at Southwest Texas State Teachers College when, for the 1928-1929 school year, he took leave to teach Mexican–American children at the segregated Welhausen School in Cotulla.  Nearly four decades later, after he had signed the Higher Education Act of 1965, he recalled:

“I shall never forget the faces of the boys and the girls in that little Welhausen Mexican School, and I remember even yet the pain of realizing and knowing then that college was closed to practically every one of those children because they were too poor. And I think it was then that I made up my mind that this nation could never rest while the door to knowledge remained closed to any American.”

In the public arena, empathy is often contrasted with logic, especially among those who disdain “touchy-feely” social policies.  Empathy without logical reasoning may demonstrate good intentions but result in bad execution, but so can logic without empathy. Government cannot help those it does not fully understand.  FDR’s response to the Great Depression and LBJ’s “Great Society” had failures and unintended consequences to be sure, but Americans needed to know their leaders felt what they felt or the social upheaval of those periods would have torn the nation apart. 

A society’s health depends on its social capital.  The extent to which we trust each other determines how effectively we can work toward common goals.  Without empathy, social capital deteriorates.   Many Americans, on the political left and right, have too little empathy for each other and sense that politicians do not empathize with them.   African Americans look for signs that people, especially their government, feel the pain of four centuries of oppression and failed promises.  Religious conservatives want to know that politicians understand the threat they feel to their beliefs.  Those in poverty want leaders who engage them as people not statistics.  Immigrants and asylum seekers want to believe their need for a better life and being treated with dignity is shared by those who already have that better life and sense of self-worth. 

Those in the front lines of the pandemic response have modeled empathy for all of us this year.  Showing empathy is one of the most essential behaviors we now need from our new president and leaders in all walks of American life.  In addition to the health care community, these leaders have many other good models to follow.  When President Bush committed the United States to fight AIDS in Africa, he showed the power of empathy to cure disease and improve America’s image in the world.  When President Obama sang “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine shot to death at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston South Carolina, he showed the power of empathy to heal Americans. 

Americans have suffered so much pain this past year – medical, racial, economic, political.  It’s time to stop the shouting and to start the sharing of care, concern and concrete action that form the path from sympathy to empathy to healing. This is not just a task for leaders. It’s a task for all of us.

Photo Credit: Robert F, Kennedy, Indiana Historical Society