The Politics of Suffering

Empathy & Compassion as an Embodied Response

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.
Felix Adler

“I feel your pain.” This statement has become a bit of iconic humorous presidential lore as delivered by Bill Clinton in recent years but I think its resonance goes unconsciously deeper than its apparent humor. To tell someone you feel their pain says something about you and the relationship you have with another. Empathy is now emerging as a concept that is crossing multiple disciplines as conflicts between individuals, companies, genders, races, and nations continue. What happens when we empathize? How are we drawn into someone else’s experience through our imagination and what takes place when relationships are formed and informed through the lens of empathy? How does empathy produce compassion as a deliberate act to resolve the felt pain between individuals and groups? Is it possible that embodied empathy or compassion is actually an interpretive posture through which one relates to the world?

The media is not a reliable interpretive window on reality but daily incursions into its vortex reflect a world in significant flux and deeply troubled. Much of this has to do with shifting power bases through the globalization of the world economy and the fight over resources. On a much more existential level, however, is the apparent diminishment and failure of the modern enlightenment project to direct the world through reason. For centuries it was perceived that reason and logic would ultimately prevail and that knowledge would always be processed and mediated through the ability of the individual to come to an unprejudiced understanding as to his or her reality. We were assuming that the power of intelligence and good sense would prevail if given an opportunity. Well…it has not happened.

In our attempt to solve human dilemmas we have begun to understand that the desire for understanding and the logical assertions as to how and why cooperation might be advantageous for both parties often does not prevail in the subsequent engagements of differing parties who may have a history of dispute and opposition to one another. Regardless of the ultimate goal of cooperation, understanding, and insight, thoughtful sympathy does not ultimately triumph. Why does difference and struggle reign in much of the world today? Why are many individuals, communities, groups, and nations seemingly locked into the dispirited position of hopelessness? Is it possible we need to create an entire area of study entitled the "politics of suffering"? Is it possible that the locus of that study should be the actual human body? Is it possible that compassion and empathy as distinct human acts give us a different set of interpretive sensibilities in resolving human struggles?

I opened this blog with the statement regarding feeling someone else’s pain. It is clear that certain individuals seem to have highly formed skills and sensitivities to sensing and interpreting another’s pain. When this pain has been prolonged and historic as in the case of endemic racism, only person’s who have had similar experiences or who are bodily aware of the pain the experiences caused can speak into the conversation. It is the old adage of walking a mile in someone’s shoes but on a deeply spiritual level.

One of the reason politicians often get nowhere in solving the apparent misreading of disparate groups and their struggles has to do with the lack of empathy and compassion. It is one thing to see the dissimilarity of perceptions, the history of the dispute and acknowledge both sides or one particular person’s experience. It is another to enter deeply into the experience of pain through which these individuals daily live. In my work with healing retreats I am amazed at how deeply felt injustice is in bodily pain. The idea that the mind is a separate entity floating above the body is a significant misconception. Humans are a whole. The inequity of life is not merely some idealistic philosophical concept discussed in classrooms and courts. What humans experience tells them who they are. Prolonged injustice cannot help but deeply form individuals into whom and what they have become and are becoming. Compassion is a way of seeing that pain.

In the rough and tumble world of men, crying is usually considered a sign of weakness. Strength in needed to traverse the vicissitudes of this life therefore acknowledging injustice through emotional expression is considered by many men to be wasted energy. “What is the point,” they may ask. “My pain is seen as a weakness and thus any open expressions of its formative power on my ability to live only place me farther down the power chain.” This is a highly over simplification of this phenomenon of men’s complicity to affective silence but it is clear that many men seldom if ever emote their present condition as it relates to the psychic pain they are experiencing. You will never know how they “feel” about an incident or issue. You may hear their detached impression or conclusion regarding an encounter; however, this should not be mistaken as this person’s final or ultimate understanding on the injustice or pain to which they are referring.

Suffering always has an implied powerful narrative to it. When one begins to listen to another’s story of pain and suffering, inevitably one will hear about power and governance. Someone controls something someone else needs. This may be actual resources or be more reflective of issues of human spirituality like love and respect. Someone desires to have it and someone else has decided not to give it or gave that impression. The politics of suffering engage this narrative from the perspective of the pain that is felt in the body (which includes all human experiences and emotions). The question ask here is, “And how do you feel about that?” This question is not to deify emotions as the most articulate reflection of truth or reality. These emotions are always riddled with reconstruction, memory’s here say, victimization, and anger. This question is ultimately part of the act of compassion. To be compassionate is to know bodily (in other words in your own body) how another feels or felt when certain things happened to them. This means being in touch with your own encounter with injustice and the ensuing suffering that came as a byproduct of that experience. To be compassionate is to, through the resonate power of your own imagination, begin to make that person’s story part of your own. You are now in divine collusion with this person. This pain is not merely their pain but “our” pain. This is what humans do: listen to each other’s stories.

The act of compassion honors the experience of this “other” as a reflection of the divine creation and desires to see this pain healed and the person restored. Once again this does not deify the emotional suffering. It spiritually brackets the suffering through empathetic compassion. Embracing the impact of certain events on someone else is validating the sense of the injustice through compassion. This does not mean one acknowledges all perceptions as true (ultimate assertions as to who is responsible) but as “deeply felt” and part of this person’s spiritual grid.

To feel another’s pain is to acknowledge as real the suffering this person has experienced. The naming of that suffering, its nuanced outworking, and its impact are ultimately healed through compassion inside of community. This is where these wounds become sacred portals through which healing must come for humans to be more human. When the community does not have the ability, commitment, or space into which this compassion can be ministered, injustices will continue to fester, grow, and even permeate into larger trans local skirmishes. We tell others when we are hurt and we demonize those people. This demonization becomes our history and to a certain extent, “the others” history from our perspective. The politics of suffering asserts that humans can hear these stories of pain and bear them up together. The politics of suffering through compassion offers an interpretive experience through which humans now can bring this disturbing account to the conversation and find empathy and support. This bond now appreciates the insight gained through the empathetic transference of one person’s injustice as seen through the eyes and heart of another. I can speak up now when I see and hear of injustice for I know its malevolent and revolting power to cloud and malform. My empathic experiences now make me a prophetic voice for the weak, lost, abused, and emotionally silenced. Compassion is now not merely an insight, but an ethos and value through which human beings live out their very existence. I feel your pain and you are real.