Timothy Recuber

The book got a great review in Inside Higher Ed on December 14.

Here’s an excerpt:

Recuber quotes Adam Smith on what is involved in a sympathetic response to others’ misfortune: “The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment.” This seems carefully balanced — a synthesis of much public-sphere argument, no doubt. But it is also demanding. It implies some obligation to find an effective means to alleviate the suffering as well as to determine if any part of it was preventable. Sympathy, to use the preferred 18th-century term, was not just a personal emotional response but also a communal force. It held society together and could, if strengthened, improve it.

Fast-forward two centuries and a few decades, and we find the contradictory and perverse situation that Recuber describes in a series of case studies. Means of communication exist that can expand our powers of sympathy and our capacity to intervene to reduce suffering — and they do sometimes, but in problematic ways. It’s not just that the intensity and pervasiveness of media coverage of disasters can induce what’s become known as “compassion fatigue.” That is certainly a factor, but Recuber emphasizes the more subtle and insidious role of what he calls “the empathic gaze.”

Where sympathy means an awareness of another’s unhappiness as something that can and should be alleviated, empathy, in the author’s usage, “refers to an intersubjective understanding of the other’s plight devoid of the obligation to intervene.” It is a relationship to the other’s suffering that is of a “more passive, vicarious character.” The capacity for empathy is much praised in the contemporary literature of self-help and personnel management. Certainly it’s preferable to the psychopathic indifference which, of late, increasingly seems like the other main option on order. But in Recuber’s estimation it rests content with having reached a secure but passive position vis-à-vis suffering, if not a rather morbidly sensationalistic variety of pity.

My impression is that Recuber, far from chastising us as a generation of moral ghouls feasting on disaster, actually regards sympathy as our original or default mode of moral perspective (rather as some 18th-century thinkers did). His case studies of disasters from 2001 to 2010 are, in effect, accounts of sympathy being frustrated, exploited or otherwise short-circuited in diverse ways by the channels into which the media directs it.

The whole thing is worth reading–take a look.