At the Center of a Healthy Society is a Morality of Community

We cease being a nation when "I" is all that matters

---

The potential connections afforded us by empathy is the closest to infinity that any of us will ever come to. We can make emotional bonds with animals, people, and inanimate objects, find comfort in nature even when it is tooth and claw, and find meaning even in tragedy. That latter may not sound like empathy, but I propose that it is, as empathy is fundamentally based on imagination, a projective connection with an image that resides solely in our own minds. As such, in tragedy, we are bonding not with the event itself, however much inspiration it may be providing, but with the imagined future self that we desire to step into with the new knowledge we desire to claim.

Unfortunately, empathy does not come with an instruction manual nor a moral compass that is anything beyond the subjectively immediate and therefore subject itself to every cognitive bias/hueuristic that guides the mental constructions we experience as reality. Because of this, we can use empathy to connect but we can also turn it off, even if the object of our connection is the same person/object/experience. The impoverished child who tugs at our heart strings in one moment can be forgotten in the next. The lover who rocked our world can be dismissed at the next heartbeat. The friend/colleague/family-member can engender a warmth in one moment and disgust in the next.

The difference of one moment to the next is the active or engaged presence of imaginative empathy, the projection of connection that says “I see you and you’re not alone because I am here as well.” Empathy is the door to identification of union, a recognition that in the creation of meaning we never leave ourselves out of the equation. The “I am here as well” is about dwelling in the same space together.

That space, that relational reality, manifests as every social connection we make, from the blink and you miss it bonds of fellow drivers on the road to the longform bonds of intimate partnership, and the broader social bonds of societal institutions and governmental forms. This is possible not because of empathy’s potential errors, but precisely because of them. Just every friendship and intimate partnership will go through periods of difficulty in maintaining promises and the boundaries that define the label those involved have agreed to, so then broader social bonds go through similar. And it is empathy that powers the creative space for identifying the union (which is not the same as agreement) that bridges the gaps as they form.

If we care for the future of democracy, we must recover that sense of shared morality that binds us to one another in a bond of mutual compassion and care. There is no liberty without morality, no freedom without responsibility, no viable “I”without the sustaining "We.” (“Morality,” by Jonathan Sacks, pg. 20)

In my very first substack article about why I write, I noted as one of my principles concerning ethics that to do it right requires a consciously deliberate activity within community. There are no concerns of morality if you are literally the only person that exists. Morality and ethics are bound within interconnection, which is why social isolation and the various means of dehumanizing people engage in is so destructive. We aren’t just ignoring a fellow conscious being, we’re undermining the very basis that provides us the means for growth, challenge, and learning.

As Sacks, above, notes, there is no liberty without morality, no freedom without responsibility. In other words, for human flourishing to occur we need to actively constitute the space of union that says “we can disagree but we’re in the same boat even when we do.”

The Loss of We for a Shallow I

Much is written about the ideological echo chambers that exist today, and technology’s ability to double and triple down on the ability to almost completely ignore anything that doesn’t align with our narrow view of the world. Further, given how search algorithms work, it is ridiculously easy to think of oneself as having done “research” or “study” when the actual activity is just wading around in the same shallow pool of belief similarity. It’s a topic I haven’t been immune to.

However, in one way, the destructive power of echo chambers isn’t fully recognized. Remember, empathy is about imagination, but imagination is about the building up of flexible associations between seeming disparate pieces of information. Imagination is built, in part, on a tacit assumption that our way of thinking is, if not wrong, at the very least inadequate to fully encapsulate our world. Were we always right, which is the feeling that echo chambers provide for us, we would have no need to build new connections. Were we to see the world immediately and clearly, we would have no need to be creative.

Creativity is the direct outlet of imagination, and imagination provides the fuel for empathy to not get stuck in simple binaries of tribal allegiance. We cannot remove the cognitive predilection to bond more easily with those we agree with (ideological purity testing), or with those who look like us (socialized bigotry), but we can, when confronted by our limitations, seek to expand from them, to push the boundaries that make us, initially, emotionally safe, and find connection even when it isn’t easy to do so.

That part of “even when it isn’t easy,” really should be the asterisk pinned to the word democracy. We don’t build a liberal (not to be equated with a particular party) society of freedom, mutual responsibility, and respect of difference, within an authoritarian state. Yes, the latter may certainly feel more comfortable, so long as the person/group in charge is doing what your tribe or ideological dogma declares is such, but the shoe, as it were, can always eventually be found on the other foot. A society based on “we” is one that recognizes power/influence is not a one-way street, but a game of billiards where force can change direction in ways unforeseen.

An Actively Engaged Social Contract

The social contract of “we” that sustains the “I” we so often associate, myopically, with freedom, does not survive or grow in a passive environment. It must be fertilized by the activities of dialogue, epistemic humility, debate, and a broadening allowance for what the human experience can manifest as.

The human condition is overwhelmingly about relationships-about faithfulness: staying true, loyal, and committed to one another despite all the tensions, setbacks, misunderstandings, backslidings, and all the multiple ways in which we fall short. It is about consecrating the bonds between us. It is about transcending our solitude. (pg. 35)

Uncertainty is not a sign of one’s loss of emotional health, it is one of the bedrock principles of our cognitive lives, one that we avoid through all manner of obfuscation, diving into echo chambers, and using identity labels to dismiss and excise pieces of humanity from ourselves and others. Rather than running from uncertainty, and the felt experience of anxiety that we, variably, experience, we can and should embrace the spaces of our ignorance, recognize the same in others, and build from that common ground. Empathy provides the means for doing so. Our common humanity is the space it leads us to dwell in.

---

References

Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Jonathan Sacks