Once again, TED has come up trumps with a talk by Brene Brown called The Power of Vulnerability.
Brene Brown studies human connection – our ability to empathise, belong, love. The website says: “In a poignant, funny talk at TEDxHouston, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share”.
The connection reaches me via a colleague and I pass it on to a colleague. He spots an assertion he doesn’t agree with (and nor do I) along the lines that People who don’t experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. I see shame as a function of self judgement as much as it is a function of empathy – strip away the self judgment and we still have the capacity to empathise. When we couple our empathy with others with self-empathy we are able to connect with our intentions in doing something even whilst recognising that those same actions were unhelpful. This is the road to sadness and to deep regret – but not to shame.
Putting aside this one assertion with which I do not agree, I applaud Brown for her exploration of the topic of empathy. It’s not just that she is witty and sharply observant in what she says. It’s not just that she exposes the fear and vulnerability that we all feel. It is – for me at least – that she highlights that this is as true in the workplace as it is elsewhere. At home women feel vulnerability initiating sexual contact with their husbands. Men feel vulnerable initiating sexual contact with their wives. At work, we feel vulnerable when we learn we have lost our job. We feel vulnerable telling others they have lost their job. This vulnerability is simply part of the human condition.
Brown highlights those things we do that stand in the way of empathy and connection – with ourselves, with others. She also offers some alternative ways of being in the world. Keep reading if you want to share with me some of my own observations about what Brown has to say. And whether or not you take time to keep reading, you might want to take time watch Brown’s talk and to hear what she has to say.
I read you blogs on Brene Brown and was glad to see you picking up on same point of Brene's talk, where she says:
"The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection."
Though for a slightly different reason than me. I agree with your remark about the importance of seeing loss of shame as part of strengthening in self-acceptance and self-empathy.
Though I feel more strongly about the second part of the quote. Irrespective of the specific characterisation (in this case the absence of shame), it requires believing that there is a certain type of people who "have no capacity for human empathy or connection".
Allowing any kind of exception on something that I believe is fundamental to being human makes a true nonviolent attitude impossible.
Which is what I believe lies at the centre of using Nonviolent Communication and nonviolent activism effectively in the face of serious violence.
Note that nonviolent theorist and activist Michael Nagler says that violence is the negation of nonviolence, not the other way around.
I think it is the most violent situations where nonviolence actually works best, since they allow to reveal one's strength of character, and one's intention of wanting dignity for everyone, more clearly than any non-threatening situation can ever do.
Keeping the possibility in mind that someone might not have a capacity for human empathy or connection, one cannot hold the nonviolent attitude and keep the kind of integrative power that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have demonstrated so dramatically in creating lasting changes.
Jeroen, huge thanks for your thoughts – there's a great deal to explore here.
I want to check my understanding of your second and third paragraphs. I think you are saying – and I want to check – that the act of holding the belief that there is such a thing as a person who has "no capacity for human empathy or connection" is in itself a barrier to connecting with others – once we have taken this view of another person or people we have made it harder to show empathy or to connect with them and this in turn means that we are not taking an approach of true nonviolence.
If I am understanding you correctly, you are highlighting the huge gap between saying a person or people have "no capacity for human empathy or connection" and saying that a person or people does not yet have or has not yet developed that capacity. It's not just that the latter statement holds out hope for other people but also, perhaps more significantly, that hold this latter belief creates a quite different inner landscape within ourselves, in particular when it comes to our own ability to empathise and connect.
Hi Dorothy, thanks for taking the discussion further. You're first part is spot on. That sounds exactly like what I was trying to say!
To your second part, I would like to make two remarks. The "huge gap" part is on target. Yet, I am thinking of a gap even more huge than "Saying that a person or people does not yet have or has not yet developed that capacity". I would rather like to put it as "Saying that the capacity for compassion can become snowed under by hatred and violent thinking". The capacity for compassion has been there from birth and will never completely disappear. Like Carl Rogers said: "It seems to me that when I get close to what the person is, the intent tends to be social. Tends to be more social than what they're doing (..) I feel that those evil behaviours, if you want to call them that, grow out of experience, are not inherent in the indivual at birth". Source: "New World/New Person Pt. 2" on http://www.carlrogers.info/audio.html from 3:45 min.
This means that we can appeal to a person's compassionate side in every moment. We don't have to wait until it develops. Though it may not always answer our call. Sometimes the call has to be quite dramatic to get through. Like the call from David Hartsough when doing a sit-in protest for desegregation of a coffeeshop during the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. David was faced with the choice offered by a hateful man with a switchblade: "If you don't get out in two seconds I'm gonna stab this through your heart". David (who happened to be a quaker using meditation) used the given two seconds to get the courage to say "friend, do what you believe is right, but I'll still try to love you". The man's jaw dropped, his knife started shaking, and then he dropped his hand and left. Source: PACS 164B – Lecture 12 from 32 min.
Which brings me to the second remark I want to make in an attempt to perpetuate this discussion further: However bad circumstances may look, the hope for someone to make a better choice might be fulfilled any moment. Of course, hope creates much more inner peace than hopelessness. But in the end, I don't just want an inner peace, I want it to extend to the outside.
What I would particularly like to discuss is a way to explain how such a nonviolent view stimulates another person to also revert to making decisions out of compassion instead of hatred. Which I think has everything to do with rehumanising themselves. By using violence in any form, one cannot prevent to bring with it the message "I don't trust that you can care about my needs and therefore I have no choice but to use coercion or get away from you". The only way to break this message is by speaking and acting out of the message "I don't like what you are doing now, and I'm not going along with it no matter how much you try to hurt me, but I trust that you are wanting to do good for everyone if you'd find a way that works for you too, and I'd love to work and live together with you such a way".