Tag Archives: capacity for empathy

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A Lion in Winter

Pliable, accommodating, and conscious of the trail of impressions they leave, ‘rhetorical personalities’ are intrepid seekers of approval, even in ‘hostile’ social settings.

It has been a few years since Bill Clinton has been in the news. But it should have been no surprise when he showed up at the recent Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For years Clinton has been the go-to guy to rally the troops. In this case it was to sing the praises of candidate Kamala Harris and ding the opposition. Still a commanding figure with a full head of white hair, it perhaps should not have been a surprise when his voice had thinned and grown a bit softer. But he was still interesting, even if he lacked the swagger that made him a special case in the annals of political communication.

For me, the fun of seeing Clinton is that it was a good reminder that I had not so long ago put forward a theory of the “rhetorical personality,” making the case that this former Governor of Arkansas represented the best available example of person reveling in his role as a public advocate. For most of his life, connecting with others was everything: the source of his energy, effectiveness, persuasiveness, and some occasional missteps. I wasn’t alone in making this assessment. Clinton was the subject of a Mike Nichols film Primary Colors (1998), depicting the roller coaster of the 1992 presidential campaign. Chris Hegedus’ and D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about that campaign, The War Room (1993), is also now a classic. At the time, “creatives” sensed that Clinton was someone who could deliver the drama and rhetoric to match his considerable ambitions. In short, he is a masterful politician and a brilliant rhetor. Very few people willingly left in the middle of a Bill Clinton speech.

Perfect Response book cover

I started the book with the subtitle “Studies of the Rhetorical Personality” with a tribute by the veteran reporter, Joe Klein, who wrote the definitive study of Clinton’s early life and considerable charisma.  Appropriately, Klein titled the book The Natural (2002), explaining its meaning in the Preface.

“His ability to talk, to empathize, to understand; his willingness to fall behind schedule, to infuriate his staff, merely because some stray citizen on a rope line had a problem or a story that needed to be heard—will doubtless stand as his most memorable quality. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota . . .once told me a story about a friend of his, a schoolteacher named Dennis Wadley, who was dying of cancer in 1994. “Dennis was a political junkie,” Wellstone recalled, “and I arranged for him to meet the President just before he died. We met at the end of the day, at a local television station in Minneapolis. Clinton came right over to us and he immediately sized up the situation—Dennis didn’t want to talk about his disease, he wanted to have a policy discussion.  And the President stood there, for forty-five minutes, and gave Dennis the gift of taking him seriously, listening to him, responding intelligently. He never mentioned the illness. It was an incredibly gracious act, entirely natural.”

Pliable, accommodating, and conscious of the trail of impressions they leave, rhetorical personalities are intrepid explorers even in potentially hostile social settings. Their lives gain purpose in deeds executed through interactions with others. They seem permanently situated in a kind of southern exposure, drawing energy from their surroundings and giving it back even when others have cooled. As Bill Clinton’s many critics have reminded us, being a rhetorical personality does not make an individual a better person. Nor does it say much about their political judgment. It simply means they are better tuned to pick up and react to the vibes of others. In short, they are other directed, filled with genuine empathy, and loquacious.  We’ve seen these features in the lives in figures as diverse as the recently deceased tv host Phil Donahue, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, the recent Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and former U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright. All used their positions to expand their reach to a larger audience, at the same time remaining open to the challenges of different kinds of stakeholders. Donahue might seem an odd choice, but his easy transactional style was used to good effect in a week in 1987 when he moved his show to Moscow.  The host’s willingness to risk his popularity shows the confidence and pleasure a rhetorical personality gets from direct exchanges from others.

As to the model of Clinton, we see his adaptation to a group in one of the 1992 presidential debates against George W. Bush.

And here’s a clip from his 2024 DNC appearance in Chicago. A slower pace and thinner voice is evident, but the pleasure of making a point still comes through.

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The Attractive Human Capacity for Empathy

second thoughts

Had we not been given so fitting a term, someone would have surely had to invent it.

It is virtually impossible to think of the effects of most forms of complex communication—from talk therapies to film—without addressing the capacities of key agents to acquire understandings that privilege compassion over judgment.  As film critic Roger Ebert noted about movies, “films are empathy machines.” We want to connect, and so we are drawn in when we see ourselves in the behaviors of others. It is an axiom of screenwriting that viewers will need to align with at least one character within a story.

Despite its obvious place as an essential feature of the fluent communicator, the capacity for empathy is unevenly distributed across any population.  Especially in these sour times, with many happy to describe their estrangement from others. But empathy remains a central capacity necessary for individuals engaged in true interactive communication.

Empathy is a bond created by recognition of oneself in someone else’s experience.  Or, as Martin Hoffman ingeniously describes it, empathy is “an affective response more appropriate to someone else’s situation than to one’s own.”  It simultaneously acknowledges the authenticity of another’s feelings and suggests the momentary creation of a more personal shared experience. It is a reminder that we are not alone, even when we feel estranged from other people. Empathy happens when we meet the challenge to imagine the inner lives of others.

President Obama after Hurrican Sandy White House Photo by Pete Souza
President Obama after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 

The word itself was not the invention of academic psychology, but grew from German aesthetic theory at the beginning of the 20th Century.  Robert Vischer was looking for a way to express the idea of projecting oneself onto another object (Einfühlung). He wanted to find a vocabulary that would help in the analysis of the individual’s response to the visual arts.  Had he not discovered so fitting a term, others would have surely had to invent it.  It is virtually impossible to think of the effects of most forms of complex communication—from film to talk therapies—without addressing the capacities of key agents to acquire empathetic understanding.

To some extent we seem hardwired for simple forms of empathetic responses.  In his Social Intelligence 2006, Psychologist Daniel Goldman describes an unlearned “primal empathy” that flows from simple contact with others. We and other primates are naturally inclined to “read” facial and physical expressions, converting them into tentative understandings about what others may be experiencing.  The threshold of awareness can be measured at the margins, as when a primate or infant is able to recognize itself (as opposed to an unknown or threatening alien) on a reflective surface. This kind of “mirroring” begins a sequence of consciousness that includes thinking as if they were the other. “I know how you feel” may be a cliché for the ages, but it reasonably describes what we take to be relatively faithful inferences made in limitless ranges of situations. Knowledge of an individual and their world increases the likelihood that we will recognize some of their experiences as our own.  In friends those bonds deepen and grow.

Most of us worry if we don’t find this impulse alive somewhere in the words or actions of a new acquaintance.  We ‘read’ others for signs that they understand the challenges we express.  The alternative is indifference or hostility: responses that school us into accepting feelings of estrangement.

Still, even with sincere effort, there is no guarantee. Familiarity can sometimes make empathy whither. Sometimes the more we know about another person, the less of a connection we feel. Biographers of famous people sometime report this effect.  The advantage of a loyal pet is that it will rarely reveal a backstory that makes us question our willingness to project the best into their actions.

In clinical settings focusing on mental health, empathy still functions as a core value in client centered therapy.  The idea of talk therapy without a supportive and accurate listener is almost unthinkable.  If quick and critical judgment is the poison of too many troubled relationships, empathy and full consciousness of how each party is feeling is a necessary antidote. This therapy is predicated on the suspension of judgment long enough to understand another.  Not surprisingly, the inability to be sympathetic is a recurring symptom in problematic mental processing, including paranoia, narcissism, and some forms of autism.

Because empathy is a subjective experience, it is easier to observe its basic impulse than to accurately map its affective meanings. We can strive for objective measures of it, but its sources are always bound in alignments and understandings unique to the individual. Thus, the great paradox of empathy is also the paradox of communication:  we live in the isolation of a unique private consciousness, even while an innate quest for connection pulls us out of ourselves and toward others.

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