The Trouble With Empathy...

Social Science has much to tell us recently about how people relate to each other across the class divide.  Much of the recent research shows that, just as we suspected, those with social power not only have difficulty sympathizing with those below them - they can't even see or hear them.

The scientists suggest that being poor or of lesser social status makes us more empathic.  If we have no money to hire help we are more apt to cultivate friends and neighbors to get things done.  Research also finds that all of us have problems hearing and empathizing across the lines of class and status.  Worst of all, the powerful consistently downplay the pains and problems of those less fortunate.  We tend to focus our attention on those we value most.

As you can guess, this leads to rich congressmen cutting funding to the poor and less fortunate as well as other kinds of prejudice. 

It would be just like a scientist to point these things out and then move on to some other area of research.  Fortunately, there is research to suggest solutions.  It turns out that people who are forced by fate or circumstance to talk and interact shed their prejudice fairly quickly.  If, god forbid, you should make a friend across the class divide prejudice becomes even more difficult to maintain.

What frightens me is that we have a wide and growing divide between the powerful and the rest of us.  That divide makes it much more difficult to reach across and find friendship and empathy with those who have more or less than us.

Remembering that we live in a democracy, finding ways to reduce the gap between the rich powerful elite and the rest of us is imperative.  Democracy cannot survive with power in the hands of those who don't hear the poor.  Oligarchy was not what the founding fathers envisioned, but it is what will persist if we can't find our way to empathize across those class and status lines.