The Dark side of Empathy

Since London went into spasm this week, I have been thinking long and hard about what has been going on. The press is throwing out the usual answers - these kids are reacting to spending cuts, to a political platform. Others are just condemning a wave of criminality. Tens of thousands, bizzarely, have signed a petition, saying that rioters should lose all State benefits. Westminster council is threatening to evict rioters (Although they have no powers to do this, but it makes good copy).

Exquisitely timed, a piece of sociological - psychological research was published this week, that sheds a lot of light on the various phenomena that we are seeing.

The article I want to discuss was published this week in "Current Directions in Psychological Science", a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
The article is entitled, "Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm."
Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley.

The essence of the article is this - working class people are far more empathetic. Their lives are more emotion driven. Their very poverty throws them into each other's laps for mutual assistance. They are much better at reading emotions than people from higher socio-economic backgrounds. They suffer the down side of living on the emotional edge, with higher rates of mental disturbance, than those who are emotionally insulated. They respond to their environment primarily on an emotional level. In normal everyday life, they are more likely to act altruistically and to give freely from the little that they have. When things go wrong, on the other hand, the other side of this coin can manifest itself.

On the other hand, people from higher socio-economic levels are poor at reading emotions on other's faces. They hoard wealth and do not re-dstribute it. Their primary focus is on the self, and not on others. They are far less reliant on their peers to get through life.

Interestingly, as people rise in social class, they shift, and start to become less empathetic, and less caring of others.

Now, what has this to do with the riots in London, and the response to them?

Let us look at the responses, first: most social commentators are, of course, from the higher socio-economic echelons. They will look at these rioters, and think, "These are people who are just like me, but poorer." They respond accordingly, and the responses show an alarming lack of empathy.
Westminster Council has threatened to evict council tenants who have had their children involved in the riots. Their children!!! Even if the parents knew nothing about it. I read this, and felt deeply uncomfortable.
Tens of thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition, asking that all people involved in rioting, be stripped of all their benefits. Here too, a lack of empathy and understanding.

Let us look at the rioters themselves. Many, when asked to explain what they were doing, responded in simple emotional terms, the most common expression being "It is fun". The rioters, young boys and youths, who are particularly emotionally unstable as a normal state of affairs, rioted. London used to have regular riots, in the Middle Ages. The apprentices of the City of London regularly went off on a wild rampage.


Essentially, this is what we are seeing. One half of society, the half that responds emotionally, the half that freely gives and that cares deeply for its own community structures, is reacting.

The question is, reacting to what? I believe the answer lies in emotional interaction between the classes. Something unpleasant has been building for a long time, a growing tension.

Since the current government was elected, (And I largely support their economic platform) there has been a burst of non-empathetic language from those in power. Those on the dole, or on sickness benefits and the unemployed have been emotionally attacked by the government, and by the media, repeatedly, day in and day out, for month after month. Feckless! Workshy! Parasites! There have been attacks on the entire concept of Social Housing. Those who receive it, are being made to feel like their Victorian predecessors were made to feel about the workhouse. The language is, quite frankly, Dickensian. And so , as we have seen, has been the response.

Within the communities, a feeling began to build up - until the point of explosion was reached.
These riots are not just about criminality. They are not about people being individualistic. Yes goods and chattels were stolen, but just as frequently, they were simply destroyed by the mob. These riots were not rational, if they were, the targets would have been different. The emotional outpouring that these riots represent was directed seemingly randomly. an animal in pain, was lashing out wildly. I believe the riots are the result of a fundamental disconnect between two very different sections of society.

These disconnects are expressed in a variety of ways, the most visible of which is through language - the previous Labour government, despite its faults, was always careful, always emotionally in tune to some extent with the lower socio-economic group. ( Whom one cannot even call the 'working classes', as so many are unemployed, and in the current jobs market, unemployable, because the jobs they once would have done, simply no longer exist). The current Tory-Liberal government is not. Liberalism, in its English manifestation, is a profoundly middle class movement. So is Toryism. They are both populated by people drawn from the higher socio-economic groups, people who think and talk in a totally different way to those who have been roaming the streets of England.

The Labour opposition has not been vocal in voicing the concerns of the poor - and if it has, it has had its voice has been drowned out. The Press is largely right wing, and the discourse there is also one of attack.

If this rioting were political, the commentators reason, then the targets should have been political. However, these riots, which I do believe are deeply political, in the true meaning of the word political, were driven by the heart, not by the head. They were an attack on the very fabric of society itself. There is a dark rationality to this.

The lower socio-economic classes have seen their jobs melt away to the Far East. What jobs remain for the less academically able, or the less well educated, or for those who speak a different dialect of English, with a different accent from the Middle - Upper Class RP norms, are almost all at the bottom of the ladder. The early morning buses coming in to the City of London are not full of City Workers in suits, but of cleaners and janitors and back office staff. The men in suits start to turn up, pouring out of the mainline stations at London Bridge and Liverpool Street a few hours later. The two populations of staff seldom even cross paths in the street, their mutual co-existence concealed, hidden away.

The end result: an explosion. The response is not likely to solve the problem, unless the underlying emotional wound that lead to the explosion in the first place, is addressed.

Youth Centres must stop closing. Programs that primarily assist the poor must not be cut back. Teenage pregnancy care provision needs to be provided. Day centres that protect the vulnerable need to be ring fenced. The Sure Start programme needs to be expanded, not reduced. The NHS needs to be seen to be protected. The wealthy - and those in government - probably all have private insurance. The poor do not. Above all, the tone of the public discourse vis a vis the poor and disenfranchised needs to change. If it does not, more riots are on the way, and next time, they will be far, far worse, more damaging to life and property, and much better planned than these small fits and spasms that we have been witness to, spasms that rioled across the surface of our body politic.