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empathy
I Was Attacked by an Owl and This Is What I Learned
I projected my desires and perspectives onto the owl without endeavoring to understand the owl’s perspective, something all to common when we approach people with differing viewpoints from our own.
Oct 06, 2024
Last month I was walking through the woods by my house at sunset when a nearly fully grown juvenile barred owl swooped over my head and landed on a branch in front of me. I was awestruck by this gorgeous bird and began doing what I’ve always done with wild animals who do not flee from me: I talk to them. We looked at each other for a long time before I decided to move on. The last thing I said to the owl after a nearly 10-minute one-sided "conversation" was, “Good night. I love you.”
Moments later, I felt a blow to my head, after which the stealthy culprit swooped to another branch to stare intently at me once more. I crouched down to grab a stick to hold above me in case the owl came after me again and slowly backed up to return home, where my husband, a veterinarian, could tend to my bloody talon wounds.
I’d heard about barred owls attacking people, but I never imagined I would be a victim. After all, I’m an animal advocate and humane educator. But I had misread everything. I was chagrined to realize that I’d been under the illusion that we were enjoying each other’s company.
Dangerous Assumptions
Just as I had misread the owl, I sometimes misread people, mistakenly assuming we’re on the same page. I often think I’m being understood, and that I’m understanding, when I’m not. This is probably true for most people. After all, it’s hard to ignore the escalating and dysfunctional levels of polarizing discourse in our culture, where mistaken assumptions and miscommunication are ubiquitous, adversely impacting our ability to come together and effectively nurture a truly healthy, inclusive, collaborative society. As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
Every time we make assumptions, there’s a good chance we’ll be miscommunicating and misperceiving, limiting the opportunities for real communication.
There are so many assumptions that prevent effective communication. We may assume that someone is religious because we are believers (or vice versa). Or we may inquire about someone’s astrological sign because we think astrology is a legitimate science, foisting this belief system on others without a second thought. When we meet someone who grew up in the same neighborhood we did, we may ascribe similar values and political beliefs to them. And when we meet people from different backgrounds, we may assume their values differ from ours and treat them with less openness.
I have friends who, thinking they are being generous, believe that supporters of the presidential candidate they abhor are simply “duped.” Other, less generous, friends think such supporters are either “selfish” or “stupid.” Some of my Christian friends think nonbelievers like me are “going to hell.” Some of my atheist friends think those who believe in God have a “mental disorder.” These are the actual words and phrases some have used in my presence.
Such assumptions arise effortlessly as we project our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions onto others. Unfortunately, this habit narrows our perspective and limits our ability to truly understand the complexity of others’ lives and minds. Every time we make assumptions, there’s a good chance we’ll be miscommunicating and misperceiving, limiting the opportunities for real communication. When we jump to our inevitable conclusions, we trade the possibility of true understanding for a false sense that we have communicated effectively.
Changing the Conversation
There’s a way out of this failure to communicate. It starts with something so natural to humans, and so obvious, that it hardly seems worth mentioning except for our seeming unwillingness to embrace it widely. We must cultivate and act upon our innate curiosity and desire to learn. In so doing, we eclipse a darker human propensity for "us vs. them" thinking, which leads us to perceive "the other" as a threat.
To communicate effectively with people who have different perspectives and beliefs, we must be eager to learn about those perspectives and beliefs. That means asking questions with friendliness and a true desire to understand rather than debate. It means striving to understand why someone holds a belief or position. What fears, experiences, or values drive their thinking? It means that when we hear something that challenges our worldview, we resist the urge to argue or correct and instead lean in with curiosity. In this way, we become better able to cultivate empathy, a foundation for understanding. In an increasingly polarized world, understanding becomes not just a moral imperative, but a practical one. Without it, divisions are likely to grow.
One of the lovely side effects of bringing genuine curiosity and openness to others is that we are likely to discover points of agreement. As we find those places where we can agree, division dissipates and the ties that bind us strengthen so that we can find places to collaborate. Coalitions to solve problems are usually more successful when diverse groups of people come together across divides to achieve shared goals. Whenever we allow side-taking, rather than collaborative problem-solving, to be our endpoint, we miss the opportunity to make our communities, nation, and world better.
The Role of Fear
One of the obstacles to making curiosity our default mindset is fear: fear of animosity and violence; fear of what society would become if others’ perspectives took hold; and sometimes even fear that we might be persuaded by a different perspective, which could threaten our existing identity and relationships. These fears are readily fostered in our society and sometimes within our families and communities. They may also be reinforced by our experiences. Since my encounter with the owl, I now enter the woods at dusk with some trepidation. Gone is my unadulterated joy and openness in the presence of these birds. Yet, my new fear is also a reminder that curiosity is indeed the gateway to understanding.
How to Move Forward
Had I spent a little more time cultivating my curiosity to better understand barred owls, I would have learned about their territorial nature, a trait we humans share with owls. I would have known better than to talk at a bird who had just flown low over my head and was perched staring at me, less curious than baleful. I wouldn’t have made the bird feel threatened by my refusal to leave their territory. I would have understood and been able to put my empathy into action by quickly moving along.
What would putting empathy into action look like with our fellow humans? A good first step might be to stop fomenting hostility, derision, and insults, whether spoken aloud about "others" within our perceived in-groups or on our social media. Whenever we make fun of, express hatred toward, or trivialize the perspectives of others, we perpetuate polarization and reinforce divisive thinking. This is not to say that we should make nice when someone intentionally says or does sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, or bigoted things. What it means is that we demonstrate respect for others’ divergent perspectives that stem from different lived experiences, sources of information, and long-held values and beliefs.
One might think these commonsense suggestions would be widely welcomed and adopted, but we’ve become so habituated to polarization that we often unconsciously stoke it. It’s not as if most people want to offend and be subsequently attacked, but nonetheless we regularly project our beliefs onto others and fail to consider the impacts of doing so. I projected my desires and perspectives onto the owl without endeavoring to understand the owl’s perspective. Reflecting upon the experience has made me wiser about how I might show greater understanding not only in situations with wild animals but also with my own species. Perhaps we can all learn something from an owl attack.
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The Problem With Complicity
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot face the truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound.
Mar 04, 2024
There is a problem with accusing ordinary Americans with complicity in the consequences of their government’s foreign policy. The problem is not with the validity of the accusation. Although Americans have been repeatedly misled by the foreign policy establishment, their complicity in the immense suffering wrought by this establishment is indefeasible. First and foremost a moral accusation, aimed at rousing empathy and a sense of ethical obligation, the problem with complicity is that it is ineffective in catalyzing a critical mass of Americans to wake up and challenge the foreign policy status quo. The accusation has helped mobilize a moral minority, but it has not worked with the majority.
There are two principal reasons for this failure. First, in order to be motivated by charges of complicity we must feel empathy for those in whose suffering we are complicit. But these people (from Palestine to Iraq to Chile to East Timur) tend to live far away and often share little connection with ourselves. The capacity for empathy is here impeded by cultural distance. This is a universal impediment. But it is perhaps particularly acute in the United States, our immense power having long shielded us from the imperatives of cross-cultural empathy and understanding. There are many people who manage to overcome this impediment, their empathy towards the suffering of others driving them to incredible acts of protest and solidarity. Sadly, such people are in the minority.
The second reason that the charge of complicity is ineffective is that accepting complicity requires accepting the reality of what we are complicit in, viz., the enormity of suffering for which our country is, wholly or in part, responsible. Facing this responsibility can be incredibly painful. Trained from birth to believe in American exceptionalism and intrinsic goodness, most of us flee from the awful truth that the country we love has been, as often as not, a global chaos agent. When the reality of complicity becomes impossible to deny, the effect on the psyche can be truly catastrophic. To truly contemplate the extent of our complicity opens us to the tragic fate of airman Aaron Bushnell, whose final words before self-immolation were that he could ‘not remain complicit’ in America’s support for genocide.
The majority of Americans cannot accept their complicity because they cannot bridge this cultural distance and cannot face this truth about the country to which their identity is so tightly bound—a truth whose enormity, if acknowledged, threatens us with mental breakdown and despair. At some level sensing this possibility, most cannot face the steamroller of apocalypse that is the American foreign policy establishment. This is the steamroller that has already destroyed much of the Middle East; that is facilitating a genocide in Palestine (while escalating tensions towards a regional war); that is barreling towards catastrophic conflict with China; that has rolled back protections against nuclear war; that is destroying the credibility of international institutions like the UN; that has welcomed the utter devastation of Ukraine for the sake of “containing” (i.e., destabilizing) Russia. If we do not stop the steamroller soon, if we do not stamp out the American death cult before it turns truly suicidal, we will lose our country to the plutocratic fascism that is already gripping the national throat.
If moral appeals are insufficient to rouse Americans to the extreme threat posed by the steamroller, what might rouse them instead? The answer is self-interest. The appeal to self-interest is morally inferior to the charge of complicity. But it is more efficacious. Even if people cannot bring themselves to feel what Susan Sontag called “the pain of others,” even if they cannot accept responsibility for their government’s role in precipitating this pain, they can still be stirred if they sense that these policies are also harming themselves and those for whom they feel more intuitive empathy.
The self-interest of ordinary Americans is rarely invoked in debates over US foreign policy, however, save in vague claims about protecting our “freedom” or saving us from terror or the revanchism of Vladimir Putin (a man who, we are led to believe, will soon march, shirtless and saddled on a bear, from the Donbas to Krakow to London to West Virginia). Rarer still are frank discussions about the economic and security risks posed to ordinary Americans by their government’s foreign policy—ordinary Americans whose stock portfolios do not wax with war, who are not employed by the lobbying groups and think tanks funded by the arms industry, and who are on the hook for the more than $13 trillion spent this century on the American war machine.
The reasons for the minimization of self-interest in debates over foreign policy are obvious. For decades, the animating ideology of US global power has been liberal humanitarianism. This ideology works only insofar as its promoters can claim that rabid interventionism and war profiteering are in fact expressions of a selfless, almost millenarian desire to bring the world, by the barrel of a gun if necessary, towards liberal democracy. Thus we are saving the world from authoritarianism or terrorism, or we are making it safe for democracy or freedom or free trade. We are, in short, always working towards the salvation of the world. Lest anyone think that our motives are insincere, lest anyone suggest that only a privileged elite benefits from US interventionism, or that what appears as humanitarianism is in actuality a crusader complex—lest any such accusations arise, the foreign policy establishment must be able to pretend that its raison d’être is, first and foremost, the peace and prosperity of all humankind.
By centering foreign policy debates around such lofty ideals, the foreign policy establishment can avoid acknowledging the truth: the truth that we are poorer, less respected, less influential, and less safe today than we were, not only on September 6, 2001, but on December 31, 1991. Far from improving the lot of ordinary Americans, the immense sums spent on national “defense” have done little but destroy the lives of millions abroad while squandering so many possibilities for national renewal at home. As genocidal extermination continues in Gaza, as we reach an inflection point in the war in Ukraine, and as we sleep walk towards catastrophe in Asia and the Middle East, it is incumbent upon us to break through the conspiracy of silence on the subject self-interest: the self-interest of “real America,” of “the 99%.”
How do we do this? We do it by developing ever more persuasive arguments that highlight the immense damage that our foreign policy establishment has done to our economic well-being and national security. We do it by asking each other whether we wish to live in a country where the annual budget for national “defense” has exceeded $850 billion, even as as many as 13% percent of the population is “food insecure” (i.e., hungry), real wages have been stagnant for fifty years, wealth inequality has skyrocketed, longevity and educational achievement has declined, and deaths of despair have soared—including among veterans, who are killing themselves at a rate of nearly 17 people per day.
Finally, we need to ask our fellow Americans whether they wish to live in a world where their government is increasingly isolated on the world stage, is shredding the “rules based order” tenuously established after WWII, is increasing the threat of nuclear armageddon, and is flaunting the human and political rights of non-Americans (and sometimes of Americans themselves). We must ask these questions, and we must propose answers backed-up by reasoned argument and researched data. We must convince our fellow Americans, not of their (again, incontrovertible) complicity, but of the fact that an unchecked, unethical, and frankly psychopathic foreign policy establishment serves none of our own interests as Americans: our interests of living in a prosperous society, a respected nation, and a peaceful world.
One day, Americans will be forced to deal, en masse, with the tragic fact that, as Frederick Douglas once put it, “there is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States.” Until then, and if we wish to build a majoritarian movement that can put an end to these practices today, the appeal to self-interest is our best hope.
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