The Sympathetic Method

For 12 years, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai and his son hide from the Romans in a desert cave. When it’s finally safe to return, the rabbi finds himself unable to do so. Encased in his own limited perspective, he sees human beings working, plowing, and sowing, and declares, “These people abandon eternal life of Torah study and engage in temporal life for their own sustenance.”

A divine voice sends him back to the cave for 12 more months. This time, when he emerges, Bar Yochai is ready to see differently. As the sun is setting on the eve of Shabbat, he encounters an older man holding two bundles of myrtle branches and, rather than rushing to judge, poses a question: “Why do you have these?” The older man responds, “In honor of Shabbat.” “But wouldn’t one suffice?” Bar Yochai asks. The man explains that one is from the verse to “remember the Shabbat day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8), and the other is from the admonition “Observe the Shabbat day, to keep it holy” (Deuteronomy 5:12). Bar Yochai looks at his son and says, “See how beloved the mitzvot are to Israel.” With this encounter, Bar Yochai’s harsh judgment is softened. He returns home.

Bar Yochai exits the cave twice. In the first exit, he sees human beings as a herd of “these people.” He learns nothing from them because he is certain there is nothing to learn. In the second, he approaches a single human being with curiosity and asks questions. From this stance, he learns about the religious devotion of an older man and a new way to bring the eternal life of Torah study into the weekly practice of remembering and observing Shabbat.

Too often we educate for Bar Yochai’s first exit rather than his second. We awaken in students the capacity to sort human beings into groups and give them a taste for what is wrong with others rather than what is good. This is a dangerous way to educate for participation in a democracy that is brimming with human difference.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked to me that, sometimes, two people meet and discover that they like each other less. Education can bring us together, but it can also tear us apart. How we learn about one another remains an urgent challenge at all levels of American education. Humanistic learning takes place through individual interactions. Groups don’t get to know each other, people do. Universities, which are tasked with serving students from different communities, are primed to do this work. Yet the same moment of history that saw the rise of diversity as an educational value also saw the hollowing out of the most vibrant, simple, time-tested vehicle universities have for learning about others as individuals: the humanities seminar. This kind of classroom is not only uniquely suited to exploring individuals past and present in their depths and particularities, it is also well suited to putting critical faculties back into balance with appreciative ones. It is a tool of civic education.

It is time to move beyond diversity as category fulfillment and to resuscitate tools and techniques that probe the majestic complexity of other human beings. To do so, we can call on the ideas of three great humanists: the economist and philosopher Adam Smith, the novelist George Eliot, and the social reformer Jane Addams. In their work and thought, these three thinkers tapped into a method for appreciating and harnessing the power of human difference. Taken together, I call their mutually complementary approach to learning about others the sympathetic method. If the humanities seminar is the tool, the sympathetic method is the technique. The insights of this method refocus our minds on a singular and urgent question: How might we better learn about one another?

Seven years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, he labored over The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In fact, it was Moral Sentiments, not The Wealth of Nations, to which he returned throughout his life, revising the text in 1767 and again in 1774. In this work, Smith is more concerned with a description and method of moral action than he is with the means and ends of self-love, or as economists call it — self-interest. The book begins with the title Of Sympathy and the following opening paragraph:

Comprehending and exploring the empathetic potential in humanity is fundamental to understanding how society actually functions. We can live together because we can feel for one another, even when the experience of another person is not directly connected to our personal or familial self-interest.

This capacity to share the feelings of others is ignited not only through actual experience. Pity, the universal human emotion, Smith goes on to explain, can be cultivated through imagination. “It is by the imagination only,” he writes, that “we can form any conception” of another person’s “sensations.” He goes on: 

Pity is not the sole human emotion of concern to Adam Smith. Pity is essentially hierarchical. One person feels sorrow for a situation or a set of conditions worse than one’s own. Pity offers a method of building social relationships, but it is one fixed in a system where distance can be secured. You pity what you do not have to suffer. And so Smith offers a distinction between the experience of pity or compassion and the experience of shared joy. Sympathy, for Smith, also becomes the opportunity to experience another person’s pleasure, the set of circumstances that stimulates happiness: “But whatever may be the cause of sympathy, or however it may be excited, nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast.”

Human beings have an ability to create at least momentary closeness by immersing themselves in the happiness of others. We can learn what brings someone joy and then, through our imagination, begin to experience that joy ourselves. Even more than compassion or pity, this quality, which Smith calls sympathy, allows for mutual understanding and fellowship without critical distance.

Particularly in the 19th century, pity, sympathy, and imagination came together in that new literary technology called the novel. Storytelling can be a powerful means for developing our human capacity to feel for one another. The novel, with its added value of length to excavate the complexity of human character, offered a method to learn about others and live with them as they moved through the whimsy of youth and the moral risks of adulthood. If statistics is the form of knowledge that best describes humanity in its group form, narrative, particularly in the form of the novel, best describes human beings in their remarkable specificity, in their wholeness.

In her 1871 novel Middlemarch, George Eliot takes Smith’s ideas from the realm of philosophy into the emotional intimacy of the home. Dorothea, the protagonist, is a serious young woman searching out purpose in life through a potential spouse. She settles, quite erroneously, on the middle-aged Casaubon, a man his nephew describes as a “dried-up pedant” and an “elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor’s back chamber.” Dorothea and Casaubon remain alien to each other, as they are both caught up in their own myopic reality, their own silos, as we might say today — Dorothea through the excesses of youth and Casaubon through the unbending habits of age.

The confinement of their singular perspectives, of their limited reference points, corrodes the possibility of marriage even at its beginning. Their honeymoon seems unconsummated, and the home they inhabit, in the verdant countryside, is cold and lifeless. They never learn to sympathize, in the way Adam Smith means, with each other. They can’t experience pleasure in the other’s pleasure, and the compassion they once felt for each other dissolves through the ongoing doubt and discomfort that emotional distance creates. Dorothea explains the marriage’s collapse:

In this novel, Eliot reveals how a life without sympathy, a life of emotional distance, destroys the foundation of marriage and home. Eliot also shows us that human beings can, through education and life experience, cultivate a way of being in the world governed by sympathy, compassion, and shared joy. As Smith affirmed, we can cultivate a sympathetic imagination. We can be Bar Yochai and his son pausing to ask a man a question that helps us uncover the deep meaning of his deed. These thinkers, through what they’ve learned about human difference, offer approaches to illuminate the wisdom and beauty in the varieties of the human experience.

We read literature because it’s fun and because it offers us multiple perspectives. Smith and Eliot understood that it also offers something more. The narrative arts have the capacity to reach beyond our critical faculties and seize our emotional ones. We can learn to move beyond thinking about and into feeling for. As Eliot writes of Dorothea, “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the light for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.” This too is part of a true civic education. It provides a pathway to the pedagogic promise of diversity, not as a statistical test but as a sympathetic interaction.

Jane Addams, the public intellectual and urban reformer, adopted Eliot’s approach and strategically advanced it for the sake of democracy in America. In 1889, Addams moved into an immigrant neighborhood of Chicago and opened a settlement house, which she named Hull House. It was to be a type of learning community that adapted and responded to the needs of the community, helping with child care, education, and neighborhood issues like sanitation. But the most important work it would do was what Addams called “socializing democracy,” ensuring that different groups could feel for one another.

Addams understood that democracy would never socialize itself and that all groups would self-isolate. At best, this self-isolation would lead to a failure of governance, where powerful groups pursue only their own self-interest. At worst, it would lead to bitter civil discord. And so Hull House became a place where different groups, whether based on economic class, nation of origin, faith, or even age, learned about one another and with one another. They did this through the simple acts of working together, eating together, and reading books together. You will not be surprised to learn that upon opening Hull House, the first book the community read together, Romola, was by George Eliot.

There are many examples of Addams’s genius for socializing democracy; of her educating, in today’s nomenclature, for “diversity.” She noticed that the younger generation, factory workers in their teens and 20s, had few ways to value the wisdom of their immigrant parents and, therefore, came to dismiss or even denigrate them. In response she created the Hull House Labor Museum. The idea for such a place first arose when Addams witnessed an elderly Italian woman sitting alone engaged in a highly skilled but now defunct task of spinning thread on a stick spindle. The woman alerted Addams to the possibility of creating, in her words, an “educational enterprise” that would “build a bridge” between the generations by interesting “young people working in the neighborhood factories” in “older forms of industry.”

After the museum was established, Addams recalled that a young Italian woman named Angelina, who had once studiously avoided arriving at Hull House through the same door as her immigrant mother, began to take pride in her mother’s craft. Addams describes Angelina’s reaction to seeing others admire her mother’s spinning,

Before Addams’s educational intervention, Angelina could see her mother only through the distant and critical gaze so reminiscent of Bar Yochai’s first exit from the cave. The Labor Museum created the conditions for curiosity, sympathy, and admiration, the conditions for Angelina to genuinely learn about her mother. This form of community, the Settlement House, demonstrated, again and again, that learning about one another requires an intimate approach. It demands a sympathetic method, a way of focusing the mind on strategies that will dignify and ennoble rather than debase.

At its core, the sympathetic method is a way to learn about individuals in their wholeness, a way to balance critique and admiration, a way to move from Bar Yochai’s first exit to his second. This method has practical implications for the Jewish community, which invests in holding together people with diverse practices and outlooks. It also has recommendations for education more broadly. Imagine how rich our civic democratic norms would be were we to invest in them. In World War II, the U.S. government began heavily investing in scientific innovation. The results remain staggering, from lifesaving medicines, to radar, to the atomic bomb. The government also ensured that America would produce the next generation of scientists. Today, the federal government spends approximately 50 dollars per student on STEM education and 5 cents per student on civic education.

The scientific method has a funding stream. The sympathetic method does not.

The sympathetic method demands a significant reinvestment in how culture is produced and received in our diverse society. On the production side, it requires the creation of new works of art, literature, and media that portray human beings as individuals through a time-intensive exploration into what they value and what brings them joy. On the reception side, it demands the establishment of intimate spaces, be they seminars or settlements, where the cultural creations of the past and the present inspire curiosity and connection. The scientific method has remade knowledge in its image: It does much good but remains achingly insufficient. It’s time to invest in its counterpart, the sympathetic method, to ensure that students can also acquire the necessary emotional foundation to sustain our civic life.

America has tried its hand at educating through polls, surveys, analytics, and identity categories. These tools of elision have proved insufficient, even degrading. It is time to revive another way to learn about one another. It is time to deliver on the promise of diversity, not as a number but as a pleasure inherent in the act of learning, and a privilege of democratic life.