Some new experiences seem par for the course—feeling less annoyed by crying kids on planes, embarrassingly tearing up to dad-themed commercials—but other changes have surprised me. I’ve grown more suspicious of strangers, for example. I’ve mentally rehearsed potential sidewalk conflicts. I’ve researched nearby boxing gyms, as though by becoming stronger or more threatening, I could somehow keep her safe.
.. Past research has shown that people who endure hardships tend to treat others more compassionately. By contrast, years of medical training candecrease doctors’ connection to their patients’ suffering. And yet scientists know almost nothing about how having children—among the most titanic and most common life changes—affects empathy.
.. First—and this one is easy—I feel empathy for my child on a scale I’ve never experienced before. Second, I can feel my empathy for others sometimes diminish in her presence.
.. By way of analogy, consider self-control. Scientists have long held that will power is like a muscle that tires with repeated use.
.. Based on my own research with Dweck, I have a hunch that empathy works the same way—people are most likely to run out of it when they believe they have only so much to give. Some psychologists have drawn distinctions between two types of empathy: vicariously sharing someone else’s pain, and compassionately wishing to improve others’ experiences. In this view, the former leads to emotional fatigue, while the latter rejuvenates.
The Lost Art of Listening: Has classical music become irrelevant?
The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past.
.. If we properly engage with it, surely it offers an experience of empathy, and not just any empathy, but a transgenerational empathy, in which we try on human feelings from another era.
.. In his brilliant essay on the impact of television, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, the American novelist David Foster Wallace laments the modern-day scourge of irony: “Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalised irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny.” He fantasises about the emergence of “some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”.
.. Classical music is not always single-entendre (Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has a bruising subtext), but in an era dominated by irony there is something restorative about its sincerity.
.. but for some time the arts have not been an end in themselves; there has only been one end, and that is Growth.
.. there are good pragmatic reasons to invest in music education. Ironically, it might even contribute to Growth. Countless studies reveal that music education will improve our children’s executive function, social ability, literacy, numeracy, concentration, brain function, fine motor skills, creative thinking, working memory, study habits, and even their self-esteem.
.. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language.
.. The music that is closest to my heart is chamber music. It is music on a human scale, a single voice to a part: the solo piano repertoire, the lied, the piano trio, the string quartet. A true child of the Enlightenment, the string quartet was described by Goethe as “four reasonable people conversing”.
The Funny Thing About Adversity
Given that adversity is linked with anxiety and depression, why does compassion ever emerge from it?
.. The reason, we suspect, is that compassion isn’t as purely selfless as it might seem. While it might appear to be a response to the suffering of others, it is also a strategy for regaining your own footing — for resilience in the face of trauma. After all, having strong social relationships is one of the best predictors of psychological well-being in the long run, and so anything that enhances your bonds with others — like expressing compassion for them — makes you more resilient.
.. In an article recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Kellogg School of Management professor Loran Nordgren and colleagues found that the human mind has a bit of a perverse glitch when it comes to remembering its own past hardships: It regularly makes them appear to be less distressing than they actually were.
As a result of this glitch, reflecting on your own past experience with a specific misfortune will very likely cause you to underappreciate just how trying that exact challenge can be for someone else (or was, in fact, for you at the time). You overcame it, you think; so should he. The result? You lack compassion.
.. Those who had overcome more severe bullying felt less — not more — compassion for current bullying victims. Likewise, those who had faced greater difficulty with unemployment had less sympathy for the currently jobless. When the adversities didn’t match, no such empathy gap emerged.