A Tripartite Theory of Empathy (and biking)

 “[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.”

            - Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I have spent my last couple summers exploring the wilderness in a few different fronts – alone, with a contingent of teenagers I was responsible for, or with friends. This summer is my first summer ever exploring an urban wilderness – which to me is more wilderness in an overwhelming-confusing-get-lost-easily sort of way.

One of my goals this summer was to learn how to live in an urban community. These past couple weeks I have begun to delve into what living and working in an urban setting means. Most striking to me has been the apparent boundaries that define our lives when we limit ourselves to a metropolitan context.

I bike to work everyday (or most days) along a well-used route in the Cities (the most biking friendly city in the country!). The commuters using the same route each day are a diverse bunch: older men in spandex with wiry legs and grey hair, cross-country ski teams measuring lactate levels after a big hill, metropolitan women in hipster jean shorts and Toms calmly saying “on your left” in a sweet voice as they pass me, and middle-aged men part of the substantially active Twin Cities biking cult (snobby about their beverage choices and their bikes).

One of the most striking differences between my experiences in an actual wilderness, living on an island near the Canadian border, and this urban wilderness, set against the backdrop of a residential street in St. Paul, is the way we view people. In the city, people are what you see – they are the clothes they wear, the things they do, the restaurants they like, and the stereotypes they seem to represent. In contrast, I have spent a full day canoeing around the Boundary Waters in previous summers and seen my fellow paddler only at lunch – there is no need to turn around and communicate, because you can communicate using the pull of your paddle through the water.

When interacting with people in a true wilderness setting, you don’t see people - you feel them. That sounds cheesy, but bear with me – Nietzsche has this wonderful way of explaining what makes humans unique through the analogy of The Bird of Prey.  A bird of prey will kill to eat; it would not make a promise to a mouse to not kill the mouse if it were starving. The bird of prey has no ability to sympathize with the mouse – to recognize that the mouse may experience pain when the bird kills it, or have a family it wants to go home to.  It has no empathy. Humans are distinguished by other species by their ability to feel empathy for each other, and to subsequently make promises not to kill other humans.  I think when you experience people in the outdoors, you empathize with people more because you have to make promises to them – you’re forced to promise to keep paddling, even if you’re mad at your fellow paddler. I think sometimes it is harder to feel empathy for people in an urban setting, because you only see them, you don’t learn their stories and develop a sort of empathy for them.

Our community conversation this week yielded a discussion about how it is easier to feel empathy for something abstract than for something concrete – i.e. it is easier to sympathize with children suffering from hunger in Africa than those suffering in the United States. I still agree with that, but I think there’s another layer to that analogy. It is easy to sympathize with the far abstract – something we don’t see everyday. And it is easy to sympathize with someone close to you whom you know and understand why they feel or act a certain way. What’s hard is sympathizing with the middle realm – the people you see regularly but don’t understand or know. The people you see only as stereotypes. I guess we can call it The Tripartite Theory of Empathy (ha). But in any case, I think the middle realm is what primarily exists in an urban environment – we constantly run around in our own little worlds and observe people as we see them, remaining concerned only with the people who we can truly empathize with. 

Not being able to properly empathize with the people around you city creates a number of additional boundaries – people are relegated into vice districts, upper-middle class suburbs, the working class areas, Uptown. I think the space boundaries set up in the Twin Cities have been one of the most striking things I’ve noticed in my time here, particularly through the tour we had last week. Vice districts may not exist in the same way they did in the 1930s, but the boundaries between neighborhoods are still very strong.

But a neighborhood is a way of identifying a community as well – it helps make you feel connected to the broader whole of the city, and activities that strengthen your neighborhood strengthen your sense of belonging for a place. When considering what makes a true community, or what helps you most effectively live in a metropolitan area, I think we need to consider how we feel connected to that area. I believe the way to strengthen a community and help people feel like they belong is by moving beyond a neighborhood to empathize with the middle realm, with the people you pass on the bike trail, and with the people who might not belong to your neighborhood. Community needs to be small to be effective – a block where you know your neighbors – but it needs to be connected to a broader whole to be strong.

I think that’s what I’m realizing social change is, and what constitutes effectively living in an urban community – empathizing with the middle realm. Most of the organizations we’re working with this summer have recognized the need for such empathy. What I still haven’t decided is whether we need experiences in the outdoors to help us understand how to empathize with people beyond our immediate community, or whether an urban environment is enough.