If Empathy is Easy...

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I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women

And the hints about the old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps

—Walt Whitman

They whipped John Newman.

Seventy-five lashes on a sandbar on the Missouri River for sedition.

They whipped him good.

It was something he said.

Five months into the Lewis and Clark expedition, and spirits were low. Each day took them farther away from familiar territory. They had seen windstorms, bear attacks, sickness, death. One young man got separated from the expedition for weeks. He had almost starved before reuniting. Two others had gone missing—on purpose, it turns out. They found one of them. He was tried and convicted of desertion. The other was never found.

As for John Newman, the specifics of his crime are lost. Maybe his words had incited the deserters. We don’t know. We just know that his peers tried and convicted him of sedition. We can only infer that it was an especially fraught time.

There’s something else we don’t know: How did it feel for a soldier to take 75 lashes on a rainy October day in South Dakota, as a crowd watched? And what was it like to watch? How many of the men winced at each stroke of leather on skin?

At least one person complained: An Arikara chief was traveling with them when the whipping occurred. He thought it was too cruel. We know this, because later that night, he complained to Captain Williiam. Clark didn’t record much of the conversation. I don’t know who would have been translating at that point, and I don’t know how much to trust Clark’s reporting. Here’s what Clark wrote:

The punishment “caused the chief to cry untill [sic] the thing was explained to him,” The chief agreed that an “example” had to be made, but he seemed to think it would be more humane to just kill the man. His people never used the whip, he said, even from birth, according to Clark’s skimpy journal entry.

I think Arikara people practice a form of tattooing that would have been extremely painful. It’s not that the chief was squeamish about physical pain. It’s that some pain is dignified, while other pain is humiliating. And the way different peoples experience suffering might be beyond mutual understanding.

There’s a word that pops up often in the bicycle community: sufferfest. People write about the gnarliest mountain-bike trail, or the biggest climb, or most oppressive weather conditions. It’s a point of pride. I don’t think the touring I’ve done qualifies as “sufferfest,” but I’ve embraced the aesthetic. I’ll be talking about a difficult ride. Someone will say, Oh I’m so sorry! And I catch myself. They thought I was whining. I wasn’t whining, I was bragging!

Gal Beckerman wrote a fascinating essay in The Atlantic about the history of experience: “What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?” [See Link at the bottom of this newsletter] The author interviews several historians who specialize in “the history of emotions and senses.” Historian Rob Boddice challenged Beckerman with a question about a “medieval carpenter hammering away in his workshop.”

“Imagine this guy: he’s building a table [Boddice] said. Suddenly the carpenter misses the nail and bangs his thumb instead. “What did that feel like for him?” Boddice asked. I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he’d just asked me to solve a quadratic equation in my head. “I guess it probably stung, and then his thumb throbbed?” I ventured, remembering actually banging my own thumb a few weeks back while assembling and IKEA desk Boddice nodded, then said, “Let me ask you again. What did it feel like for him?”

That question is more complicated than it seems. True, something universal happens in the body when a hammer meets a thumb, but after that “an internal process of interpretation assign[s] meaning to that response.” There are an infinite variety of responses to the stimulus, an infinite variety of meanings coloring that response.

Even emotions are hard to pin down. “[T]here is no spot in our heads where a Platonic (or emoji) version of sadness or happiness resides,” Beckerman writes.

Boddice, we find out, would like a T-shirt that says “down with empathy.” To explain Boddice’s rejection of empathy, Beckerman reflects on the experience of the medieval carpenter. He asks questions about the carpenter’s culture, religion, work life. “Does this happen a lot?” How does his religious background color his concept of suffering? “If suffering, sin and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are ‘lived connections,’ Boddice said, ‘and you’re surrounded by them’ how might he feel when the hammer hits the thumb?”

What if Walt Whitman had asked questions like these? I used to think of Walt Whitman as the soul of America.

I celebrate myself and sing myself

And what I assume, you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I thought of “Song of Myself” as an anthem for finding unity in our differences. But then, back in the good days of Twitter, I met a Native Alaskan poet who eviscerated the poem. “What I assume, you shall assume” suddenly looks too proscriptive. I had forced the line into what I wanted it to be: “What you assume, I shall assume,” where “assume doesn’t mean “believe” but “collect.” Now I wonder if the “empathy” in this poem is more of an invasion than an attempt at understanding. I understand you. You’re in my world now.

This definition of empathy is too easy. It’s the process of superimposing my experiences on top of someone else’s. But what if we define empathy as hard work? And what if that work involves asking the kinds of questions Boddice asks about the carpenter? And what if we think of empathy as a race worth running even if we can never really reach the finish line?

If empathy is facile, so is the deliberate lack of empathy. I remember the political science professor who told his students that people in “third world countries” don’t value life the way we do in the West, so we should trim our moral revulsion about stories of torture or mass bombings.

And recently, studies have appeared showing that doctors have been taught to expect a higher tolerance for pain in people of color—and patients continue to suffer as a result.

When I started writing this, I thought I was contradicting Boddice, but I’m not, am I? The political science professor thought he was being empathetic. He thought he understood how other people felt.

The Trump Administration has cut funding for studies like this. They don’t want to ask questions. They want to quell the questions.

Curiosity is hard work, especially when an authoritarian president is trying to kill it.

Without curiosity, there is no justice.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/human-ancestors-emotion-history/684959/?gift=UhWoUKzA_2BRb7cfCs1CgJBjzRewbCygVrS6vNDaFlU&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share]