I hate being bad at things, and having lacks. I spend a lot of mental energy worrying because I am aware of times past when I lacked empathy. I respect and value it, but by working hard I can remain only in the bottom quartile of insensitive jerks. Although I hate it, there's not much to be done.
I take some encouragement from this poem (quoted from here):
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
| GLORY be to God for dappled things— | |
| For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; | |
| For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; | |
| Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; | |
| Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; | 5 |
| And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. | |
| All things counter, original, spare, strange; | |
| Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) | |
| With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; | |
| He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: | 10 |
| Praise him. |
All things Counter, Orginal, Spare, Strange -
Spare in this context I take to mean, sparingly made, made out of not quite all the parts. As I am.
Why feel bad? I can't think of any occasion when you've been an insensitive jerk. (But maybe I'm not around often enough.)
ReplyDeleteI think kindness and learned skills can atone for plenty of lack of E. But what can atone for my often woeful lack of S? Andrew thoughtfully builds me more shelves in my cupboards so I can keep my clothes neat. It doesn't help.
S types are very useful to the world.
ps.
I've read further beyond SBC regarding empathy. I'm not keen to write the stuff on my blog because comparing autistic people with psychopaths feels wrong... But. It seems there are two kinds of empathy: cognitive empathy (reading people and situations correctly) and reactive (I think that's what it's called) empathy (reacting appropriately to a know emotion). It seems that autistic people have impaired cognitive empathy but normal reactive empathy - this means that they find it hard to work out what people are feeling, but once they know, they react appropriately. Psychopaths are the the opposite. They know how people are feeling, but react inappropriately.
Amming it up-hay for the eadership-ray. Also, as an S, there is crippling perfectionism. Also, apparently most MBTI types develop their inferior functions after midlife, and for INTPs like me, that is E-F. So look out world, I shall be radiating feelings and encouraging you all to feel them.
ReplyDeleteWould SBC (like all psych researchers) be vulnerable to the WEIRD critique - that WEstern, Industrialised Rich Developed nation members are actually a narrow subset, even if you get a lot of them. Optical illusions, which you would think should be pretty close to the 'hardware' of the brain, are often ineffective on people not raised in such rectilinear environments as ours.
That distinction between cognitive empathy and reactive empathy is good - opens up a lot of space. Presumably there must be a possibility of non-cognitive empathy where your emotion-reading bits are doing the job, but the message doesn't settle down to something cognitively clear for hours or days afterward. That's sometimes my experience, although as per the MBTI wisdom literature, its improving.