It's true we may lack socially approved ways of expressing fellow-feeling.

Ones that are aware of status and social positioning, and the importance of social performance.

Which could, in a lot of contexts, get read as not caring 🤷‍♀️

But…

2/10

Maybe our empathy just looks different?

I think autistic empathy can be quite practical (if we're not feeling overwhelmed or under pressure).

And genuine - if not always very smoothly expressed.

3/10

When I was young I'd feel awful about myself if certain people expressed sympathy for me, but I hated it.

I thought there was something wrong with me!

Now, I think I was reacting to incongruence... my skin prickling.

4/10

Now I know that a lot of what gets called "empathy" isn't quite that simple.

It can be about showing deference, or superiority. Or virtue signaling.

Pleasing the right people, in the right ways, at the right times. Making yourself look like a good person.

5/10

#PowerDynamics #Hierarchy

Now we're onto the topic of power dynamics 😁

I've noticed autistic empathy can be rather unorthodox. 💟

That could mean feeling compassion for animals, plants, trees, octopuses, sharks, avatars, our plushies… or even inanimate objects.

🧸

6/10

So perhaps it's about direction of travel?

Service and deference, in society, are meant to flow upwards.

Yet we autistics, it seems, are more likely to feel for the excluded person, the animal or child… the spider in the bath, or the earthworm on a sunny road.

7/10

#Autistic

Empathy is usually believed to be a personal virtue, that some people have and others don’t.

I don't think that's the whole story.

It’s also shaped by power. By conditioning. By rewards and punishments. By who’s allowed to have needs, and who's trained to attend to them.

8/10

Autistic people often don't fit that mold.

We get called rigid, naive, inappropriate. But I think it might be a lot more to do with ethical consistency.

If we’re told honesty matters, we tell the truth. If we’re taught kindness matters, we try to direct it where it seems most needed.

9/10

So perhaps autistic people aren’t empathy-impaired at all.

Just misaligned with a social order that expects empathy to be smooth, selective, strategic, performative, and status-aware.

And maybe that's really what gets pathologized.

End of 🧵

Full article, with refs, in the link below.

@KatyElphinstone

This isn’t just an article explaining how empathy works in autistic people. It’s is about how empathy works, and doesn’t work, in society. The author points out that what we (mainstream society) see as empathy, often isn’t really empathy at all, but is purely performative virtue signalling.

Everyone could benefit from reading this article, regardless of their neuro type.

@Susan60

Thank you 🙏🥰

Interestingly, I got the book "Against empathy", by Paul Bloom, out of my University library last week. I'd highly recommend it, as he goes into the definitions etc. We're basically saying a lot of the same things regarding how empathy gets defined, but just using different words.

@Susan60

Another fascinating thing I've got from the book - which looks at various studies into the matter - is how not having empathy (as currently defined) doesn't result in more violence, cruelty, etc.

My autistic brain says perhaps we are really underestimating the role of logic in social justice and kindness.

And in fact, a lot of what we currently call empathy results in partisanship, and dehumanizing other groups 🤷‍♀️

@KatyElphinstone @Susan60
For a while now I've held the belief (more of a conclusion really) that a lot of things like social justice and kindness actually have an objective basis, and that all empathy is is just the emotion that evolution was able to come up with to try and make these things happen (because they confer evolutionary advantage). But like most emotions, it's limited and fuzzy logic, and easily interfered with by other emotions. For humans, it can be interfered with by beliefs and values, but also bolstered with proper logic and evidence. I think that the role empathy has played in human society is to just tip our progress in the favor of improvement (like a 49/51% split), but then we have institutionalized social negatives which are impeding this progress, which is why we see such a mix of good things happening in the world and bad.

I hope that made sense. I haven't been awake long, and I'm condensing a lot into one little message.

@murdoc

Yes, the more I think about it and study it, the more I realise empathy is not this thing that we should put on some throne of idealism.

It's just an ordinary mechanism designed for living together, for survival.
Where was it I read recently...hm... about selfishness. That empathy is selfish, technically. It's just dependent on what you count as the unit - the organism? The gene? The family? The social group? And so on ...

@Susan60

@KatyElphinstone

You just reminded me of a conversation I had with my older brother after he got married and had kids. He said to me "When I was your age, I was a socialist like you. (I never called myself that btw, but anyway...) But once you have a family of your own, you'll learn what really matters." I didn't say anything back, for many reasons, but what I wanted to say was something like "That the hormones directing you to protect and provide for your family instead of considering everyone somehow makes you a better person?"

Empathy evolved from humanity's past, when all we had to worry about was the family unit, or the tribe. Getting larger groups to cooperate for the benefit of all requires our capacity for reason because it's harder to do. But unless you have a population that's educated enough, most of them will just default back to their instincts and care more for their in-groups. That's not even getting into the threads of romanticism throughout our culture where you keep hearing the term "family" all the time, like it's the greatest thing ever.

That said, I still think that empathy is useful, it just needs to be properly guided with reason. Like the old saying goes, they are like the shoes on your feet: you can go farther with both than with just one.

@Susan60

@murdoc @KatyElphinstone

The first bit made me laugh. I love it.

I think the word “relate” matters here. We care about those we “relate” to. For many, that stops at close genetic relations, actually biological “relatives”. For some autistics, that “relate” applies to anyone for whom we have empathy. If we can relate to how they feel or might feel about something, we empathise, & therefore we care.

@murdoc

Exactly!
And I'm extremely curious as to what this means in evolutionary terms.
I mean, if humanity doesn't extend its in-group, pronto, then we are doomed, so... 🤔

@Susan60