Walking in Someone Else's Moccasins

One of the more common bromides that I've heard over the years suggests you shouldn't judge someone until you've walked in his or her moccasins. A quick search on line tells me that the aphorism comes from the following 19th century poem.

Judge Softly

“Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps,
Or stumbles along the road.
Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears,
Or stumbled beneath the same load. 

There may be tears in his soles that hurt
Though hidden away from view.
The burden he bears placed on your back
May cause you to stumble and fall, too. 

Don’t sneer at the man who is down today
Unless you have felt the same blow
That caused his fall or felt the shame
That only the fallen know. 

You may be strong, but still the blows
That were his, unknown to you in the same way,
May cause you to stagger and fall, too. 

Don’t be too harsh with the man that sins.
Or pelt him with words, or stone, or disdain.
Unless you are sure you have no sins of your own,
And it’s only wisdom and love that your heart contains.

For you know if the tempter’s voice
Should whisper as soft to you,
As it did to him when he went astray,
It might cause you to falter, too.

Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.

I believe you’d be surprised to see
That you’ve been blind and narrow-minded, even unkind.
There are people on reservations and in the ghettos
Who have so little hope, and too much worry on their minds.

Brother, there but for the grace of God go you and I.
Just for a moment, slip into his mind and traditions
And see the world through his spirit and eyes
Before you cast a stone or falsely judge his conditions.

Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins
And remember the lessons of humanity taught to you by your elders.
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives, our kindnesses and generosity.

Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.”

~ by Mary T. Lathrap, 1895

Mary T. Lathrap.
Public domain image from Women and Temperance,
by Frances Willard, 1888.

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I think it's a pretty impressive sentiment. And the fact that the original saying actually does refer to First Nations individuals surprised me. I'd thought that the original words were "walk a mile in someone else's shoes", and that it'd been "repurposed" in a misguided form of "cultural appropriation". (That just goes to show the value of seeking out the original source.)

But having said that, I have been thinking a lot lately about the ability to "put yourself in someone else's moccasins". What exactly does it mean? And is it possible for most people to actually do this?

The first thing to ask is whether the poem is suggesting empathy or sympathy. I suspect that the two terms have become hopelessly intermingled and robbed of much of their meaning (like "decimate" and "annihilate", or, "psychopath" and "sociopath"), so I'm just going to arbitrarily start with the Wikipedia definitions and go from there. They suggest that "empathy" refers to the ability to imagine yourself physically and emotionally in the situation of another. "Sympathy", in contrast, is about feeling what you actually think are the emotions of another.

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These two different ways of looking at another person are quite distinct, but might be hard to understand. To illustrate them, let's look at two different examples.

My wife, Misha, once had a dog named "Nik" that she had done an absolutely amazing job training. She managed this by listening to her best friend, Amber, who is a professional dog trainer and the best practical animal psychologist I have ever met. One thing that she taught my significant other is that you should never, ever comfort a dog that is in distress. The reasoning is that dogs have very different minds than humans. If you try to comfort a dog---like you would a child---you are, in effect, training it to think that being afraid is a preferred emotion. And the result won't be a "comforted" dog, but one that will become more and more easily disturbed. With regard to dogs, Amber was telling Misha that it is important to have empathy (ie: understand how he looked at the world), but a very bad thing to express sympathy (ie: try to share emotions) with him.

Another example comes from literature. In the "Parable Series" the author Octavia Butler, created a character, Lauren Oya Olamina, who was born with a psychological syndrome (caused by a parent taking a drug designed to boost her intelligence) where she would feel extreme, debilitating sympathy with anyone that she saw in any sort of pain. The result was that Lauren had to go to great lengths to avoid being around people in any sort of pain or suffering. As a literary device, Butler was---I assume---attempting to describe the horror that one feels in a society that is going down the toilet.

The late---and greatly missed--Octavia Butler, 

from her Twitter account.

In her books, The Parable of the Sower, and, The Parable of the Talents, Butler describes a very believable future USA. Climate change has created scores of internal refugees as the South West turns into a vast new desert. Canada---which has benefited agriculturally from the changes---has created a militarized border that keeps American refugees out by force. Wealth inequality has increased to the point where large swathes of the countryside are controlled by violent swarms or hordes of people who have nothing to lose and prey on anyone or anything they can get their hands on. The super-rich live in secure enclaves protected by armies of their own private guards. The declining middle class hold onto their precarious positions through ruthless competition for a declining number of good jobs. They also live in poorly-protected, gated communities which are constantly under threat by the anarchic hordes just outside the barbed wire. At one point, the government is taken over by racist "populists" who try to impose their form of fundamentalist Christianity on everyone and start a quickly-lost war attempting to regain Alaska, which has succeeded from the Union and is now under the protection of Canada. 

Throughout this turmoil, Lauren becomes the leader of a refugee community and eventually becomes a spiritual leader. Unfortunately, when the fundamentalist Christians take over she ends up branded a "witch" and has her daughter taken from her, is forced into slavery, and, spends time in a concentration camp. Through out this horrific experience, she gains the wisdom and serenity necessary to change her sympathy into a type of empathy that is able to analyze and understand what has gone wrong with her country.

Her conclusion is that America has failed because it's citizenry has lost any sense of a collective purpose. To that end, she suggests that a national resolve to travel to the stars is what is needed to bridge the gaps between the rich and poor, Christians and other faiths, and, everything else that has fallen apart. By the end of The Parable of the Talents, she is an old woman, venerated by the public, reunited with her daughter, and witness to the first launch of a star ship being sent to start a colony on a planet circling Alpha Centauri.

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I surprise myself that I can keep hammering out these op eds on a weekly basis. The only suggestion that I can make about how I do it is that I spent 31 years wandering around an academic library thinking about "life, the universe, and, everything". Well, that too was an effort.

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The thing that I've been wondering about is why it is that so many people I've met over the years seem fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the moccasins of others. As a result of these ruminations, I've come to the following conclusions.

First, you have to want to walk in those moccasins. A lot of people in our society see everything as a competition. That's hardly surprising as many families do everything short of putting a gun to the side of their children's heads forcing them to play team sports. And don't forget the schools that have become more and more competitive as parents and teachers rant and rave about the importance of getting a "good job" after graduation. It's simply the case that I've met a lot of people who are so concerned about "winning" that there's no opportunity for them to consider the other side's point of view.

A special case of this problem involves people who feel that they have a "professional obligation" to limit their point of view. Union leaders, for example, often believe that they have an obligation to "go to the wall" in defense of members no matter how outrageous their behaviour. Many police officers have a "blue wall" attitude that forbids the membership from ever putting themselves in the moccasins of any person who gets brutalized by a "bad apple". Politicians, lawyers, public relations people, bureaucrats, etc, far too often believe that they are professionally obligated to never consider the world from the vantage point of the "enemy". Quite a few times I've tried to get a "professional" to try to see some issue from someone else's point-of-view only to get a blank star and the response "I don't understand the question" as an answer---or even what I call the "X-Files answer". (That's when someone asks an uncomfortable question and the other person just looks away and doesn't say anything at all.)

It might be, but don't expect a professional to tell you unless he thinks it's in his client's interest.

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Second, you have to have some imagination. That's because it requires a fair amount of creativity to try to see the world from someone else's vantage point. We all come from very different situations, have different life experiences, and, choose different ways of living our lives. Each one of those things opens up new possibilities, but they also cut off an equal number of others. More importantly every experience we have creates, and, stunts or reinforces emotions and personality traits.

There are philosophers who say that each of us inhabits our own little "universe" of "personal culture" that has been created by our own specific experiences. That's what the "walking in someone else's moccasins" is all about. The boundaries of that experience are our "horizon". When we interact with another person we have the opportunity to either "merge our horizons" and learn from each other or "bounce off".

Years ago I read an essay by a man who'd grown up in a dirt poor Appalachian mining town. His dad had been a coal miner all his life and his mom a stay-at-home housewife. The author had managed to "pole vault" his way out of this life and ended up at university on a scholarship. He described sitting in a classroom listening to women bitterly complain about the lot of women who were "stuck" at home raising children instead of going out to work like their husbands.

The essay describes the young man's thoughts about what they had to say. At first, he simply couldn't see how raising children, growing a garden, preserving food for the winter, sewing cloths, cleaning, etc, was any worse than crawling around in a dirty, dangerous, loud, hot, nasty coal mine. He certainly didn't see how it was worse than spending your later years dying of black lung.

But then he went on and explained that he learned that the experience of the women in his class was very different from his. Their fathers had had good paying, groovy jobs where they ordered around and "used up" people like his father. And their mothers hadn't been essential to the functioning of the family. His mother's work work providing and preserving food, raising the children, making the clothes, holding the community together, etc, was just as important to the well-being of the family as the father's paltry pay cheque. Instead, their mothers had just been "birds in a gilded cage" who had become made increasingly irrelevant by labour-saving devices and isolated by the suburban tracts that they lived in. The traditional relationships that defined those women's lives ceased to make any economic sense (as it still did to some extent in Appalachia), and as a result had become in many cases nothing more than prisons.

What the essay writer was talking about was his personal experience of "merging horizons" with the women in his class, or, learning to "walk in their moccasins". But it's important to realize that he was only able to learn how to do this after he'd already developed some "distance" from his own situation. He had already learned from various sources about the ways in which society had exploited and abused his family. This freed him from the stories that we tell each other about the lives we lead. One of the more common ones that people learn is to never question the situation we find ourselves in because "that's just the way it is".

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This leads into the third issue that I think often keeps people from being able to manifest empathy: anger.

When we question why "things are the way they are", most people go through a period of anger. And anger is predominantly an inward-focused emotion, one that has very little time for "putting yourself into someone else's moccasins".

I lived through the 1970s and met a lot of women were very angry towards men at that time. They even had a name for the experience: "empowering rage". In my experience just about everyone who "gets woke" goes through this stage. It can be painful to be around people at this point because they often lash out at not the person who is the greatest cause of their pain, but more often the people who are closest to them, and---probably more importantly---the people that they feel safest with. 

That's part of the reason why some people get so outraged and freaked out at university. It's the first---and for many the only---time in their life when they are able to engage with new ideas and rethink how they fit into "the big picture". It is also probably the safest place in our society to manifest the sort of rage and anger that comes from rethinking the ways in which you have been put down and exploited by the world around you. It's a "career limiting move" to "become woke" in the vast majority of work places! And rethinking the dynamics between men and women can be dangerous if you are pregnant and have just signed onto a gigantic mortgage. Much better to wrestle with this stuff while the biggest problem you have is getting an essay on Victorian novels in on time.

People on the outside of this very traumatic experience have to remind themselves that the angry person in front of them is often trying to change their mental processes in a fundamental way. And the process of being on the outside looking into this often requires real empathy for the relationship to survive. Many people finish this transformation and the people who were able to "hang in" can end up with a much better connection as their "horizons fuse" into a greater "oneness". Unfortunately, some people get "stuck" in their anger. That sucks, but it's best to consider the person it happens to as being a "casualty" rather than an evil person who insists on making the lives of everyone around them miserable.

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This rambling mess of an editorial has gone on long enough. I freely admit that it is far from exhaustive, but I do hope that I've suggested the universe of complexities that flow from the seemingly trite saying that one should "walk a mile in someone else's moccasins". It's a profound statement about what it means to be a human being and takes a lifetime of thought and effort to actually put into practice. But we would all be better for it if we tried just a little more often to actually do what it says. 

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 Furthermore I say onto you. The climate emergency must be dealt with!