War Casualties Include Empathy

The individual behavior of empathy is one of the casualties of lethal conflict between groups. War is “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between political units (as states or nations).” Empathy is “the capacity for participating in or a vicarious experiencing of anther’s feelings, volitions, or ideas.” (Both definitions are from Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, 1986.)

The definition of war does not refer to the individual soldier who tries to kill and is vulnerable to being killed. “Political units” distinguish war from individual conflict and murder. Empathy pertains to emotional behavior of the empathic individual. Empathy shares or perceives the other person’s feelings, such as joy or sorrow.

Human beings are born with the capacity for empathy and develop empathic behavior in early childhood. The great cognitive capabilities of our species and the network of social relationships contribute to our awareness of the thoughts and feelings of parents, other adults, siblings, and other people. When empathic behavior is not apparent in a social situation, the reason is usually not deficient capability. It is because the empathy has been suppressed.

War requires another group to be regarded as the enemy. The individual soldier’s obligation to kill and to be a target for killing is tolerable only by suppressing empathy. A less drastic suppression of empathy occurs in competition with other people, especially in team sports. A person with fragile ego or low self-esteem may attempt to bolster the sense of self by suppressing empathy.

A popular euphemism in war is “collateral damage.” A more accurate term would be “killing or destroying people or objects that are not combatants.” The term “damage” is appropriate for the effect of war on empathy. War suppresses but does not destroy the capability for empathic behavior. The suppressed empathy is an urge that expresses itself in distorted ways, in accordance with Freud’s description of emotional feelings that are repressed from conscious awareness. Symptoms of sup­pressed empathy include exaggerated affiliation with the person’s group or nation, and the reaction formation of exaggerated hatred of the enemy.

I believe that the 1991 Gulf War sup­pressed lessened empathic feeling and subsequent empathic behaviors of individuals in all of the participant nations. The prolonged suppression of empathy contributed to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and its “coalition,” defying the United Nations and the sentiments of many individuals in the United States and elsewhere. Collateral damage to empathy following the 2003 war may include American aggression against other countries, heightened Muslim antagonism against the “Great Satan,” and more frequent attacks by individual terrorists against Israel and the United States.

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