'The Tender Instinct is the Hope of the World': Human Feeling and Social Change Before Empathy

Abstract

Abstract Social feeling is understood as the foundation of civil society, an emotional connectivity that underlies pro-social action. These 'ordinary affects' are commonly expressed in the concept of empathy, a transpersonal state of emotional extensiveness. But this term was only introduced into Anglophone cultures in the first decade of the twentieth century, gaining purchase on social explanation over twenty years later. This essay examines competing understandings of social feeling in this period of transition, which resisted situating it in relation to those individual processes of perception, 'inner imitation' and projection that spoke of empathy's origin in aesthetic theory. By contrast, psychologists, sociologists and political theorists invoked an innate capacity for association and 'fellowship' - the 'gregarious' and 'herd' instincts - with altruism as the expression of that transindividual formation in externally directed action. In these models, emotional extensiveness was tangled up with questions of creaturely sociability, the dynamics of collectivity and mutual tenderness, moving beyond the problem of perceiving 'other minds' to imagine the inner states of others in their social embeddedness. Hence they speak to contemporary concerns with our capacity to respond to 'distant suffering', the everyday consolations of association and human presence, and the ability to effect social change.Key words social feeling, empathy, collective psychology, sociology, new liberalism, Wilfred Trotter, William McDougall, George Arthur Tansley, Sigmund FreudHuman feeling has long been part of the discourse of civil society and futures thinking. It can be seen in the language of social hope that has characterised Barak Obama's political rhetoric on the one hand, and in the 'compassionate conservatism' of the right, on the other.1 Its reverse is mirrored in the recurring expressions of concern for the failure of citizens to act in the common interest in social commentary. In the UK this has been articulated in the Conservative Party's rhetoric of 'broken Britain' and mirrored in the coalition government's expressed aim to establish a 'big' society,2 but it is also evident in public debate concerning the integrity of the representatives, structures and practices of public institutions, business and government. The perceived failures of social feeling identified in commentary on street crime and riot at one end of the social scale, and financial corruption, bankers' bonuses and politicians colluding with media moguls at the other are no longer painted onto an epic canvas of evil and pathology but one scaled down to petty human failures: greed, arrogance, selfishness. Just as riot has become disembedded from the repertoires of purposeful collective political dissent, the concerted pursuit of systemic privilege through public roles and institutions is conceived in terms of individual anomaly. To fail to act in the common interest is a failure of ordinary emotion, then: a lack of the emotional connectivity through which an individual subdues personal motivation and self-interest in favour of the public good. Harnessed to an emotional register, sociality becomes a matter not just of recognising common cause - an act of thought predicated on mutually shared interests or purpose - but of being bound to an imaginary relating to a commonality of predicament, experience and affective response. It is that 'social feeling' which appears to harness individuals' actions to a common future.In the present day, this commonality of feeling is usually expressed in the concept of empathy. Despite the notorious variability of the term3 the ability to share the emotional experiences of others, to feel 'at one' with their affective responses, is in many countries part of a common curriculum: in Canada, the US, Australia and the UK, for example children are taught empathy as part of emotional literacy in schools.4 The Roots of Empathy programme originating in Canada in 1996, which aims to increase pro-social feeling by teaching children to understand others' emotion, was introduced in England and Wales in February 2013. …