The power of empathy

Eisenstein mentions that the new space opening up in the U.S. “between stories” offers both danger and hope, depending upon the nature of the forces that occupy it. If the forces of reaction prevail, it can lead to totalitarianism. But a different force can animate new movements of reconciliation and environmental responsibility. That force he defined as empathy, “born of the understanding that we are all in this together”.

What is the relevance of this to Auroville? Auroville is clearly not the U.S. Yet, in one sense, we are also “between stories”. Not because we lack a new story – Mother made it very clear how she wanted Auroville to be – but because, for many of us, our day-to-day behaviour reflects a very different story. To put it brutally, it is the difference between being servitors of the Divine and servitors of our smaller selves.

Min identified aspects of this latter story in a series of questions he posted recently on Auronet:

How many of us work for the community at least 5 hours a day? How many of us use Auroville as a semi-retirement base? Is money becoming the sovereign lord in Auroville? Do we use Auroville assets under our stewardship for personal benefit and for the benefit of friends and next of kin?

So how do we begin to substitute Mother’s story for ours?

Well, the way we have gone about it so far on the collective level has been to draw up guidelines and policies that we hope will take us closer to this goal. The latest of these is the draft document Values Guiding the Collective Life of Auroville drawn up by the Entry Service: the intention is that is should be signed by all Newcomers. Among other things, it identifies no ownership of property as a respected collective value, and it continues.

Auroville is a self-governing community contributing towards building a collective prosperity for all the members irrespective of the type of work one is engaged in. Everyone endeavours to build an economy based on generosity and sharing. All works and efforts as a member of Auroville’s collective life are directed towards building a shared economy for the “city the earth needs”. One refrains from participating in activities solely benefiting personal interests, institutions or family members outside Auroville.

This is fine: it is important to lay out the fundamental principles upon which we wish to base our lives here. The problem is the credibility gap, for Newcomers are very aware they are being asked to sign up to something that does not reflect how many Aurovilians actually behave.

In this situation, it is easy for them to become cynical, to accuse Aurovilians of hypocrisy. At the same time, many Aurovilians also have a tendency to divide the community into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Aurovilians, depending upon how well they perceive them approaching these exacting standards. But does this really change anything?

Empathy offers a different approach. It doesn’t begin by labelling people as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Rather, it tries to listen attentively to their individual ‘story’, to the circumstances of their life and the personal predispositions that cause them to behave in the way that they do. Having understood this, certain things may become clearer. For example, that it is not necessarily bad will that causes an executive of a commercial unit holder to withhold contributing a portion of their profits to Auroville. It may simply be that he or she does not feel able in the present Auroville to support their family in any other way.

There may be no immediate solutions for cases like this. But if the individual is clearly concerned about contributing to the larger community rather than simply maximising their own interest, it may be possible to design small steps, stepping-stones, that would move them closer to the ideal while taking into account of their present fears and insecurities.

The key assumptions of this approach are that everybody is different, and that many, perhaps most, people will try to do better if they can see a road ahead that takes account of the real pressures upon their lives.

But the deeper intention behind the empathic approach is to create, or recreate, connection between us. For, in many ways, the present Auroville is atomised: many people seem to relate more closely to their particular group than to the larger community. This can be seen, for example, in those long-time Aurovilians who have withdrawn from active participation in the collective because they do not relate to anything that is happening in Auroville today, whether it be what they perceive to be the ‘sale’ of houses, the present open door entry policy or the pervasiveness of money power.

The problem with such groupings, with different ‘Aurovilles’ existing within Auroville, is that they tend to be self-reinforcing. People with the same viewpoint tend to cluster together and support each other’s perspective – like those sneaky Google algorithms that pander to our present tastes rather than expanding our horizons – while increasing the sense of separation between those inside and outside the group. This easily leads to stereotyping of the latter, to those lazy generalizations about ‘vellakaras’, Tamil Aurovilians, unit holders or ‘retirees’.

On the other hand, empathy, the attempt to listen and understand someone else, breaks down these categories because one is forced to deal with that person as an individual rather than as a type. And the more you understand, the harder it is to judge.

Such an approach requires endless patience and a willingness to suspend quick judgements. This is already happening in experiments in cross-cultural dialogue and restorative circles, but it is not easy and requires long-term training. It is certainly not suited to a mindset that prefers to deal with people through the implementation of general policies and rules, something that Auroville may be drifting towards. For while policies, guidelines, are useful as reference points and may help deal with those who set out to abuse the system, they are too crude as tools to deal with the subtle warp and woof of individual lives.