Can a chef teach President Trump empathy?
On CNN Monday, the remarkable Spanish-American chef Jose Andres was interviewed while feeding tens of thousands of the victims of Hurricane Florence in both Wilmington and Raleigh, North Carolina. Andres, whose World Central Kitchen is like a hipper, tastier version of the Red Cross, was asked about President Donald Trump’s derisive recent tweets throwing cold water on the deathtoll estimate of 3,000 in Puerto Rico.
Anderson Cooper clearly expected the James Beard Award winner to attack Trump. After all, Andres was on the ground in Puerto Rico in 2017, feeding those displaced by Hurricane Maria. And Andres has long been a critic of the president, following remarks made by Trump about Mexican immigrants during the 2016 presidential campaign, comments cited by Andres as the reason he pulled out from a deal to open a restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. A lengthy legal battle ensued.
But here is what Andres actually said: “I think 51 percent of a leader is empathy. And I think we all need to help him to gain some empathy because that’s part of leadership.”
It was an unusual response within the scorched-earth binary of the moment, not least because it suggested that Trump was a work-in-progress, a leader who could be improved if only Americans decided to give him some on-the-job training.
So what is empathy? Is it really a part of leadership? Who (or what) teaches it? And could Trump — a pretty old dog when it comes to new tricks — actually be taught?
Empathy is usefully described as the ability to walk a mile in the shoes of another — to see the world from their point of view. Though both words have roots in the Greek pathos, or suffering, empathy is not the same thing as sympathy, which involves feeling sorry for someone from an external point of view.
If you feel sympathy, you might well do something nice, but you’d do it from a remove. Trump has, on occasion, expressed sympathy. Empathy, though, means you really feel connected to someone’s actual life experience, even if far different from your own. The Greek philosopher Aristotle discussed it in reference to tragedy through the concepts of pity and fear.
Let’s say you’re watching old King Lear (in the Shakespeare play of that name) rail against the storm. Pity doesn’t mean that you’re feeling sorry for the old man, it means that you can actually connect how he feels with the cause of those feelings (being old, having lousy kids, making terrible errors of judgment and so on). Fear comes when you realize that one day you will be old yourself, and then you will be right there with him, howling at the moon.
And I don’t mean in a piano bar.
Great actors such as Ian McKellen (a great Lear) or Meryl Streep will usually say that their process in building a character involves empathy, not sympathy, and that empathy is what they want their audiences to feel for, say, The Washington Post Publisher Katherine Graham, played by Streep in “The Post.” Or look at Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” wherein Elisabeth Moss has created a character with whom you’d have to be a brick wall not to empathize. It’s not about sympathy; that show works because it feels like you are living alongside Moss’ character, Offred.
Consuming these stories — be they novels, movies, plays or TV shows — is a big part of how we learn to empathize from a young age. They’re often our first exposure to lives very different from our own. For all the limitations of Alex Haley's “Roots,” there’s no denying the show helped Americans empathize with lives very different from their own, as did Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.” One could reasonably extrapolate from that the importance of the arts and humanities in anyone’s education. History shows us that while many terrorists over the years have been highly educated, they often have lacked exposure to that which builds empathy. They’ve trained themselves but not read enough stories about other people.
The relationship of empathy with leadership is more complex. You could argue that if a manager empathizes too much with superfluous employees, they won’t get laid off, inefficiencies will thrive and the business will go under. And — as Arthur Miller understood in “Death of a Salesman” — few low-margin, for-profit businesses can afford to employ those who have no fiscal worth left, whatever the human cost. The owner does not have to be Donald J. Trump.
But Andres, who owns 26 restaurants around the globe, is part of a new TED Talk-friendly, socially conscious style of management that emphasizes empathy and runs counter to the long-standing image of the tyrannical chef, firing any and all incompetents. You might have noticed such approaches are thriving, turning Trump and his ilk into dodo birds. Of course, if you’re savvy or cynical, you might also note the huge publicity value of talking to Anderson Cooper about relief efforts against a backdrop of delicious free food being delivered to shelters, all while your other costly eateries are open for business. Who does not want to patronize — or be employed by — a business with an empathetic owner? Even as a customer, you want empathy from your waiter, and the waiter wants empathy from you.
And who else has stepped up quite like Andres to help? No one. It is nothing short of remarkable how he has put such an effort together. And like his counterpart Jamie Oliver in Britain, Andres is a born educator and disruptor, well-placed to argue that even people in distress deserve to eat well.
Which brings us to Trump and how many people died in Puerto Rico.
To even argue the question on social media — just as Hurricane Florence was lapping at North Carolina — was evidence of a lack of empathy for how important such statistics are when those you love are in their numbers.
Andres is one of the few people, it seems, who don’t see Trump as an empathetic lost cause. But Andres is right. Empathy should be job one in the White House pedagogy department. All of us can learn.
Sometimes, all it takes is the right story, or maybe just the right meal with the right people. The kind that makes your forget yourself.