7 ms·

The Banality of Empathy

48 points by anarbadalov 8y ago

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
> "This viewing experience finally undid for me what I have long suspected to be a meaningless platitude: the idea that art promotes empathy." I don't mean to be rude, but why on Earth would someone start out from a baseless conclusion or platitude like that? Art by its very nature is incredibly subjective, differs in meaning and scope for every person, and in some senses is literally defined by having a property that escapes classification into previously existing taxonomies (such as, "things that elicit empathy"). Each of "art elicits empathy", "art does not elicit empathy" and "art elicits sadism" are frankly just very stupid things to say or believe. Some art can be argued for some observers to do one or the other or a mix of them. Why is this worth writing about? I'm asking sincerely. Let alone in connection with Bandersnatch, which was mediocre at best.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- rimliu 8y ago
  IIRC there was a study how reading fiction corelates with more emphaty.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Does that mean anyone would conclude that all fiction elicits empathy? Or that fiction never elicits empathy? Or any other similar extreme conclusion? Wouldn't we obviously say that there exist types of (fictional work, reader) pairings that yield sympathetic outcomes and other (fictional work, reader) pairings that yield sadistic / non-empathic outcomes? In other words, from what source does there drive any kind of authoritative argument that generic reading of fiction either always or generally leads to increases in measures of empathy? A study that measures fiction reading would surely not be adequate, unless it controlled for all possible sources of variation between dispositions of people and dispositions of fictional works, which is ludicrous in principle.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    * Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-rea...) * The Relationship Between Empathy and Reading Fiction: Separate Roles for Cognitive and Affective Components (https://jeps.efpsa.org/articles/10.5334/jeps.ca/print/ https://jeps.efpsa.org/articles/10.5334/jeps.ca/print/) * How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/) * Can fiction stories make us more empathetic? (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140811151632.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140811151632.h...) * Exploring the link between reading fictionand empathy: Ruling out individual differencesand examining outcomes (https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fiction%20and%20empathy.pdf https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fict...) But see * Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers: Psychologists have failed to replicate a famous study suggesting that short fiction improves readers’ abilities to read the emotional states of others. (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-psychologists-study-fiction/509405/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-p...)
- davidb_ 8y ago
  This article feels like a direct response to the ideas of Stephen Pinker, summed up by this quote: > one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them and, in the context of: > Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa. > > To be sure, empathy is not enough. But another Enlightenment principle is that people can appreciate principles of universal rights that can bridge even the gaps that empathy cannot span. Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I'm sorry, but I'm baffled by the extended quote you pasted. It reads like a rhetoric 101 essay of a college freshman, deeply contrived and not hitting at any real point. Just meandering under the pretense that this is Serious Discourse.
    - davidb_ 8y ago
      The quote was taken from: https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker-identity-politics-is-an-enemy-of-reason-and-enlightenment-values https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker... I posted it to give context to the "debate" Pinker was engaged in. I don't have much of an opinion on whether or not it is "Serious Discourse."
    - jerf 8y ago
      That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books. On the flip side, there are some people who would still accuse him of being glib. On the flip flip side, though, the numbers often support Pinker. Some of the people complaining have serious academic issues. But some people complaining are simply people who have incorporated some degree of doom-saying or even outright misanthropy into their core identity and find it offensive when someone makes an at-least-semi-decent argument against everything being inevitably doomed. Separating the two can be a challenge because there is a lot of overlap between the two sets.
- asark 8y ago
  > Let alone in connection with Bandersnatch, which was mediocre at best. Yeah, that one was an odd connection for me. Interactivity does change the experience of narrative media, as has been obvious to anyone playing video games for a good long while now, but it's a weird way to work one's way up to where the article takes it. To the extent that one's empathy wanes in Bandersnatch I think it's mostly down to (1) seeing the scaffolding behind the scenes and wanting to explore, at which point the narrative loses its power and it becomes more about poking around the various branching paths, and (2) the limitation of choice itself as meta-level control of the viewer—those "oh god I don't want to do either thing to this person" choices are the part where the episode actually has something to say. Maybe not anything new or profound (done to death in video games, which have mined the meta-territory of player choice in narrative for years) but at least something. To me this is the part—the "wait can I do neither? Oh. I'm under control too." that elevates the episode to Black Mirror level rather than just being an interesting tech experiment. The little "ah ha". The second part is why it's pretty easy to get into the groove of just poking around without feeling anything for the characters. It's the limitation of your choices and the high visibility of the system behind them that kills the empathy. Again, territory video games have played around in for a good long while. It's a hell of a lot harder for me to play the "bad" route(s) in some video games than others, depending on how they're structured and how good the narrative and characters are. Often I can't do it and still enjoy myself. What's interesting here is why Bandersnatch in particular isn't great at maintaining viewer/player empathy—which is likely, at least in part, intentional.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Googling for "art elicits empathy" produces, for me: * Pictures of pain: their contribution to the neuroscience of empathy: G. D. Schott (https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/3/812/336766 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/3/812/336766) * Art Education and the Encouragement of Affectiveand Cognitive Empathy in Early Childhood (https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4193&context=etd https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...) * Empathy-Related Responses to Depicted People in Art Works (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5323429/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5323429/) * Using the Arts to Build Empathy, the Ultimate 21st Century Skill (https://charterforcompassion.org/using-the-arts-to-build-empathy-the-ultimate-21st-century-skill https://charterforcompassion.org/using-the-arts-to-build-emp...) The idea that "art" (literature as well as other "fine arts") increase "empathy" (for some definition) in general is a well-developed and reasonably common notion.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    In what way does your final paragraph follow from anything you wrote before? You assert that the art -> empathy connection exists, but literally provide no basis for this assertion. The idea that art generally does X is purely subjective, for all X, by the very nature of what art is.
selune 8y ago
Is it even a widespread idea that "art promotes empathy"? I feel like nowadays we're talking about morality of art mostly when we're talking about mainstream media (representation in popular media etc). I'm no art critic but I've always thought that generally accepted truth about art is that there is no single concept, idea or purpose behind it. It used to be something along the line of "art is beautiful" but it's not even that now. Anything can be art and art can be anything and it can be perceived in numerous ways. I haven't finished it yet tbh but I find this piece of writing weird because I really don't see where it's coming from.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  Maybe it would be better phrased as "art has the capacity for exploring and engaging with empathy"? Just because someone said a urinal is art doesn't mean that The Brothers Karamazov is less impactful to me.
  - selune 8y ago
    It would make more sense but then what's the point in arguing about it? It has that capacity, because, well, I feel empathetic towards certain people/groups of people after, say, watching some movies. Case closed. I feel like the writer wants to explore how effective this could be as a tool for social change since there is a huge discourse going on about it in the context of pop culture (representation in popular media, glorification of certain subjects (war, violence), objectification, etc) but ventures into weird and a little bit difficult to comprehend (at least for me) philosophical space.
  - throwaway2048 8y ago
    A lot of people seem to hung up on the idea that art has to be good. Art can be completely deplorably awful, it doesn't have to be good to be art.
- bgilroy26 8y ago
  Roger Ebert, the popular film critic, observed that the purpose of the best filmmaking was to generate empathy in the audience https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-generates-empathy-roger-ebert-gets-his-own-documentary https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-gene...
dmix 8y ago
> and lately, in sporadic calls for us to read fiction about those especially under threat in our time: refugees, victims of mass shootings, transgender people, etc. Is this really a common thing? People promoting fiction as a means of understanding popular political issues of the day?
- ebullientocelot 8y ago
  I don't know that the purpose is promoting understanding of popular political issues, but it definitely seems to me that work of this kind is fashionable to celebrate in literary circles. Take my view with a grain of salt, though--I'm neither fashionable nor in literary circles.
- edgarvaldes 8y ago
  In Mexico we have had a trend of books about drug trafficking for years, which is a very charged political and social issue. I do not think that most of these publications contribute towards understanding the problem, however.
- axedwool 8y ago
  I think so, absolutely. Consider how some people suggest reading 1984 or Brave New World to understand totalitarian societies, or how people suggest various reading science fiction or fantasy as a way of understanding some issue. What the quote describes is the empathy crowd's version of that.
bigbadgoose 8y ago
> Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Author understands empathy as a micro emotional transaction enacted on a personal scale. The empathic domain is actually "all things", and should include "all positions and considerations". In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing their perspective on this matter.
- bitL 8y ago
  It frankly sounds like a sociopath's description of empathy. Somebody missing the necessary parts in their brain to be naturally empathetic, describing it based on perceivable symptoms, assuming there is some risk/reward ratio with game theory going on underneath.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Well, considering we evolved from amino acids based on all kinds of risk/reward filters of evolution, that's probably what's underneath.
    - Joe-Z 8y ago
      At the lowest level of every computer there's only zeroes and ones. Still you don't try to explain a neural network in terms of zeroes and ones. Because the emergent behaviour is much more complex than that.
      - lostmsu 8y ago
        No, that's actually exactly what you do.
        Joe-Z 8y ago
        I think we may be talking about different things here. So in the interest of clearing things up: I was using the example of a neural network as "the closest thing" (arguably still very far off) to the human mind we have in computing. If I'm explaining a newly developed software to one of my colleagues I'm talking in terms of services, requests and protocols. Even trying to explain it on the level of an assembly language would be a nightmare. Just think about the millenia it would take me to fully articulate all states the CPU goes through when executing even a single function. And even then all you'd have is an endless list of zeroes and ones, but no explanation as to the meaning of it.
_bxg1 8y ago
"Who gets to have our empathy? Hitler or one’s wife? The living or the dead? Those near to us or far? Those who resemble and agree with us, or those who don’t? The one or the many? And when it comes to art, as Knausgaard rhetorically asks, “Is it not more important to engage with our neighbor, who after all is real, rather than with one who exists only in a work of fiction?” I look at empathy not as a resource but as a muscle. Practicing empathy means cultivating a heart that emits it. Empathy should be directed at those you encounter, as you encounter them (or more precisely, those who stand to be affected by your actions). Works of fiction that inspire empathy for imaginary characters are training this muscle. “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence.” Empathy without action is inert, yes, but action without empathy is at best blind idealism, deaf to the effects it has on real souls, which has been the source of a large portion of history's evils. One could just as easily say that a compass on its own doesn't propel you towards any goal. But a vehicle, pointed directly towards its destination and lacking a steering wheel, is worse. As with most this-vs-that arguments, this essay is a banal oversimplification: both things are important. I don't know why that's so hard for people to accept.
jcranberry 8y ago
The author is right in one thing, which is the great thing about (some/a lot of) art is not just empathizing. However, giving the ability to empathize implies the true merit of such art, which is a record of the experience of a person, presented in such a way where you are able to look at yourself as that person--to find a common ancestor node and see a path from that node to the person presented through art. From such a record, you increase the different perspectives from which one may base their "representative thinking", as mentioned in the article. The irony of lambasting art which provokes empathy while promoting representative thinking, is that it is exactly representative thinking with a limited set of viewpoints which literature (and art in general) which provokes empathy for people from different points of view attempts to cure. If you try to put yourself in the place of another (which is different from immersion, in which you lose the connection to your sense of self, which is a distinction I think the author fails in not making), without the knowledge of their experiences, this ends in a total failure of understanding, and at a society-wide scale can lead (and has led) to destructive misperceptions. So to think this way without relying on resources which provoke empathy and force you to broaden your sense of self (meaning broadening the viewpoints which you are able to place yourself in) is actually very bad. What is interesting about the book that the author mentions in the final section is not that it attempts to disassociate the reader and stop any kind of feeling of empathy, it's that it attempts to force you to consider what you've just felt. So it's a feature on top, or used in conjunction with empathy, not in spite of it. "What would this model of art as “representative thinking” entail? Well, for one thing, literally more representation. One can only bring the experiences of others to mind if they are made imaginatively available to us. Perhaps, instead of the current distribution—portrayals of “default humans” (that is, straight white men, good and evil) vs. empathy vehicles (that is, everybody else)—we could simply have greater variety of experience represented in our art." Ultimately the author seems to have some misunderstanding of the idea of empathy or at least empathy in art, especially if they think that no straight white male has even been portrayed in art in such a way to provoke empathy, and if they think that art in general is lacking in diverse representation.
zhoujianfu 8y ago
I’ve defined art as “something you think somebody else might find interesting.” So I guess that is related to empathy.

48 points by anarbadalov 8y ago

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

> "This viewing experience finally undid for me what I have long suspected to be a meaningless platitude: the idea that art promotes empathy." I don't mean to be rude, but why on Earth would someone start out from a baseless conclusion or platitude like that? Art by its very nature is incredibly subjective, differs in meaning and scope for every person, and in some senses is literally defined by having a property that escapes classification into previously existing taxonomies (such as, "things that elicit empathy"). Each of "art elicits empathy", "art does not elicit empathy" and "art elicits sadism" are frankly just very stupid things to say or believe. Some art can be argued for some observers to do one or the other or a mix of them. Why is this worth writing about? I'm asking sincerely. Let alone in connection with Bandersnatch, which was mediocre at best.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rimliu 8y ago
IIRC there was a study how reading fiction corelates with more emphaty.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Does that mean anyone would conclude that all fiction elicits empathy? Or that fiction never elicits empathy? Or any other similar extreme conclusion? Wouldn't we obviously say that there exist types of (fictional work, reader) pairings that yield sympathetic outcomes and other (fictional work, reader) pairings that yield sadistic / non-empathic outcomes? In other words, from what source does there drive any kind of authoritative argument that generic reading of fiction either always or generally leads to increases in measures of empathy? A study that measures fiction reading would surely not be adequate, unless it controlled for all possible sources of variation between dispositions of people and dispositions of fictional works, which is ludicrous in principle.
- mcguire 8y ago
  * Novel Finding: Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-rea...) * The Relationship Between Empathy and Reading Fiction: Separate Roles for Cognitive and Affective Components (https://jeps.efpsa.org/articles/10.5334/jeps.ca/print/ https://jeps.efpsa.org/articles/10.5334/jeps.ca/print/) * How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3559433/) * Can fiction stories make us more empathetic? (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140811151632.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140811151632.h...) * Exploring the link between reading fictionand empathy: Ruling out individual differencesand examining outcomes (https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fiction%20and%20empathy.pdf https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fict...) But see * Reading Literature Won’t Give You Superpowers: Psychologists have failed to replicate a famous study suggesting that short fiction improves readers’ abilities to read the emotional states of others. (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-psychologists-study-fiction/509405/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/should-p...)
davidb_ 8y ago
This article feels like a direct response to the ideas of Stephen Pinker, summed up by this quote: > one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them and, in the context of: > Even the aspect of identity politics with a grain of justification—that a man cannot truly experience what it is like to be a woman, or a white person an African American—can subvert the cause of equality and harmony if it is taken too far, because it undermines one of the greatest epiphanies of the Enlightenment: that people are equipped with a capacity for sympathetic imagination, which allows them to appreciate the suffering of sentient beings unlike them. In this regard nothing could be more asinine than outrage against “cultural appropriation”—as if it’s a bad thing, rather than a good thing, for a white writer to try to convey the experiences of a black person, or vice versa. > > To be sure, empathy is not enough. But another Enlightenment principle is that people can appreciate principles of universal rights that can bridge even the gaps that empathy cannot span. Any hopes for human improvement are better served by encouraging a recognition of universal human interests than by pitting group against group in zero-sum competition.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but I'm baffled by the extended quote you pasted. It reads like a rhetoric 101 essay of a college freshman, deeply contrived and not hitting at any real point. Just meandering under the pretense that this is Serious Discourse.
  - davidb_ 8y ago
    The quote was taken from: https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker-identity-politics-is-an-enemy-of-reason-and-enlightenment-values https://www.weeklystandard.com/adam-rubenstein/steven-pinker... I posted it to give context to the "debate" Pinker was engaged in. I don't have much of an opinion on whether or not it is "Serious Discourse."
  - jerf 8y ago
    That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen Pinker elaborates more in his books. On the flip side, there are some people who would still accuse him of being glib. On the flip flip side, though, the numbers often support Pinker. Some of the people complaining have serious academic issues. But some people complaining are simply people who have incorporated some degree of doom-saying or even outright misanthropy into their core identity and find it offensive when someone makes an at-least-semi-decent argument against everything being inevitably doomed. Separating the two can be a challenge because there is a lot of overlap between the two sets.
asark 8y ago
> Let alone in connection with Bandersnatch, which was mediocre at best. Yeah, that one was an odd connection for me. Interactivity does change the experience of narrative media, as has been obvious to anyone playing video games for a good long while now, but it's a weird way to work one's way up to where the article takes it. To the extent that one's empathy wanes in Bandersnatch I think it's mostly down to (1) seeing the scaffolding behind the scenes and wanting to explore, at which point the narrative loses its power and it becomes more about poking around the various branching paths, and (2) the limitation of choice itself as meta-level control of the viewer—those "oh god I don't want to do either thing to this person" choices are the part where the episode actually has something to say. Maybe not anything new or profound (done to death in video games, which have mined the meta-territory of player choice in narrative for years) but at least something. To me this is the part—the "wait can I do neither? Oh. I'm under control too." that elevates the episode to Black Mirror level rather than just being an interesting tech experiment. The little "ah ha". The second part is why it's pretty easy to get into the groove of just poking around without feeling anything for the characters. It's the limitation of your choices and the high visibility of the system behind them that kills the empathy. Again, territory video games have played around in for a good long while. It's a hell of a lot harder for me to play the "bad" route(s) in some video games than others, depending on how they're structured and how good the narrative and characters are. Often I can't do it and still enjoy myself. What's interesting here is why Bandersnatch in particular isn't great at maintaining viewer/player empathy—which is likely, at least in part, intentional.
mcguire 8y ago
Googling for "art elicits empathy" produces, for me: * Pictures of pain: their contribution to the neuroscience of empathy: G. D. Schott (https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/3/812/336766 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/138/3/812/336766) * Art Education and the Encouragement of Affectiveand Cognitive Empathy in Early Childhood (https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4193&context=etd https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...) * Empathy-Related Responses to Depicted People in Art Works (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5323429/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5323429/) * Using the Arts to Build Empathy, the Ultimate 21st Century Skill (https://charterforcompassion.org/using-the-arts-to-build-empathy-the-ultimate-21st-century-skill https://charterforcompassion.org/using-the-arts-to-build-emp...) The idea that "art" (literature as well as other "fine arts") increase "empathy" (for some definition) in general is a well-developed and reasonably common notion.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  In what way does your final paragraph follow from anything you wrote before? You assert that the art -> empathy connection exists, but literally provide no basis for this assertion. The idea that art generally does X is purely subjective, for all X, by the very nature of what art is.

selune 8y ago

Is it even a widespread idea that "art promotes empathy"? I feel like nowadays we're talking about morality of art mostly when we're talking about mainstream media (representation in popular media etc). I'm no art critic but I've always thought that generally accepted truth about art is that there is no single concept, idea or purpose behind it. It used to be something along the line of "art is beautiful" but it's not even that now. Anything can be art and art can be anything and it can be perceived in numerous ways. I haven't finished it yet tbh but I find this piece of writing weird because I really don't see where it's coming from.

zwkrt 8y ago
Maybe it would be better phrased as "art has the capacity for exploring and engaging with empathy"? Just because someone said a urinal is art doesn't mean that The Brothers Karamazov is less impactful to me.
- selune 8y ago
  It would make more sense but then what's the point in arguing about it? It has that capacity, because, well, I feel empathetic towards certain people/groups of people after, say, watching some movies. Case closed. I feel like the writer wants to explore how effective this could be as a tool for social change since there is a huge discourse going on about it in the context of pop culture (representation in popular media, glorification of certain subjects (war, violence), objectification, etc) but ventures into weird and a little bit difficult to comprehend (at least for me) philosophical space.
- throwaway2048 8y ago
  A lot of people seem to hung up on the idea that art has to be good. Art can be completely deplorably awful, it doesn't have to be good to be art.
bgilroy26 8y ago
Roger Ebert, the popular film critic, observed that the purpose of the best filmmaking was to generate empathy in the audience https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-generates-empathy-roger-ebert-gets-his-own-documentary https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-gene...

dmix 8y ago

> and lately, in sporadic calls for us to read fiction about those especially under threat in our time: refugees, victims of mass shootings, transgender people, etc. Is this really a common thing? People promoting fiction as a means of understanding popular political issues of the day?

ebullientocelot 8y ago
I don't know that the purpose is promoting understanding of popular political issues, but it definitely seems to me that work of this kind is fashionable to celebrate in literary circles. Take my view with a grain of salt, though--I'm neither fashionable nor in literary circles.
edgarvaldes 8y ago
In Mexico we have had a trend of books about drug trafficking for years, which is a very charged political and social issue. I do not think that most of these publications contribute towards understanding the problem, however.
axedwool 8y ago
I think so, absolutely. Consider how some people suggest reading 1984 or Brave New World to understand totalitarian societies, or how people suggest various reading science fiction or fantasy as a way of understanding some issue. What the quote describes is the empathy crowd's version of that.

bigbadgoose 8y ago

> Empathy is, in a word, selfish. In his bracing and persuasive 2016 book Against Empathy, Paul Bloom writes, “Empathy is a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now… Empathy is biased… It is shortsighted.” Author understands empathy as a micro emotional transaction enacted on a personal scale. The empathic domain is actually "all things", and should include "all positions and considerations". In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing their perspective on this matter.

bitL 8y ago
It frankly sounds like a sociopath's description of empathy. Somebody missing the necessary parts in their brain to be naturally empathetic, describing it based on perceivable symptoms, assuming there is some risk/reward ratio with game theory going on underneath.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, considering we evolved from amino acids based on all kinds of risk/reward filters of evolution, that's probably what's underneath.
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    At the lowest level of every computer there's only zeroes and ones. Still you don't try to explain a neural network in terms of zeroes and ones. Because the emergent behaviour is much more complex than that.
    - lostmsu 8y ago
      No, that's actually exactly what you do.
      - Joe-Z 8y ago
        I think we may be talking about different things here. So in the interest of clearing things up: I was using the example of a neural network as "the closest thing" (arguably still very far off) to the human mind we have in computing. If I'm explaining a newly developed software to one of my colleagues I'm talking in terms of services, requests and protocols. Even trying to explain it on the level of an assembly language would be a nightmare. Just think about the millenia it would take me to fully articulate all states the CPU goes through when executing even a single function. And even then all you'd have is an endless list of zeroes and ones, but no explanation as to the meaning of it.

_bxg1 8y ago

"Who gets to have our empathy? Hitler or one’s wife? The living or the dead? Those near to us or far? Those who resemble and agree with us, or those who don’t? The one or the many? And when it comes to art, as Knausgaard rhetorically asks, “Is it not more important to engage with our neighbor, who after all is real, rather than with one who exists only in a work of fiction?” I look at empathy not as a resource but as a muscle. Practicing empathy means cultivating a heart that emits it. Empathy should be directed at those you encounter, as you encounter them (or more precisely, those who stand to be affected by your actions). Works of fiction that inspire empathy for imaginary characters are training this muscle. “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief, consolation, and work, which would involve us in their pains and would require at least the sacrifice of our indolence.” Empathy without action is inert, yes, but action without empathy is at best blind idealism, deaf to the effects it has on real souls, which has been the source of a large portion of history's evils. One could just as easily say that a compass on its own doesn't propel you towards any goal. But a vehicle, pointed directly towards its destination and lacking a steering wheel, is worse. As with most this-vs-that arguments, this essay is a banal oversimplification: both things are important. I don't know why that's so hard for people to accept.

jcranberry 8y ago

The author is right in one thing, which is the great thing about (some/a lot of) art is not just empathizing. However, giving the ability to empathize implies the true merit of such art, which is a record of the experience of a person, presented in such a way where you are able to look at yourself as that person--to find a common ancestor node and see a path from that node to the person presented through art. From such a record, you increase the different perspectives from which one may base their "representative thinking", as mentioned in the article. The irony of lambasting art which provokes empathy while promoting representative thinking, is that it is exactly representative thinking with a limited set of viewpoints which literature (and art in general) which provokes empathy for people from different points of view attempts to cure. If you try to put yourself in the place of another (which is different from immersion, in which you lose the connection to your sense of self, which is a distinction I think the author fails in not making), without the knowledge of their experiences, this ends in a total failure of understanding, and at a society-wide scale can lead (and has led) to destructive misperceptions. So to think this way without relying on resources which provoke empathy and force you to broaden your sense of self (meaning broadening the viewpoints which you are able to place yourself in) is actually very bad. What is interesting about the book that the author mentions in the final section is not that it attempts to disassociate the reader and stop any kind of feeling of empathy, it's that it attempts to force you to consider what you've just felt. So it's a feature on top, or used in conjunction with empathy, not in spite of it. "What would this model of art as “representative thinking” entail? Well, for one thing, literally more representation. One can only bring the experiences of others to mind if they are made imaginatively available to us. Perhaps, instead of the current distribution—portrayals of “default humans” (that is, straight white men, good and evil) vs. empathy vehicles (that is, everybody else)—we could simply have greater variety of experience represented in our art." Ultimately the author seems to have some misunderstanding of the idea of empathy or at least empathy in art, especially if they think that no straight white male has even been portrayed in art in such a way to provoke empathy, and if they think that art in general is lacking in diverse representation.

zhoujianfu 8y ago

I’ve defined art as “something you think somebody else might find interesting.” So I guess that is related to empathy.