patricksomerville.com

Empathy and Reading

This morning I read this article about empathy (via Katherine Bell of the Harvard Business Review). Here’s the lede:

A new study from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shows that Americans’ levels of empathy have dropped significantly in the last three decades.

The article is brief, but there is a (very internetty) whisper of speculation about the simultaneous decline of reading playing a role in this declination of empathy in our society. To which I say: that seems totally possible, actually, but that also seems like correlation without causation? At least in this case.

Still, it got my mind rambling.

My ears perked up at this article, I think, because anyone who has read it knows that empathy is at the center of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, and becomes particularly important in the book’s final story, when the ability to empathize becomes basically embodied in a piece of technology. (And sidenote: I was recently talking to somebody about why the helmet looks like 19th century technology instead of 21st century technology. Part of the reason is that the featherproof intern who sketched it initially sketched it this way, and then I wrote around the drawing, but beyond that, I do think there’s something important about it being differentiated from our own technology. Within the framework of the story, too, I liked that it was in this way more firmly linked to the 19th century poetry that inspired it.)

Here it is:

Anyway, without indulging in such things as quantifiable evidence (why do such things, really?), my intuitive answer to the question about reading is the answer most avid readers and writers would give: yes, absolutely.  Of course.  Books undeniably make it easier for people to see things from other points of view, and to thus empathize.  That’s what books are.  They are machines of understanding other people.  It’s so self-evident, and yet it’s so frightening that this is starting to sound both pedantic and somehow disconnected from the realities of our era.  To me, making an actual machine called “The Machine of Understanding Human Beings” was a way to dramatize the absence of empathy and way to think about where it comes from in the first place; I wanted to write about somebody who was coming to empathy for the first time, really—someone who had not properly integrated it into his adult life. It’s not said in the story, but this is certain: Tom Sanderson is not a reader of fiction.

Thinking about this whole question made me remember this book review from the New York Times. It’s a review of a book called The Science of Empathy, which came out last summer. I referred to this book while trying to think about evil in the book I was working on at the time, and despite his semi-disturbing location near the front gates of evolutionary psychology, I like Baron-Cohen’s idea about “Zero-Negative” personalities, it somehow rings true to me.  (Again, intuitively, as this is the internet.) The basic idea: evil is not a moral question, but rather the absence of empathy and the presence of a few other factors. (And I have to say: I smiled a little bit, re-reading this review, as it reminded me of Dr. Baron-Cohen’s term empathizing mechanism.)

To me, the penultimate paragraph is the most interesting part of the review, and I will end this empathy ramble there, noting that fiction writers, I think, should pitch a tent within these temporary episodes if they want to write well and continue to understand characters:

At the core of this deceptively simple book is the question of the nature of cruelty. In the last and most philosophical chapter Dr. Baron-Cohen discusses situations in which an individual who is not otherwise lacking in empathy may behave cruelly. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s term “the banality of evil,” and discussing the work of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo in which ordinary people exhibited cruel behavior, he acknowledges that in most of us empathy may be suspended temporarily, under certain circumstances.