On empathy
Reading is interesting, because in many ways it teaches us about how we engage with the perspectives of others.
This doesn’t especially mean that, in reading, you are engaging with me, The Writer – you are, rather, engaging a fabricated perspective, a persona or idea of a person with a very particular manner of expression and a very particular set of values. You are engaging the lens through which the story is viewed.
And one book isn’t necessarily one specific perspective – in fact, most books are lots and lots of perspectives, as many books these days take place from many different points of view, and each of those perspectives will have their own values and virtues. Even if a book is one point of view, focusing on one character, if that book takes place over a great length of time, that point of view’s perspective can change dramatically.
The breakdown is when the engagement with this perspective fails to happen – when you are incompatible with a perspective, when you violently reject its values. This can happen for two reasons:
1. The writer failed to create some measure of empathy for this perspective – the fabricated perspective, in other words, fails to evoke empathy correctly.
2. The reader has no empathy to give this perspective – or perhaps any perspective other than the ones they agree with.
Empathy, I think, is amoral – it is the ability to sympathize with others. “Sympathize” is a positive word, but it’s perfectly possible to sympathize with “bad” or objectionable people.
More importantly, you can do this and still remain a “good” person. For example, one can understand the fear that inspires prejudice while not falling prey to the same and going on to incorporate that prejudice in their own life.
To have empathy is not to accept; to sympathize with is not to approve; it is merely comprehension and understanding, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, but not actually become that person.
And when someone rejects a book outright, decrying one character or another, or objecting to one chapter’s perspective of a character – assuming, in other words, that the book is actively advocating on behalf of the values being presented… Well, it always makes me wonder about this confusion between empathy and acceptance, between sympathy and approval: everyone agrees that they want to understand and sympathize with their fellow human beings, but I’m not everyone knows exactly what that entails.
