"I killed a man the other day."
March 8, 2019 6:01 PM Subscribe
The Banality of Empathy "The slippage between emotional empathy and the good in our public discourse also presumes that when we do feel the suffering of others, we are prompted to relieve it. But this is not always true. Sometimes, we just want it to go away."
An essay that begins with the watching of Netflix's Bandersnatch leads into a discussion about the idea of empathy in morality, Arendt's interpretations of Kantian aesthetics, and the virtue of diversity in art.
An essay that begins with the watching of Netflix's Bandersnatch leads into a discussion about the idea of empathy in morality, Arendt's interpretations of Kantian aesthetics, and the virtue of diversity in art.
Oh god this puts into words what I’ve felt for years! Awesome.
posted by The Toad at 7:43 PM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by The Toad at 7:43 PM on March 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
This point was made in a classic article from The Onion: "Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes the Blues"
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:25 PM on March 8, 2019 [18 favorites]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 9:25 PM on March 8, 2019 [18 favorites]
I find that the best way to grasp the distinction between “representative thinking” and emotional empathy is Arendt’s lovely phrase, “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”
This is an interesting take and beautifully phrased but it comes across as a bit of hair splitting. That is, "empathy" is a nebulous term: one person's "empathy" may be another's "representational thinking". These abstractions are generally used in such broad ways in everyday speech! But yes, this is a good essay.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:00 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
This is an interesting take and beautifully phrased but it comes across as a bit of hair splitting. That is, "empathy" is a nebulous term: one person's "empathy" may be another's "representational thinking". These abstractions are generally used in such broad ways in everyday speech! But yes, this is a good essay.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:00 AM on March 9, 2019 [2 favorites]
It's also a little too bad that Serpell doesn't find more time to touch on video games in her essay, as games that offer meaningful choices to the player have been / were a big deal fairly recently, and the limpest acknowledgement that a player's choice was illusory was seen as fairly bold. The notion that an entire game, no matter the story structure or number of forking paths, is essentially dictated is not generally raised.
Also, rather sad that Dada didn't get a shout out for its rejection of art.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:10 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
Also, rather sad that Dada didn't get a shout out for its rejection of art.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:10 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
I know Brecht had it in mind to stimulate political action, but I’m not sure many other artists had that kind of directly pragmatic ambition? The idea that art can have such a clear, one-to-one influence on action is a little naive, idk, and I’m not really sure who’s actually made that claim... Sure, watching poverty porn to get you’d feels on and then forgetting to do anything about poverty in your city (or feeling like you *did* by watching a movie) is a common enough hypocrisy. But to say art doesn’t do anything to broaden perspectives (beyond stereotype) and inform action isn’t quite right either. Many more vehicles and structures are required to get people going (a thriving civil society, healthy communities, democratic institutions, lack of corruption - or such a dearth of all of those that revolution is practically forced). But a powerful film (tv show, book) can be a useful drop in a bigger bucket. I just don’t think you can hope to predict how or when.
Because we’re mimetic, representation in media does have an impact on how people identify and represent themselves to themselves, what they find possible or attractive. (Thinking of how applications to forensic psychology programs shot up after CSI [or to law, with various sexy law shows over time], of how Jennifer Lopez and the Kardashians helped shift ideas about the attractiveness of a certain body shape, the contagious quality of news reporting on murder and suicide, ok there are probably better examples, those are ones that came to me at nighttime wakeup # 3.) But I think internal shifts that influence self-identity are very possible, relatively quickly. Shifts in attitudes towards others might take longer (or more exposure to a given trope) because deep down we’re all mostly egoists, but that doesn’t mean absolutely nothing is happening. I’m pretty certain that men growing up seeing themselves as the protagonists in every fucking thing has helped affirm their sense of entitlement to being agents (and has helped dehumanize women and flatten ideas about our agency) and I’m pretty sure more films passing the Bechdel test would be helpful in doing something similar for women.
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:01 AM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
Because we’re mimetic, representation in media does have an impact on how people identify and represent themselves to themselves, what they find possible or attractive. (Thinking of how applications to forensic psychology programs shot up after CSI [or to law, with various sexy law shows over time], of how Jennifer Lopez and the Kardashians helped shift ideas about the attractiveness of a certain body shape, the contagious quality of news reporting on murder and suicide, ok there are probably better examples, those are ones that came to me at nighttime wakeup # 3.) But I think internal shifts that influence self-identity are very possible, relatively quickly. Shifts in attitudes towards others might take longer (or more exposure to a given trope) because deep down we’re all mostly egoists, but that doesn’t mean absolutely nothing is happening. I’m pretty certain that men growing up seeing themselves as the protagonists in every fucking thing has helped affirm their sense of entitlement to being agents (and has helped dehumanize women and flatten ideas about our agency) and I’m pretty sure more films passing the Bechdel test would be helpful in doing something similar for women.
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:01 AM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.I'll be spending some time with this Candace Vogler quote from the article. It carries so many assumptions about literature, readability, and what it means to know someone. Something about it irritates me.
posted by idiopath at 7:24 AM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
As a boy I daydreamed of being unable to feel pain. I accepted the ability to ignore pain as second choice; I would find controlled ways to cause myself physical and emotional pain, to train myself to transcend it, to "toughen" myself. Because this is the model of coping I was taught. The solution to my problems, according to the people I trusted, was to stop feeling things. Or to decide the things I felt didn't matter.
I think this might be the opposite of empathy, where empathy moves out from my own experience to understand another, this masculinization moves inward from my own experience to deny it as weakness.
And it's a precondition for a banal manly sort of cruelty.
I think empathy is a strange model for how we take in fiction because a character doesn't feel, it's described in ways that might be calculated to make me feel but that's different in a way that matters.
A video game or an action film can use its characters and contrive its situations to reenforce cruelty and diminish empathy without undermining its own ability to draw you in and play your emotions. If we learn to enjoy violent media, we learn the genre conventions of violence and follow along, we learn to turn off the ability to see someone as human like flipping a switch, to prevent the painful experience of empathizing.
posted by idiopath at 8:10 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
I think this might be the opposite of empathy, where empathy moves out from my own experience to understand another, this masculinization moves inward from my own experience to deny it as weakness.
And it's a precondition for a banal manly sort of cruelty.
I think empathy is a strange model for how we take in fiction because a character doesn't feel, it's described in ways that might be calculated to make me feel but that's different in a way that matters.
A video game or an action film can use its characters and contrive its situations to reenforce cruelty and diminish empathy without undermining its own ability to draw you in and play your emotions. If we learn to enjoy violent media, we learn the genre conventions of violence and follow along, we learn to turn off the ability to see someone as human like flipping a switch, to prevent the painful experience of empathizing.
posted by idiopath at 8:10 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.
I'll be spending some time with this Candace Vogler quote from the article. ... Something about it irritates me.
Is it its wrongness? Well-drawn literary characters change with each reading, because hopefully you change between readings. If it’s done well there’s enough space left for collaboration, for that evolution. They are not “knowable” in some definite, finite way; there are entire disciplines devoted to arguing about them. This quote is so wrong, in such easily demonstrable ways, that it actually annoys me.
The whole article is like this, tbh. The assumptions about the purpose of art, to start, are...ridiculous. It takes a fine critical theory about how some people choose to experience art and makes it dumb by universalizing it.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:58 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
I'll be spending some time with this Candace Vogler quote from the article. ... Something about it irritates me.
Is it its wrongness? Well-drawn literary characters change with each reading, because hopefully you change between readings. If it’s done well there’s enough space left for collaboration, for that evolution. They are not “knowable” in some definite, finite way; there are entire disciplines devoted to arguing about them. This quote is so wrong, in such easily demonstrable ways, that it actually annoys me.
The whole article is like this, tbh. The assumptions about the purpose of art, to start, are...ridiculous. It takes a fine critical theory about how some people choose to experience art and makes it dumb by universalizing it.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:58 AM on March 9, 2019 [3 favorites]
It takes a fine critical theory about how some people choose to experience art and makes it dumb by universalizing it.
This is the NYT of what I dislike about the article even as I enjoyed it as a provocation. That said, coming immediately on the heels of Green Book winning the Oscar and in a general moment where high art promoting a kind of empathy is still quite popular, my own inclination is to be forgiving. Brecht always feels like he's on the outs in mass culture, and I would like more time for him in the sun.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:12 PM on March 9, 2019
This is the NYT of what I dislike about the article even as I enjoyed it as a provocation. That said, coming immediately on the heels of Green Book winning the Oscar and in a general moment where high art promoting a kind of empathy is still quite popular, my own inclination is to be forgiving. Brecht always feels like he's on the outs in mass culture, and I would like more time for him in the sun.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:12 PM on March 9, 2019
Uh, the "nut", not the "NYT"
posted by Going To Maine at 1:20 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Going To Maine at 1:20 PM on March 9, 2019 [1 favorite]
not to digress, but: I stopped reading the (very interesting, I thought) essay to jump to the short story it mentions: "The Venus Effect," by Violet Allen, and personally I feel like whether you read the essay or not, you should read the story.
(I did pick the essay back up and feel like it sort of muddies the waters, particularly by the end about what exactly it means by "empathy"; it's still really good and yeah, provocative, but I'm not sure it comes anywhere toward the point it's claiming to seek)
posted by Kybard at 6:07 PM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
(I did pick the essay back up and feel like it sort of muddies the waters, particularly by the end about what exactly it means by "empathy"; it's still really good and yeah, provocative, but I'm not sure it comes anywhere toward the point it's claiming to seek)
posted by Kybard at 6:07 PM on March 9, 2019 [5 favorites]
No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth repeated readings is knowable.
I'll be spending some time with this Candace Vogler quote from the article. It carries so many assumptions about literature, readability, and what it means to know someone. Something about it irritates me.
I think you might be taking the quote in a way different than Vogler uses it (her paper is quite good, though a bit esoteric) and than Serpell references it for her point in essay. The idea of "knowing" a person or character here isn't used as a positive signal of art's merit, rather the very limits of art, or more accurately, the mistaken values some seek to imbue art with in regards to moral philosophy.
Characters in literature are, by necessity and design, essentialized and shaped to the ends of the author/story. Their actions and thoughts are pared down to what is of use in the tale, no matter how long or shaggy that story may be, and their "lives" on the page are fit to the purpose of the story, no matter how debatable that "purpose" might be. This sort of simplification is one of the main things Serpell argues against in the paragraph following her quote of Vogler, where it is pointed out how that is also the essence of stereotyping, for example.
Character lives are comprehensive, they are entirely bound by the writing to that which is given by the author. There is no more to them then what is on the page. We might imagine alternatives to their choices or invent things for them, but that isn't represented in the work, that is our own fantasizing about it. Our knowledge of characters is also invasive in ways that our knowledge of other people is not. We are given access to thoughts or actions that would be private in the real world and thus unknowable.
Narratives are, or seek to be, coherent and to capture a totality of purpose for a story. We sometimes borrow from this notion of narrative to give explanation to events or people in our lives, to make sense of them as if they were written, but that attempt can't capture the fullness of life, it uses fictional form to provide rationale to that which otherwise may seem to lack sense. Human lives are less knowable for not being so clearly defined in print, for exceeding set purpose or remaining invisible to others no matter how intimate our contact. This isn't a failing of our interactions nor is the attempt to render whole a superiority of fiction to life, just a signal difference that need be noted to better grasp the relationship between fiction and how we might use it to understand our existence.
Vogler's paper is mostly an argument against some ways literary readings are used in moral philosophy. She doesn't argue that there is no use for it or provide an end definition of what the "right way" to clarify the relationship might be. Serpell goes a bit beyond that in bringing up Arendt's idea of representative thinking, which may or may not fit Vogler's own take on the issue of empathy as that wasn't quite what her paper was about, though it is certainly a reasonable tangent to pursue for from the ideas in the paper.
Personally, I think Arendt and Serpell through her use of the idea, is much closer to the mark then the frequent reliance on ideas of empathy being key to the value we get from art. Empathy is easily abused for one thing. The nature of essentializing and shaping works to an end makes providing "excuse" or reason for virtually any action possible by dint of contriving the circumstances to make it so. That's an all too common feature of popular narrative arts that use certain tropes or narrative forms to channel audience focus towards some and away from others. Serpell rightly points out how this usually flows towards the benefit of the status quo, the figure of the white male who needs no excuse for being the central point of investment in the story. The short story she brings up at the end of the essay explicitly challenges that point of view for much the same reason.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:16 PM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
I'll be spending some time with this Candace Vogler quote from the article. It carries so many assumptions about literature, readability, and what it means to know someone. Something about it irritates me.
I think you might be taking the quote in a way different than Vogler uses it (her paper is quite good, though a bit esoteric) and than Serpell references it for her point in essay. The idea of "knowing" a person or character here isn't used as a positive signal of art's merit, rather the very limits of art, or more accurately, the mistaken values some seek to imbue art with in regards to moral philosophy.
Characters in literature are, by necessity and design, essentialized and shaped to the ends of the author/story. Their actions and thoughts are pared down to what is of use in the tale, no matter how long or shaggy that story may be, and their "lives" on the page are fit to the purpose of the story, no matter how debatable that "purpose" might be. This sort of simplification is one of the main things Serpell argues against in the paragraph following her quote of Vogler, where it is pointed out how that is also the essence of stereotyping, for example.
Character lives are comprehensive, they are entirely bound by the writing to that which is given by the author. There is no more to them then what is on the page. We might imagine alternatives to their choices or invent things for them, but that isn't represented in the work, that is our own fantasizing about it. Our knowledge of characters is also invasive in ways that our knowledge of other people is not. We are given access to thoughts or actions that would be private in the real world and thus unknowable.
Narratives are, or seek to be, coherent and to capture a totality of purpose for a story. We sometimes borrow from this notion of narrative to give explanation to events or people in our lives, to make sense of them as if they were written, but that attempt can't capture the fullness of life, it uses fictional form to provide rationale to that which otherwise may seem to lack sense. Human lives are less knowable for not being so clearly defined in print, for exceeding set purpose or remaining invisible to others no matter how intimate our contact. This isn't a failing of our interactions nor is the attempt to render whole a superiority of fiction to life, just a signal difference that need be noted to better grasp the relationship between fiction and how we might use it to understand our existence.
Vogler's paper is mostly an argument against some ways literary readings are used in moral philosophy. She doesn't argue that there is no use for it or provide an end definition of what the "right way" to clarify the relationship might be. Serpell goes a bit beyond that in bringing up Arendt's idea of representative thinking, which may or may not fit Vogler's own take on the issue of empathy as that wasn't quite what her paper was about, though it is certainly a reasonable tangent to pursue for from the ideas in the paper.
Personally, I think Arendt and Serpell through her use of the idea, is much closer to the mark then the frequent reliance on ideas of empathy being key to the value we get from art. Empathy is easily abused for one thing. The nature of essentializing and shaping works to an end makes providing "excuse" or reason for virtually any action possible by dint of contriving the circumstances to make it so. That's an all too common feature of popular narrative arts that use certain tropes or narrative forms to channel audience focus towards some and away from others. Serpell rightly points out how this usually flows towards the benefit of the status quo, the figure of the white male who needs no excuse for being the central point of investment in the story. The short story she brings up at the end of the essay explicitly challenges that point of view for much the same reason.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:16 PM on March 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
Reminded of a person quoted in Jonathan Glover's Humanity: "I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it."
This was a person who lived near a Nazi death camp, and was distressed to be confronted with it -- which aspect I forget, incompletely burned people or their screams or visible brutality. Empathy tending to disengagement.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:40 PM on March 9, 2019
This was a person who lived near a Nazi death camp, and was distressed to be confronted with it -- which aspect I forget, incompletely burned people or their screams or visible brutality. Empathy tending to disengagement.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:40 PM on March 9, 2019
That exact quote is in the article.
posted by idiopath at 8:31 AM on March 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by idiopath at 8:31 AM on March 10, 2019 [3 favorites]
It is an interesting article, and I agree that empathising with someone, or some character, isn't going to change society. But I do think it is a start. More importantly being able to understand that other people have different wishes, desires and lives that you is vitally important. As is coming to the realisation that your personal lived experiences are not mine, they are not universal, and we don't all share the same background, and even if we did we are often still different.
Good stories and good characters offer us an opportunity to see ourselves, but also to see other people, to see alternatives and whatifs.
Empathising also does not excuse or condone any action. You can understand the path that led to a certain action while at the same time condemning the action itself.
posted by Fence at 10:57 AM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
Good stories and good characters offer us an opportunity to see ourselves, but also to see other people, to see alternatives and whatifs.
Empathising also does not excuse or condone any action. You can understand the path that led to a certain action while at the same time condemning the action itself.
posted by Fence at 10:57 AM on March 10, 2019 [1 favorite]
"The fact that it’s a rich white man taking a poor black man’s death for a spin is no coincidence. The empathy model of art can bleed too easily into the relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it. It’s a gateway drug to white saviorism, with its familiar blend of propaganda, pornography, and paternalism. It’s an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities, on the page and on screen, to say nothing of our actual lives. And it has imposed upon readers and viewers the idea that they can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized."
I think the author is saying something important here, but what this quote describes is sentimentality rather than empathy.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:17 PM on March 11, 2019
I think the author is saying something important here, but what this quote describes is sentimentality rather than empathy.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 1:17 PM on March 11, 2019
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