The Banality of Empathy
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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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2014/07/03/328230231/a-machine-that-gene...
Do St. Peter's Basilica or Rei Kawakubo's clothes generate empathy? Should they even? Those are prominent, largely influential examples in their respective fields (architecture and design of clothes).
https://twitter.com/page88/status/1100441460934131717
In which we find a link to an entire book oin the idea:
IIRC Ruskin, a leading art critic in 19th century, argued that art (aka paintings) should be moral and Christian and I'm pretty sure at least a few really clever medieval and ancient guys shared the same notion (albeit their ideas of morality were probably different).
But it's not a universally accepted truth. Just one of possible interpretations I guess.
and the "goodness" of art is about consensus around the level of interestingness of the ideas behind it (ideally; of course, social considerations make that murky).
so it's not art if there is no interesting ideas behind it, or if people find it banal. if i hold up my starbucks coffee cup and say it represents hegemony and should be considered high art, well, no one will really care.
i'd once heard a joke (story?) about found art where a janitor accidentally left a mop and a bucket while cleaning a gallery space and it attracted a crowd trying to discern what it meant. =)
"Meaningless but aesthetically pleasing" is just decor.
But yes, I can agree that art is essentially encoded data.
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.
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.
This pseudo-scientific rant was to imply that future science will rediscover the irreducible to matter and evolutionary mechanisms soul, sorry I mean't "universe's special consciousness layer"?
If you start saying that "oh, it's just evolution", your contribution to the topic is zero, skipping any issues with that theory we can't explain yet, making it similar to a religion (which condenses certain observable facts into its rules otherwise it wouldn't survive). It's pretty normal for scientists to believe in 99% BS but if they are 1% right, we consider them super successful. None of the pioneers had any kind of holistic view of a field crunched through by theoreticians, after the initial discovery dust settled, taught at universities, so they inevitably believed all kinds of silly things from our current point of view. I hope the same would hold for our successors, having boldness to explore, instead of blindly taking existing knowledge without any doubts and punishing everyone who deviates from whatever narrative.
You're confusing "empathy the emotion" with "empathic reasoning", which is a form of generalized empathy. Clearly the article is about the emotion which has all the downsides listed.
That's what "oughta". It's not what it is, though, (or, if you prefer, what it usually is), and that's what the author talks about.
Is this really a common thing? People promoting fiction as a means of understanding popular political issues of the day?
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.
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.
* The Relationship Between Empathy and Reading Fiction: Separate Roles for Cognitive and Affective Components (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/)
* Can fiction stories make us more empathetic? (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%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-p...)
> 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.
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."
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.
The details within Pinker’s books are irrelevant to my criticisms of this article and of the quote you pasted. Further, it’s also irrelevant that your pasted quote is a summary or not.
The issue is that it’s juvenile, contrived writing that isn’t rooted in any coherent position on anything. It’s a smattering of ideas that loosely touch on different things, but are presented as if together it constitutes some type of bigger picture about art and empathy, which it doesn’t.
It reminds me of one of my favorite observations by Scott Adams (from long before he turned into a political commentator), which is that all characters start out as shallow caricatures. The only solution to that is giving the author time to elaborate; if you instantly and irrevocably label the character as a caricature and don't give that time, you'll never have find any characters that aren't caricatures. Similarly, yes, this quote may be shallow, but unlike a freshman essay where this is the conclusion, Stephen Pinker does elaborate, expand, and defend at some length. If you judged all arguments this way, you'd look around you and find that the world has nothing but shallow freshman arguments.
Although the two may be somewhat in sync as it requires empathy to promote it.
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.
* Pictures of pain: their contribution to the neuroscience of empathy: G. D. Schott (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=...)
* Empathy-Related Responses to Depicted People in Art Works (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-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.
The idea that art generally does X is purely subjective, for all X, by the very nature of what art is.
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.
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.