
The Banality of Empathy - anarbadalov
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/
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selune
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
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
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.

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bigbadgoose
> 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.

~~~
naasking
> In short, the author should work through a few feelings that are biasing
> their perspective on this matter.

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.

~~~
bigbadgoose
Thank you for the detail :)

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dmix
> 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?

~~~
axedwool
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.

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mlthoughts2018
> "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.

~~~
davidb_
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
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “That's a summary statement. If you're interested in more details, Stephen
> Pinker elaborates more in his books.“

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.

~~~
jerf
My point is the only solution to that criticism is to elaborate on it more.

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.

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jcranberry
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.

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_bxg1
"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.

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

