Intersections
I hope you’ve all read the interview with Rebecca Goldstein – because it’s so good, and interesting, and full of ideas. Not my doing, obviously, but Goldstein’s. I’ve been an admirer of her fiction for years – ever since The Mind-Body Problem came out, in fact, I think, which is more than twenty years ago. It’s a brilliant novel. I’ve always thought so, so I was pleased to see Steve Pinker tell her “Your first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, is a classic among people in my field” in that conversation between the two of them I posted in Flashback a few days ago. I hope you’ve also read that, because it’s fascinating. I hadn’t read it before I wrote the interview questions, so I was interested to see Steve Pinker asking some of the same ones. For instance about storytelling and empathy.
SP: We are getting less cruel, and the question is how. The philosopher Peter Singer offers a clue when he notes that there really does seem to be a universal capacity for empathy, but that by default people apply it only within the narrow circle of the family or village or clan. Over the millennia, the moral circle has expanded to encompass other clans, other tribes, and other races. The question is, why did it happen? What stretched our innate capacity for empathy? And one answer is mediums that force us to take other people’s perspectives, such as journalism, history, and realistic fiction.
RG: Storytelling does it.
SP: By allowing you to project yourself into the lives of people of different times and places and races, in a way that wouldn’t spontaneously occur to you, fiction can force you into the perspective of a person unlike yourself, who might otherwise seem subhuman.
RG: There’s a fundamental role that storytelling is always playing in the moral life. To try to see somebody on their own terms, which is part of what it is to be moral, is to try to make sense of their world, to try to tell the story of their life as they would tell it. So in our real life, just in making sense of people’s actions and in seeing them in the moral light, we’re involved in storytelling.
SP: So you agree that fiction can expand a person’s moral circle?
And then – Pinker talked about much the same thing last week on Start the Week. The idea of the expansion of empathy from the immediate circle to include larger and larger proportions of Other People. So, read the interview, read the conversation, listen to Start the Week, and you’ll see how it all joins up.
I remember Jonathan Miller, in an interview with Dick Cavett lo these many years ago, saying something similar about the use of storytelling in expanding our normal range of empathy.
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of people who don’t like fiction and think it a waste of time. They seem exactly the type who “just follow orders”–no matter what those orders might be.
And Simon Blackburn talks about it here and there. In the next TPM, for one place.
Mind you…I’ve gotten more demanding about fiction in the past few years. It has to be good fiction to do all that work. There is such an ocean of mediocre fiction out there, and I don’t think most of it teaches much about empathy. (A lot of it is too self-absorbed, for one thing. Disguised [barely disguised] memoir or diary rather than real fiction, and all the empathy is for the author-surrogate. That’s part of what makes it mediocre.)
Good fiction…well, yeah, that goes without saying.
I notice that the I-don’t-read-fiction people also tend to find history boring and irrelevant. Curiously, they have no problem with watching movies and TV shows about make-believe places and characters. Hmmm. Maybe they just don’t like to read, period. Wonder if watching films has any empathy-expanding effects on non-reading types.