There is no doubt that we are facing a cultural decline. But we are a reading generation. You can read and learn anything from a book—or nothing. You can learn to be a suicide bomber or a religious fanatic. You can acquire unrealistic expectations of love… You can float forever like driftwood on the current of text; you can be as passive as a person in an all-day movie theater, as antisocial as a kid holed up with a video game. The force of reading, the power of words, is not always a force for good. Deleterious emotional responses to vicious narratives also activate the neural shared manifold for inter-subjectivity. With all of television’s faults, has it, by depicting victim’s close-up, contributed to an enlarged awareness and empathic feeling toward victims around the world? Or, does exposure to victims repeatedly over time result in habituation and a lowering of people’s empathic distress to the point of making them feel indifferent to another’s suffering? Or, does depicting people in one’s primary group as victims of another group foster ethnic hatred? Possibly all of the above apply and the net effect of television on “mass empathy” depends on the frequency and context of one’s exposure. However, empathy supports both caring and justice as it is embedded in moral principles adopted by a society. That is, empathizing with particular victims led to both affirming the caring principle and using the principle as a premise for judging laws that violate it as morally wrong. Empathy may work best in homogeneous groups and in complex, multicultural, or if I may extrapolate global contexts. The two motives, empathy-induced altruism, and the wish to uphold moral principles of justice, sometimes cooperate, but sometimes conflict. E.M. Forster proclaimed in his 1927 lectures, published as Aspects of the Novel, that “it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source.” Though humorously critical of novelists for neglecting the main facts of human life (birth, death, food, sleep, and sex). Forster celebrates the capacity of fiction to allow readers to “know people perfectly,” for fictional characters are “people whose secret lives are visible.”
In other words, a writer’s empathetic exertions must extend to both the dark places of psychology and the broad field of other peoples’ experiences, for no material is barred. “Everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought,” writes Virginia Woolf, “every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.”… “We see person like shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them? All too often, we see them as just shapes, or physical objects in motion. What storytelling in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social circumstances.”
What you read make you. A contributor to moral sentiments, the basis of benevolent affection, sympathy is a valued quality of human nature. David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) and Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) speak of sympathy, including clearly recognizable aspects of empathy, though neither philosopher uses that term. Hume’s sympathy includes an empathic first stage of what contemporary psychologists would call emotional contagion: the minds of men are mirrors to one another. We are all sealed up inside our frozen cultural habits, and there seems to be no workable precedent for adopting a more generous and creative view of how human beings might communicate or act in concert across racial, ethnic, or civilizational divisions. The goals of a cultivated role-taking empathy could follow upon recognition of commonalities to our common good. It is possible that by transcending both ourselves and our cultures we can project ourselves into other selves and other cultures. The imaginative power reading uniquely demands is clearly linked, psychologically, with a capacity for individual judgment and with the ability to empathize with other people. Mark Edmundson writes, “It is time to inspire a nationwide renaissance of literary reading and bring the transformative power of literature into the lives of all citizens.”…“Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a certain kind of responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy.”