9/2/2021 The Banality of Empathy | by Namwali Serpell | The New York Review of Books

The Banality of Empathy

Namwali Serpell
March 2, 2019

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with
characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing
suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

I killed a man the other day. Not

literally, of course. I was watching
“Bandersnatch,” the newest episode
of the dystopian TV show Black
Mirror. The episode cleverly
imitates the form of a choose-your-
own-adventure book. Every few
minutes, the hero—I forget his
name, an adorably disheveled white
dude trying to make it as a
videogame programmer in the
Eighties—confronts a binary choice:
this cereal or that cereal, this album
or that album, follow that creepy
fella or have a chat with your
shrink. A black menu bar rises from
below and you, the viewer, have to
Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos
click on a choice for him before the
Elsa Triolet Library, Bobigny, France, 1996
thin white line retracting from both
sides of the screen disappears—a
kind of techno-hourglass. If you abdicate, the show makes its own choice.

I found this episode pleasingly meta: there’s an actual choose-your-own

adventure book the dude’s obsessed with and a conspiracy theory (plots and
plots!) about being controlled by unseen forces. At one point, he shouts
something like “Who’s there?!” while gazing paranoiacally at the ceiling. (A
missed opportunity for direct address, imho.) All this was fun at first:
choosing a record that would become the soundtrack for the next scene and so
on. But then the format began to paralyze me, its innocuous “this vs. that”
choices building slowly toward fatal decisions. Take the psychiatric meds or
flush them down the loo. Try acid or don’t. Jump off this balcony or make the
other guy jump. That last one is when I killed a man, simply by not clicking at
all, my eyes widening as the white line zoomed in from its edges. It vanished
into its middle. A man went splat. Back to the previous menu.

Every time I restarted the “game” to explore another fork in the path, I got a
little less squeamish about drug abuse, about self-harm, about murder.
Gradually, something became apparent to me. My empathy for the hero was

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completely at odds with my desire to watch Black Mirror—that is, to indulge

in an often violent and therefore titillating TV show about the horrors of
technology. This gave the lie to the idea that I had any genuine empathy for
this white dude at all. I wasn’t there to feel his pain. I was there to impose it—
and simply because that would be more interesting.

This viewing experience finally undid for me what I have long suspected to be
a meaningless platitude: the idea that art promotes empathy. This idea is
particularly prevalent when it comes to those works of art described as
“narrative”: stories, novels, TV shows, movies, comics. We assume that works
that depict characters in action over time must make us empathize with them,
or as the saying goes, “walk a mile in their shoes.” And we assume that this is
a good thing. Why?

The idea goes back at least to the eighteenth century, when the philosopher
Adam Smith placed “sympathy” (meaning something closer to what we would
now call “empathy”) at the center of ethical relations, leading the novelist
George Eliot to claim, a century later, that “if Art does not enlarge men’s
sympathies, it does nothing morally.” This concatenated belief is now
everywhere: art encourages empathy and empathy will save us all. We see it
in lay summaries of neuroscience, in the use of virtual reality to foster
empathy, 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.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s acceptance speech for his 2015 Welt Literaturpreis,
published as “The Vanishing Point” in The New Yorker, doesn’t use the word
empathy but typifies the general tenor of the claim. Musing on the photo of a
“dead little boy on the beach”—Alan Kurdi, a young Syrian refugee who
washed up drowned on the shores of the Mediterranean—Knausgaard is
shocked into a realization: “Are people dying? While this insight may be
banal, its repercussions are not.” He goes on to compare the news media,
which he thinks takes a remote, drone’s-eye view of other people, with an
idealized version of the novel:

There is a vanishing point in our humanity, a point at which the other goes from
being definite to indefinite. But this point is also the locus for the opposite
movement, in which the other goes from indefinite to definite—and if there is an
ethics of the novel, then it is here, in the zone that lies between the one and the all,
that it comes into force and takes its basis. The instant a novel is opened and a
reader begins to read, the remoteness between writer and reader dissolves.
The other that thereby emerges does so in the reader’s imagination, assimilating at
once into his or her mind… This space—that is, the novel’s—is idiosyncratic,
particular, and singular: in other words, it represents the exact opposite of the
media, which strives toward the universal and general.

Knausgaard captures how our concept of empathy has shifted. This isn’t just
putting another person’s shoes on. Rather, the space between people
“dissolves”; the reader “assimilates” the other into his or her mind. It’s a kind
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of ghostly possession or occupation. Knausgaard goes on to give an example

of how to access an individual’s experience rather than lazily adopting a
generalized, standard account of them. “If we allowed that remoteness to
dissolve, what we would see would no longer be the very image of evil, but a
boy growing up in Austria with a violent, authoritarian father and a mother
whom he loved. We would see a sixteen-year-old so shy he hadn’t the courage
to speak to a girl with whom he was in love…” And so, boringly, on. The
individual in question turns out to be none other than Adolf Hitler.
Knausgaard’s perversity here—using a Nazi to exhort us to humanize others
—isn’t that surprising. After all, he named his multi-volume autobiographical
opus My Struggle. Many readers feel that its last book is at its worst when he
eschews empathizing with his ex-wife, clearly under severe mental duress,
because he’s too busy writing about… Hitler.

Godwin’s law notwithstanding, Knausgaard’s speech unwittingly reveals

several problems with this, as he says, “banal” model of ethics. There’s what
we might call the unequal distribution problem: 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?” Jean-Jacques Rousseau
raised the same point a couple of centuries ago: “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.”

Knausgaard answers this counterargument by claiming that fictional empathy

is in fact better because it takes place “in the reader’s own most private,
intimate sphere, where the rules that govern our social interaction do not
apply and its practical constraints do not exist.” This feels like a specious little
paean to the triumph of the personal over the public good in our time. As
Rousseau also noted, one can never be sure of the purity of one’s desire to
empathize: “when the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself
with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to
suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am more interested in him for love of
myself.”

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.”
Bloom helpfully distinguishes between the more useful cognitive empathy—
understanding what’s happening in other minds and bodies—and emotional
empathy, trying to feel like or even as someone else. With a simple thought
experiment—you pass by a lake where a child is drowning—Bloom shows

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that emotional empathy is often beside the point for moral action. You don’t
have to feel the suffocation, the clutch of a throat gasping for air, to save
someone.

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. Bloom cites a German woman who wrote a letter complaining of
the concentration camps near her home: “One is often an unwilling witness to
such outrages… I request that it be arranged that such inhuman deeds be
discontinued, or else be done where one does not see it.” Other times, we
empathize with suffering as a kind of amusement that has no bearing on our
ethical behavior. A case in point: white American football fans may wince
with vicarious pain as they watch black players ram into each other, but that
doesn’t mean they care about the state-sanctioned violence to which those
players are susceptible when they walk off the field.

If witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t necessarily spark good deeds, why do

we think art about suffering will? The Hate U Give, a movie adapted from a
novel about police brutality against black kids, has been praised for making “a
lot of white people cry.” Its star, Amandla Stenberg, calls it “a tool of
empathy” and the movie has even been screened to groups of black teenagers
and police officers to foster solidarity (results were uneven). Narrative art is
indeed an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with
characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it.

The philosopher Candace Vogler takes this assumption apart. She notes that
fictional characters lack two qualities fundamental to humans: a capacity for
change and a resistance to being known. In fact, she argues, “I will be making
an ethical mistake if I take myself to have the kind of grasp of a person that
fiction makes available to me in my engagements with imaginary people…
No human being will be knowable in the way that any literary character worth
repeated readings is knowable.”

We actually already recognize this. Whenever we rail against tokenism,

objectification, or stereotype in our accounts of real people, we are saying that
they ought not be reduced to a single imaginary fabrication. The very idea of
readers using fiction as a guide for life is mocked in classics like Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Many of our best fictions of
recent decades, like Nabokov’s Lolita and Morrison’s Beloved, make a moral
case against their characters overidentifying with others (Humbert with
Dolores; Sethe with her children) lest they usurp them.

I often think about a sequence in Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, in

which the wealthy, white male narrator repeatedly re-enacts the murder of a
black man at the actual scene of the incident. He hires two black men to
march up to him and shoot at him with blanks, each time at half the speed of
the previous iteration. McCarthy said in a 2013 interview: “My hero does
have an empathy for others and really wants to imagine himself into this guy’s

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death. He’s deeply moved by it in a perverse way.” Regardless of whether his

empathy is “real” or “perverse,” this passage shows the ease with which it can
be co-opted into a kind of cathartic release:

My two assassins took their time in killing me. The slowed-down pace at which
they raised and fired their guns, the lack of concern or interest this seemed to
imply, the total absence on my part of any attempt to escape although I had plenty
of time to do so—all these made our actions passive. We weren’t doing them: they
were being done. The guns were being fired, I was being hit, being returned to the
ground. The ground’s surface was neutral—neither warm nor cold…. When I let
my head roll slightly back, a bollard hid all these words except for one of the two
Escapes. Would my man have seen this, just before the life dribbled out of him
towards the puddle? Escape?

The possessives, “my two assassins” and “my man”; the conscription into a
willful passivity; the mechanical quality of the sequence, absent of concern or
interest or survival instinct; the supposed neutrality of the usurped ground; the
ironized “Escape”: Isn’t this creepy, fugue-like occupation of the dead a truer
picture of contemporary empathy than the older cliché of walking a mile in
another’s shoes?

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.

Perhaps worse, it has imposed on makers of art, especially the marginalized,

the idea that they can and ought to construct creative vehicles for empathy.
This grotesque dynamic often makes for dull, pandering artworks. And it in
fact perpetuates an assumed imbalance in the world: there are those who
suffer, and those who do not and thus have the leisure to be convinced—via
novels and films that produce empathy—that the sufferers matter. The scales
remain tilted and this is why cultural appropriation still runs only one way, as
does what we might call ethical slumming. To wit, when I, as a black woman,
read or watch a white male hero, I’m meant to take on his perspective by
default; no one assumes that it humanizes him or makes me more empathic.
Unless, of course, he’s Hitler.

In Knausgaard’s celebration of literature’s capacity to engender empathy, he

corrals to his cause Hannah Arendt’s critique of a different Adolf (Eichmann):
“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of
expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us
against reality.” This is the basis of her famous equation between banality and

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evil. I’ve always found this syllogism—“cliché is evil, therefore literature is

good”—both snobbish and self-serving. You only ever hear it from writers,
and besides, isn’t it a bit cliché by now?

I still think Arendt would have balked at her inclusion in Knausgaard’s

argument, but for other reasons. For one, she had a powerful distaste for
sentimentality. She expressed impatience and even hatred for pity, sorrow,
emotional appeals, displays of suffering, and especially patriotism—“I have
never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective,” she once wrote. And she
proposed that literature’s special talent for adopting the viewpoints of others
was geared not to ethics but to politics:

I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by

making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I
represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual
views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a
different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be
or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of
being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not. The more people’s
standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the
better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the
stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my
final conclusions… The very process of opinion formation is determined by those
in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition
for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s
own private interests.

Arendt derived her theory of “representative thinking” from Kant’s aesthetic

theory in The Critique of Judgment, which she called “his unwritten political
philosophy.” To make an aesthetic judgment, you cannot use reason alone;
you need input from other people. Because humans are social beings,
judgment requires an investment in what others believe. When others disagree
with you, you reconcile your beliefs with theirs by adopting a Kantian
“disinterestedness,” which Arendt sometimes calls “impartiality.” In so doing,
you shift from being an actor in a situation to being a viewer detached from
what Arendt elsewhere disdained as “the inner turmoil of the self, its
shapelessness.” You achieve this “general standpoint” by enlarging your mind
to encompass the positions of others.

This may sound a lot like empathy but Arendt insists that it isn’t. Rather than
virtually becoming another, she asks you to imagine using your own mind but
from their position. It’s a matter of keeping your distance, maintaining
integrity, in both senses. It has some affinity with Bloom’s emphasis on
cognition rather than feeling. This need not be cold, just less… voracious. 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 way of relating to others is not just tourism.
Nor is it total occupation—there is no “assimilation” of self and other. Rather,
you make an active, imaginative effort to travel outside of your circumstances
and to stay a while, where you’re welcome.

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It has something in common with John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, which is

also geared toward political justice rather than moral feeling: What would I
want the world to offer me if I were born in another person’s situation? What
is it like to be and think “in my own identity where actually I am not”? How
would I—still as myself—“feel and think if I were in their place”? Note that
you might feel and think differently than they (say they) do; the point is to
inhabit the position, not the person.

It’s no surprise that when Arendt turns to literature, she sees it as rooted in the
“disinterested pursuit of truth”: “The political function of the storyteller—
historian or novelist—is to teach acceptance of things as they are. Out of this
acceptance, which can also be called truthfulness, arises the faculty of
judgment.” Arendt does not mean “acceptance” as a form of political
quietism. She means “truthfulness,” as opposed to propaganda, which is
partial—biased, incomplete information.

She traces the tradition of literary political representation to “the moment

when Homer chose to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the
Achaeans, and to praise the glory of Hector, the foe and the defeated man, no
less than the glory of Achilles, the hero of his kinfolk. This had happened
nowhere before; no other civilization, however splendid, had been able to
look with equal eyes upon friend and foe, upon success and defeat.” This is
not humanizing Hitler, but rather offering a broader view of humanity, while
maintaining a keen awareness of who is friend and who is foe. This is what
Keats praised in Shakespeare as “negative capability.” To be sure, authors
often feel the need to imagine themselves into others. But that act of empathy
is instrumental, not ethical as such—writers are not historically renowned for
being good people—and ideally, it is in the name of a greater impartiality and
equality.

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. The
part of the hero has been dominated for so long by what is actually a world
minority that this kind of change is almost hard to picture. But there’s a reason
the “Bandersnatch” episode of Black Mirror felt anachronistic to me, beyond
its nostalgia for Eighties-era music and games. Its London is lily-white.
Things have shifted enough in pop culture, and what we expect from it, for
that partial and implausible representation to be newly noticeable to me. We
can offer a fuller, deeper, rounder picture of human experience simply by
casting characters in a different shade, so to speak. But we can also make
more interesting—more daring—art.

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A remarkable sci-fi story by Violet Allen entitled “The Venus Effect” is, to my
mind, one of the best recent depictions of the struggle to reimagine art
centered around someone other than “the default.” The story, which first
appeared in Lightspeed and was selected for The Best American Science
Fiction and Fantasy 2017, is divided into subsections, most of which are
subtitled with potential versions of an adventure tale about a black superhero.
The first, “Apollo Allen and The Girl from Venus,” features a rooftop party, at
which Apollo catches sight of a love interest just as she accidentally falls off
the roof. He watches in shock as she speeds toward the ground, then “just
stops and hangs in the air.” The girl from Venus lowers herself gently and
races off. Intrigued, he chases after her, but then, an unexpected twist:

There is a man in a police uniform standing at the corner. Apollo does not see him
in the darkness, does not know that he is running toward him. The man in the
police uniform draws his weapon and yells for Apollo to stop. Inertia and
confusion do not allow Apollo to stop quickly enough. Fearing for his life, the
man in the police uniform pulls the trigger of his weapon several times, and the
bullets strike Apollo in his chest, doing critical damage to his heart and lungs. He
flops to the ground. He is dead now.

Here, a wry voice intrudes: “Uh, what? That was not supposed to happen…
Dudes aren’t supposed to just pop off and end stories out of nowhere.” This
writerly voice reflects on their narrative choices—“He was a pretty unlikeable
protagonist, anyway, a petty, horny, pretentious idiot with an almost palpable
stink of author surrogacy on him”—and decides to start over: “This time,
we’ll go classic. We’ll have a real hero you can look up to, and cool action-
adventure shit will go down.”

The next version of the story, “Apollo Rocket vs. The Space Barons from
Beyond Pluto,” gives us a goody-two-shoes type, a star basketball player
whose words are edited into anodyne cheese on the page (“ ‘Holy shit Golly,’
he says”). This time, Apollo discovers the alien woman after her ship has
crashed. But while gathering supplies to heal her wounds, he is again accosted
by a police officer. Apollo reaches for his wallet. You know the drill. The
story again breaks into a metafictional aside, this time puzzling out why the
story keeps hitting a wall with this specific character:

To be honest, I don’t really get the whole “relatability” thing. Isn’t the point of
reading to subsume one’s own experience for the experience of another, to crawl
out of one’s body and into a stranger’s thoughts? Why would you want to read
about someone just like you? Stories are windows, not mirrors. Everybody’s
human. Shouldn’t that make them relatable enough?

The writer figure tries another tack: “Everybody loves children, and
everybody was one. Plus, it’s really easy to make them super-relatable.” But
even with softening edits like “a fantastic-looking gun object that in no way
resembles a gun or any other real-life weapon,” our next hero Apollo Kidd
reaches an untimely end at the hands of a cop. As does Apollo Young,
member of a “multicultural, gender-inclusive” justice league, and
Apollonia Williams-Carter (“Why not a lady-protagonist? Women are

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empathetic and non-threatening and totally cool”), and on and on. The writer
figure begins to despair: “It’s the same story every time. Again and again and
again.”

Allen’s story essentially returns us to a model of political art that Bertolt

Brecht theorized in the 1930s. Brecht was against the catharsis of emotion that
Aristotle once postulated as the purpose of dramatic art—to be moved to pity
and fear in the theater so as to expunge those dangerous feelings. Brecht
didn’t want audience members cleansed of emotions. He wanted them to leave
the theater ready to start a riot. Art should not be a release valve, but a
combustion engine. One of Brecht’s aesthetic innovations was to disrupt
immersion—that characteristic “dissolve” of the line between audience and
players. By highlighting the apparatus—the stage, the props, the set changes
—this “estrangement effect” continually makes the audience aware of the
artifice of the play. For Brecht, as for Arendt, the receptive experience should
entail a measure of distance, not an emotional mind-meld.

Allen’s meta-literary musings serve this function, reminding us of the work of

constructing the story, while preventing us—and this is key—from
experiencing emotional empathy while reading it. We are not meant to cry
when Apollo dies, nor are we meant to laugh (à la Marvel’s Deadpool).
Empathy for him turns out to be not just difficult (he’s not relatable enough;
he dies too many times for us to feel it, even if we occasionally witness people
mourning him) but foreclosed by the story’s formally rendered awareness of
the difference between art and life, between artistic empathy and political life.
Instead of weeping or frowning with pity, we are asked to “visit” an
experience, to learn or recognize what it’s like “to feel and think” when the
specter of unexpected, unjustified, unjust state-sanctioned death hovers at
every corner.

At one point in “The Venus Effect,” there’s a digression about a moment in

John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” when some “young people” play a game
called “Niggers and Masters.” “In playing the Nigger,” Allen’s writer figure
says, “one can experience subjugation on one’s own terms. There is no real
danger, no real pain. You can leave at any time, go home and watch cartoons
and forget about it. Or you can indulge fully, giving oneself up to the game,
allowing oneself to experience a beautiful simulacrum of suffering. It is
perfect pretend.” As in McCarthy’s Remainder, black pain, black death, is the
clarifying limit case for the use of art for empathy. Its very seamlessness
condemns it.

I won’t spoil the rest of Allen’s story—you should read it yourself—but its
chilling end makes a deft formal turn that takes our contemporary faith in the
power of fictional empathy and twists it like a knife. The story as a whole
offers an object lesson in how empathy is beside the point when respectability
politics neutralizes the kind of hero we can “relate to.” It makes us question
which kinds of murder we represent and which we censor. It challenges the
buoyant, frictionless illusion of choice in representations of the eternal return
of death in works like “Bandersnatch.” Most importantly, “The Venus Effect”
gives the lie to the idea that art can somehow save us from the violence that

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still permeates people’s lives, shockingly unevenly. “I was just trying to find
some meaning, the moral of the story,” the writer figure says. “But murder is
inherently meaningless.”

Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer and Professor of English at Harvard. She is the author
of The Old Drift, a novel, and Stranger Faces, a nonfiction book. (March 2021)

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