WEBVTT
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Mills.
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So thank you all very much for being here, whether in the room or online.
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This evening marks the beginning of our new academic year, and traditionally the provost opens it, so that's what I'm doing.
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But it also marks the very first time that so many Gresham professors, past and present, have been gathered together.
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And if you're a past professor who's just coming in for the first time in several years, I hope that you've already found your name on one of the new boards.
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And if you haven't, please look afterwards.
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And we'd love it if you took your photograph uh by the board.
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But I was set a challenge by the uh director, Richard Smith, because it's the first time that so many Gresham professors have been gathered together.
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Um, he suggested that um I might think or I might consult with others in my household to think about a new collective noun.
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And give for such a gathering, right?
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And given that the grasshopper is our college symbol, let me suggest that we have a hopper of Gresham professors here tonight.
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And uh these are the past professors who are here.
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If your name is not up there, I'm sorry.
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Probably means you signed up after I got the list of names.
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Um, here is our hopper of current Gresham professors, um, and here we are back to those in the room.
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So, as I've said, this lecture opens the academic year, and we have especially focused on the arts and humanities this coming year, not least because we feel the world is in need of them.
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And of course, as always, we've got many lectures in the sciences and social sciences.
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But back to the arts.
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Iris Murdoch, the novelist and writer, put it like this: art is not a diversion or a side issue.
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It is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of all morality can be seen.
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So, what is empathy?
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I'm going to begin by reading something.
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Uh, and when it was written and where it was written is important.
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It was written in London in December 1914, a few months into World War I.
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I was at the Temple Church on Christmas Eve for Bach's music.
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The shimmering double church was full of old and elderly men, of women of all ages with a sprinkling of soldier lads brought along on what may be their last Christmas in this world, brought along by their mothers and sisters and sweethearts.
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Everyone, but it was perhaps that my own eyes and heart were opened, everyone seemed so altered from other perfunctory times.
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They were grave, sincere, aware of all it meant.
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With the first rasping notes of the organ tearing the veil of silent prayer, there came before my mind, as when a cloud rent suddenly shows depths of solemn moonlit sky, the fact that there also, there beyond the sea and the war chasm, in hundreds of churches of Bach's own country, I can see the Thomas Kirk at Leipzig, where he was cantor, and the church of his birthplace, Eisenach.
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There at this very moment were crowds like this one at the temple listening to this selfsame Christmas music.
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There also elderly men stayed behind, and many, many women, old and young, and a sprinkling of soldier lads brought for that maybe last Christmas at home and on earth.
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And they were praying like these, silently kneeling around me, and praying for the same mercies.
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So the eagle-eared amongst you may have noticed that we played bark when you came in.
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This passage evokes the power of art, in this case music, not only to stir powerful memories, but also to make a connection to others, those with whom we may discover a link through art despite a perceived division.
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The person who wrote it absolutely knew the power of evoke of art to evoke both memory and emotion.
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She'd been researching it for years in Florence, where she lived.
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This was Violet Paget, though the name she wrote under was Vernon Lee.
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And she was one of the very first people.
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The OED is a bit dodgy about first use here, so I'm going to say she was one of the very first people to induce the word empathy into British English.
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She built on the work of psychologists who had taken the term from the German word Einfüllum.
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And she understood it as the tendency to feel or project oneself into a situation or object, especially one that was unfamiliar.
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And it was regarded as different from sympathy, a much older word.
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It dated from the 16th century.
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And sympathy was much more about identifying with another.
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This is about sort of almost projecting yourself into the other.
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Lee was interested in aesthetics.
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How might a piece of art such as a painting activate the viewer's imagination?
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How might that heighten the viewer's sense of the painting and the vitality or energy of the viewer herself?
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She came to this notion of empathy, to kind of understand what she was trying to do, through seeking an empirically based account of aesthetic experience.
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For over a decade, in the galleries of Florence, like Vieufizi, she recorded her and others physical and mental responses to a wide range of pieces of art.
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She made meticulous notes on the physical changes they experienced when they viewed an object.
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And some of them, well, you know, did if did it make a difference that the weather changed?
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Did you feel a prickling on the back of your neck?
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Now this was at a time when physiology tended to dominate psychological discussions.
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The body was centre stage.
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But Lee was asking much bigger question: is empathy a product of our brains, of other biological factors, of environment or of upbringing?
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And these are the questions people still ask.
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She came to believe that empathy is largely a mental, not a physical process, imagination and memory at work with perception.
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This can lead not only to an emotional response to art, but to identification with the other.
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And much of this research, along with her conclusions, is found in her book of 1912, Beauty and Ugliness.
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And I just want to say that I hate to say this because I'm a bit of an admirer of Vernon Lee, as you've probably gathered, but the prose does tend towards the ugly rather than the beautiful.
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And the New York Times, when they reviewed it, said, it's quite tortured, this prose, but she was saying some very important things.
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All of you, if you get really interested in Vernon Lee, I'll tell you what to read, perhaps before beauty and ugliness.
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And in some of Lee's experiments in front of statues, she and others found themselves instinctively copying the pose of the statues that they were observing.
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So we've probably all known that, you know, if something's bending that way, we start to do that, right?
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This notion of mimicry was something that psychologists were increasingly exploring.
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For example, an audience will involuntarily imitate the facial expressions of a speaker.
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You will likely smile when I smile.
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You will yawn if I do, though you may also yawn anyway if I don't keep the content lively.
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So psychologists saw mimicry as central to empathy and empathy as having an important role in personality development.
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They also talked about emotional contagion when we automatically copy someone else.
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And when we get much further along in the lecture, you will see that people are making a bit of a backlash against this notion of emotional contagion.
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Neurologists and biologists who have worked on this since then have talked about mirror neurons.
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And on the handout, which I think you can receive at the end of the lecture if you'd like it, I've listed some fairly accessible books if you want to read more about that.
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Psychologists went on to identify two aspects to empathy.
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The first was cognitive empathy, perspective taking, and effective empathy, which is about a shared emotional response.
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And I really do think both of those are extremely important.
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You can't have one without the other.
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So I thought I'd better have a working definition of empathy, and this is mine based on those various, or my quick summary of those various insights, the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.
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And I also want to note here that I make no presumption that by exercising empathy, we are bound to take on or accept the perspective or the emotion of the other.
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Rather, the exercise we're undergoing is to try and understand it.
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So I'm going to come back to the arts in a moment, but first let's ask the question, why do we need empathy?
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Because I think the title of the lecture is Why We Need Empathy without a question mark.
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But I thought I ought to put a question mark by it.
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In her 2012 book, In Defense of the Humanities, Not for Profit, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that democracy needs the humanities.
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Citizens cannot relate well to the world around them by factual knowledge and logic alone.
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She believes that to be a citizen, we need to develop a narrative imagination.
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We need to learn how to be an intelligent reader of another person's story, a person different from ourselves, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.
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In other words, we need to practice empathy.
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The circumstances of our modern world are such that we need each other to solve the shared problems that threaten our survival as a species.
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And this makes the understanding of others vital.
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So Nussburn puts it like this.
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We live in a world in which people face one another across gulfs of geography, language, and nationality.
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More than at any other time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.
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The problems we need to solve, economic, environmental, religious, and political, are global in their scope.
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They have no hope of being solved unless people cooperate in ways they have not before.
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Now Nassbum wrote this book 16 years ago, and I would say the situation has become much more urgent since then for a variety of reasons, but shot through all of that is technology which has developed at an unprecedented scale, speed, and scope, influencing our individual and shared lives in unexpected ways.
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Now, this association between democracy and the development of a narrative imagination to understand and sympathize with others is not new.
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In fact, it has its roots in the Enlightenment.
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And of course, the Enlightenment was that moment when those flatter forms of societal and political organization, that is to say democracy, were beginning to develop.
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The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith was a pivotal figure here.
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Yes, he is the man famous for his defense of capitalism in the Wealth of Nations, but in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments from 1759, he offered a theory of moral action based on sympathy, or as he put it, fellow feeling.
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He believed that sympathy is an intrinsic human quality, even in the most selfish of people.
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We cannot feel exactly what others feel, but we can share it to some degree through our imaginations.
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We can feel with one another.
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If another human being is suffering, Smith writes, by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter, as it were, into his body and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.
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And he would the same, you can feel another's joy in the same way.
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He doesn't only talk about suffering.
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Sympathetic passions allow both.
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A parallel development in the Enlightenment period was the rise of the modern novel, a narrative form that elicits our emotional identification with the characters and evokes our concern about what happens to them.
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We care.
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Think of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, 1748.
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Not everyone in the room may have read this because it is a very, very long novel.
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Perhaps some of you who read English were forced to read it.
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But it's about the suffering of Clarissa at the hands of her libertine suitor and her complicit family, and it is kind of the archetypal mid-18th century novel.
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And as the novel developed further in the 19th century, we might say that Charles Dickens, perhaps, brought, above all others, brought the conditions of the working classes in industrialized and increasingly industrialized Ingolln into middle class reading homes, creating a kind of sympathy for what was happening in those industrial cities.
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The historian Thomas Lequeur describes novels as they developed in the 18-19 centuries as humanitarian narratives.
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And he notes that many novels had a particular focus on bodily suffering.
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That's certainly true for Clarissa.
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And lots of realistic details, too.
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And this was the same time the autopsy reports were coming about.
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And so thus novels move the reader to compassion and perhaps to social action.
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So to sum up this section, democracy to function healthily requires the participation of its members in civic life.
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It requires us to understand a range of points of view and then to evaluate them using our reason.
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As I said before, we don't have to accept unquestioningly another's point of view, but we do need to know it and understand it if we're going to be responsible citizens.
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A narrative imagination in which we enter another's experience is therefore central to developing and building any social arrangements that seek for common good.
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It's also important in the quest for a meaningful life, both individually and communally.
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The stories we tell ourselves as a society shape who we become.
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Okay.
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When people talk about empathy, they often talk about stepping into other people's shoes.
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And they usually mean it metaphorically.
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But actually, I used to teach some of these themes at Stanford, and then the opening class session, I would always invite, not compel, invite the students to swap shoes physically.
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The exercise quite often brought them new understandings of each other.
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I always remember one woman putting on a man's work boots and saying how powerful she suddenly felt.
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The man put on her light summer flip-flops and said, I feel free.
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So anyone can swap shoes anytime.
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It's an exchange of experiences we can easily manage, though you will be relieved to know I'm not going to ask you to do it tonight.
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But the practice of empathy gives us the possibility of trying to understand the experience of others whose lives and worlds are outside our immediate orbit.
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And I'm going to make the case that we can do that through the arts, obviously.
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It's largely an act of imagination, and the writer Marilyn Robinson, the novelist and essayist, articulates it very beautifully in her collection of essays titled When I Was a Child, I Read Books.
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Community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.
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In other words, community itself is necessarily a work of the imagination, and the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and the more humane the community will be.
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This begs the question: do we imagine our communities to be inclusive of others who are unlike us or not?
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As you all know, this is a pressing current question.
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For Robinson, the art form that has most profoundly trained her attention and developed her imagination has been the book.
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She writes of looking up at shelves and shelves of books as a child and thinking how wonderful it would be if she could write one of those.
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Well, if you know Marilyn Robinson, you know she's written quite a lot and won many prizes, including a Pulitzer.
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But the books of others have been vital for the development of her own narrative imagination.
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As she puts it, they have been a personal cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.
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So I want to now look at empathy and the arts.
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And we're going to do some actual looking in a moment.
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So we're going to be talking, I'm going to be talking or getting you mostly to be viewers.
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But let's remember the role of the artist who points out to us what we cannot see or what we do not want to see, who makes us pay attention.
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The American writer James Baldwin called the artist a disruptor.
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He wrote, Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war.
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And he does at his best what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation to make freedom real.
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Let's now look at some examples from the visual arts.
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The first of these is a sculpture called Invisible Man by the American artist Daniel Goldstein.
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I hope you can get a sense that it's a suspended sculpture, it rotates, made of 864 syringes, each tipped with a red crystal bead.
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So this cloud of arrows surrounds a negative space, which, as the work rotates, reveals a human figure.
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And I think you can probably see the shape of the human figure there.
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The artist Goldstein said of his sculpture, as someone who lived through the devastating early years of AIDS in San Francisco, this is a theme I call the presence of absence.
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The absence of an actual body reminds us of all those lost to AIDS, and yet that bodily shape at the center reminds us of the actual human bodies that suffer, live, and die with hope and faith when undergoing gruelling medical treatments.
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Now, pieces of art often have resonances with each other.
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And if you're looking at this, for some of you, in your memory of paintings, you might be reminded of something like this.
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Saint Sebastian, the martyr, who of course, this doesn't have many arrows.
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He hasn't got many arrows in him here, sorry.
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But in many paintings he has many arrows.
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He was a third-century Christian saint and martyr who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows during a period of persecution of Christians.
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Now I've chosen this one in particular by the Renaissance painter Il Sodomo because Vernon Lee, who I began with, spent a lot of time contemplating this painting in the Ufizi.
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She reflected on her physical reaction to it.
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Should she have a sense of the arrow in her neck as she viewed it?
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But she found that the angel over the scene mitigated that possibility for her.
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She reflected, when I cover the angel, the arrow business becomes more painful.
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That cheerful, busy, very alive angel sets up, I think, a feeling which destroys the arrow feeling.
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So I invite you to think, to do a little moment of practice of effective empathy and think about what the syringes of the invisible man and the arrows of St.
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Sebastian evoke for you, what they make you feel.
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But you don't have to report back in class today.
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So the invisible man in its shape and form has another resonance for me.
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And that is with this sculpture, Lazarus by Jacob Epstein.
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It's a 1947 sculpture.
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Epstein was the American-born British sculptor, very influential upon people like Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
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This was installed in the chapel at New College, Oxford, in 1952.
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Well, technically it's in the anti-chapel, and you can see it's in that space just before you enter the chapel, and it's in front of the great west doors.
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It's big, it's over seven feet tall, and I hope you can see that the bandaged body is facing the west doors, but the head is twisted around to face east and the altar right up at the end of the chapel.
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I've spent a lot of time looking at this sculpture.
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I was for a decade the Dean of Divinity at New College, and that's was often eyeballed me when I was behind the altar.
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And I've spent a lot of time contemplating it, and I'll just give you a nugget of what I think about it.
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There's an ambiguity to this, which I find deeply instructive.
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Is Lazarus gladly turning his head towards the east and to the light as he steps back into life from death, ready to grasp new life and send his bandages spinning off?
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Or is it hard leaving the dark safety of the tomb?
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Is he walking out into the light but only reluctantly?
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And he's therefore turning his head back to the comfort of burial, reminding us that new life and change is a struggle.
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So for me, this sculpture is a lot about the fact that as human beings, we often say we want new life.
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We might actually even genuinely want new life, but we can be very resistant to change.
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Now, the visual arts require our attention.
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I've just given you an example of a sculpture I attended to very deeply over many years.
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I recently read Patrick Bringley's book, All the Beauty in the World, which I recommend.
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It's about his 10 years working as a museum guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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He gave up a busy job at the New Yorker magazine because he was in grief.
00:23:24.319 --> 00:23:28.000
His brother had just died, and he felt he needed to do something else.
00:23:28.079 --> 00:23:29.759
So he took up this position.
00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:40.799
There he could circulate amongst all the galleries and spend hours every day paying attention, not only to the visitors, but also to the art.
00:23:41.519 --> 00:23:56.319
His telling detail that museum guards at the Met are given a sock allowance,$80 a year, helped me realize what it would like be, what it would be like to be in his shoes all day on his feet in the museum.
00:23:56.400 --> 00:24:01.759
And I tell you, I have a newfound appreciation for museum guards since reading that.
00:24:02.240 --> 00:24:08.079
But let me take one instance of his attention to the art in that museum.
00:24:08.319 --> 00:24:18.319
One day he was in the Middle East gallery, it was not a culture familiar to him, and arriving early one day, he was able to sit, in itself a luxury.
00:24:18.480 --> 00:24:22.559
And he says, I love the feeling of sitting in front of a work of art.
00:24:23.039 --> 00:24:31.200
And as he sat, he looked at a 16th-century dervish, a Sufi, a member of the mystical form of Islam.
00:24:31.920 --> 00:24:36.480
And as he was sitting there, he read a translation of the painting's inscription.
00:24:48.079 --> 00:24:54.559
For Bringley, the portrait put a face to the grief he had been feeling about his brother's death.
00:24:54.799 --> 00:25:01.839
It came from a culture and time utterly unlike his own, and yet there was a resonance.
00:25:02.480 --> 00:25:06.079
On the subway to and from work, he read about Sufism.
00:25:06.319 --> 00:25:11.039
Back at the museum, he requested that he be posted near the Dervish.
00:25:11.200 --> 00:25:16.480
And there he experienced a combination of identification and strangeness.
00:25:17.359 --> 00:25:26.079
Using one of my eyes, I feel an intimacy with this 16th-century follower of an esoteric religious sect.
00:25:26.640 --> 00:25:30.799
And then my heart beats, and he feels distant and strange.
00:25:31.359 --> 00:25:37.279
And then my heart beats again, and like the painting before me, he feels near again.
00:25:38.240 --> 00:25:43.200
This is an illustration, I think, of what the writer Rebecca Solner calls the faraway nearby.
00:25:43.599 --> 00:25:46.160
She describes empathy as a journey.
00:25:46.319 --> 00:25:52.319
We have to travel out of ourselves a little way to engage in it and to expand.
00:25:52.880 --> 00:26:03.119
Brinier's experience with the Dervish also reminds us that in looking at or reading about someone from a culture that is strange to us, an identification can occur.
00:26:03.359 --> 00:26:11.599
Someone, especially perhaps a fictional someone, does not need to be like us for us to identify with them.
00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:24.559
The interracial British novelist and essayist Zadie Smith writes of the character of Olive Kittridge in the white American novelist Elizabeth Strant's work.
00:26:24.720 --> 00:26:30.880
And I tell you of those two writers' ethnic backgrounds because it's relevant to the point that Smith makes.
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:39.759
She writes, What do I have in common with Olive Kittridge, a salty old white woman who has spent her entire life in Maine?
00:26:40.559 --> 00:26:44.880
And yet, as it turns out, her griefs are very like my own.
00:26:45.119 --> 00:26:46.160
Not all of them.
00:26:46.400 --> 00:26:49.519
It's not a perfect mapping of self unto book.
00:26:49.759 --> 00:26:53.599
I've never met a book that did that, least of all my own.
00:26:53.839 --> 00:26:57.119
But some of Olive's grief weighed like mine.
00:26:58.160 --> 00:27:18.559
Certainly, I might turn from a writer like Elizabeth Strout towards a writer like Tony Morrison and find our griefs more closely aligned for obvious reasons like race and class, which two contingencies do so much to form a person's experience and therefore their sensibilities.
00:27:19.759 --> 00:27:24.880
But what passed between me and Olive was not nothing.
00:27:25.599 --> 00:27:39.839
I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people strange to me in life might be revealed through the intimate space of fiction to have griefs not unlike my own.
00:27:40.079 --> 00:27:41.680
And so I read.
00:27:42.240 --> 00:27:51.359
So I think this also illustrates that empathy is not about appropriating another's experience, but attending to it and attempting to understand it.
00:27:56.960 --> 00:28:01.920
The exercise of empathy as a journey takes us out of ourselves.
00:28:02.079 --> 00:28:05.200
And this leads me to talk about beauty.
00:28:06.319 --> 00:28:08.480
Perhaps controversially, I don't know.
00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:19.759
If the arts are regarded as a luxury by some, then beauty is seen as an exaggerated version of that, unnecessary while people are suffering.
00:28:20.319 --> 00:28:22.319
So what about the place of beauty?
00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:26.160
Vernon Lee wrestled with that question: what is beauty?
00:28:26.240 --> 00:28:27.759
And indeed, what is art?
00:28:28.079 --> 00:28:32.640
The end of the 19th century was a time when many people were talking about this.
00:28:32.799 --> 00:28:38.240
Some embraced the idea of art for art's sake, like Lee's friend Walter Pater.
00:28:38.559 --> 00:28:44.319
That made others fear that it was decadent and they wanted to find a moral purpose to art.
00:28:45.279 --> 00:28:59.119
Vernon Lee said something in between, that art was rather for life's sake, that art helps us not because it makes us good, but because through it we realize we're fully alive.
00:28:59.440 --> 00:29:04.559
This means that art is not purely instrumental and it still leaves a place for beauty.
00:29:04.720 --> 00:29:10.640
Not as a luxury, but as something which can take us beyond ourselves, opening us to a wider world.
00:29:10.960 --> 00:29:24.160
I'm going to read a passage now from Aris Murdoch, who I think expresses this better than anyone else I know, but I think you've probably all had an experience when you literally took in your breath because something was so beautiful it surprised you.
00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:28.640
This is Murdoch.
00:29:28.799 --> 00:29:40.079
I'm looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige.
00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:44.559
And then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.
00:29:45.119 --> 00:29:47.200
In a moment, everything is altered.
00:29:47.440 --> 00:29:51.680
The brooding self, with its hurt vanity, has disappeared.
00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:55.759
There's nothing now but kestrel.
00:29:56.400 --> 00:30:01.039
And when I return to thinking of the other matter, it seems less important.
00:30:01.519 --> 00:30:10.960
And of course, this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
00:30:12.000 --> 00:30:25.440
So this process, which she calls unselfing, means that the time we spend protecting, guarding, advancing the self and its prestige can be released so that we may spend it in the service of something bigger than us.
00:30:28.480 --> 00:30:37.519
While the visual arts both demand and elicit patient and sometimes repeated attention, theatre provides a different immersive experience.
00:30:37.680 --> 00:30:46.480
And I'm going to talk about just one play which has been on very recently, and I think it's still going around the country, and it's a brilliant play if you get a chance to see it.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:54.960
This is Punch by James Graham from 2024, which tells the true story of Jacob Dunn.
00:30:55.359 --> 00:30:59.839
Dunn lived in a socio-economically deprived area of Nottingham.
00:31:00.079 --> 00:31:09.680
He was out for a night of drinking and thrill seeking with friends when unprovoked he punched a stranger, a paramedic named James Hodgkinson.
00:31:10.160 --> 00:31:12.960
That single punch killed Hodgkinson.
00:31:13.200 --> 00:31:23.839
Jacob Dunn went to prison for manslaughter, and when he got out, he was lost, he was ashamed, he was without direction, he didn't want to associate with his old friends, but he didn't have another world to go to.
00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:31.200
The victim's grieving parents, through an organization called Restorative Justice, contacted Jacob.
00:31:31.359 --> 00:31:37.759
And through their raw, painful, and painstaking encounters with one another, all three of them were changed.
00:31:38.160 --> 00:31:41.279
It's not a neat story of redemption and forgiveness.
00:31:42.079 --> 00:31:47.920
Grief and guilt remained, but transformation did and continues to happen.
00:31:48.400 --> 00:31:58.640
So this is a play, and I should say that Jacob Dunn and Hodgkinson's mother, Joan, go around talking about this still.
00:31:59.119 --> 00:32:19.680
So this is a play in which the audience members are completely immersed and fully engaged emotionally, you're thrown in from the very beginning with the fast-moving, very frenzied early scenes in which Jacob and his friends are out partying and drinking, to the very difficult scene in which Jacob and Hodgkinson's parents, Joan and David, meet for the first time.
00:32:20.319 --> 00:32:25.759
One reviewer wrote, For the audience, it's an education in empathy.
00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:33.200
The play doesn't moralize, it simply places us in a room with these people and asks us to listen.
00:32:37.039 --> 00:32:43.519
So this takes us to the question of empathy in society and indeed the role of deep listening.
00:32:44.720 --> 00:32:55.359
Hands up, if you've ever wondered how on earth someone else could believe this or that or vote for X or Y?
00:32:55.519 --> 00:32:57.839
Has anyone in the room ever had that experience?
00:32:58.079 --> 00:32:59.519
There you go, right?
00:33:00.799 --> 00:33:03.920
And maybe you made some assumptions about those people too, right?
00:33:05.519 --> 00:33:11.119
So how do we understand someone whose views, political or otherwise, are so different from ours?
00:33:11.759 --> 00:33:18.079
I have found very helpful in this case the work of the sociologist Arlie Hoxchild.
00:33:18.400 --> 00:33:23.440
She teaches and lives in Berkeley, California, one of the heartlands of liberal America.
00:33:23.599 --> 00:33:26.799
No, maybe the heartland of liberal America.
00:33:27.200 --> 00:33:35.440
In 2010, she spent five years on and off living in the conservative Bayou County in Louisiana, getting to know the people there.
00:33:35.680 --> 00:33:43.279
It's a place of real poverty, environmental crisis, low educational rates, low life expectancy.
00:33:43.599 --> 00:33:51.759
But she wanted to go beyond a common assumption amongst liberals that those on the right were voting against their own best interests.
00:33:52.160 --> 00:33:58.640
So she befriended and listened to building contractors, auto mechanics, homemakers, gospel singers, and many more.
00:33:58.799 --> 00:34:04.400
She went to church with them, she went to potluck suppers with them, and she attended their political rallies.
00:34:04.559 --> 00:34:09.840
And she learnt about their fear of cultural eclipse and economic decline.
00:34:10.480 --> 00:34:18.320
That story is much more familiar to us now, a whole decade later, but not least because of Hoxschild's work.
00:34:18.639 --> 00:34:21.920
Though some political events may have had something to do with it too.
00:34:22.320 --> 00:34:26.960
But the point for this lecture tonight is how her understanding came about.
00:34:27.199 --> 00:34:32.960
She listened with complete empathetic attention to what she calls their deep story.
00:34:33.039 --> 00:34:37.360
And I have found that concept of the deep story very helpful.
00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:41.440
It's a story that feelings tell.
00:34:41.599 --> 00:34:48.559
It's useful because it removes judgment and tells us how things feel, not necessarily how they are.
00:34:48.880 --> 00:34:52.960
How something feels to someone else, not necessarily the reality of the situation.
00:34:53.199 --> 00:35:06.480
So she puts it like this: such a story permits those on both sides, we might now say all sides, of the political spectrum, to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world.
00:35:06.719 --> 00:35:14.719
And I don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it, for we all have a deep story.
00:35:15.840 --> 00:35:36.800
Our deep stories obviously come out of our own circumstances and contexts, yes, but we might all recognise that, again, in the decades since she wrote that, those circumstances and contexts and ideas and our own deep stories are being increasingly manipulated in the post-truth age that is skeptical of both facts and experts.
00:35:37.199 --> 00:35:50.880
This is exacerbated by Section 230, which, as you may know, is a 1996 US law that prevents online platforms from being treated as the publishers of user-generated content.
00:35:51.280 --> 00:36:00.079
So they're treated just as platforms and therefore they can't be held responsible for anything on them in a way that the publishers can be for what they publish.
00:36:00.559 --> 00:36:15.599
So if you put this together with a large amount of AI-generated content, bots on the web, malign influences attempting to manipulate public thinking, and you will see that our deep stories are being very much shaped by many different forces.
00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:21.280
Now, I presumed in the title of this lecture that empathy was a good thing.
00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:24.159
Is there a case to be made against it?
00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:30.480
Last year, Elon Musk remarked that empathy makes us weak as a civilization.
00:36:31.119 --> 00:36:36.960
Of course, empathy, trying to understand those different from ourselves, carries with it risk.
00:36:37.440 --> 00:36:42.639
When we start that journey to understanding, we don't know where it will end up.
00:36:43.360 --> 00:36:46.400
And it might make us feel weak.
00:36:46.880 --> 00:36:48.880
Does it actually make us weaker?
00:36:49.119 --> 00:36:51.519
That depends on your definition of weakness.
00:36:51.760 --> 00:36:58.960
But certainly making the empathy journey will likely change us and how we see the world, and that can be threatening.
00:36:59.119 --> 00:37:03.199
Back to Lazarus's statue is he wanting change or not?
00:37:03.920 --> 00:37:06.639
Elon Musk is not a lone voice.
00:37:06.800 --> 00:37:16.719
There has recently been a backlash against empathy with several books arguing that empathy has gone too far and it jettison's logic in decision making.
00:37:16.960 --> 00:37:28.239
The most well-known of these books is one with the most unfortunate title, Suicidal Empathy by Gad Saad, who's a professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi.
00:37:28.480 --> 00:37:32.960
And that title has become something of a buzzword in some circles.
00:37:33.119 --> 00:37:36.639
And I've been really interested in the ways in which the literature has changed.
00:37:36.719 --> 00:37:47.360
So when you, if you get the handout, you'll see there's a quite a lot of books from the 2010s, the last decade, that are pretty positive about empathy.
00:37:47.519 --> 00:37:50.400
And there's now something of a backlash.
00:37:50.800 --> 00:38:00.719
But there are other arguments against empathy from a different point of view, such as that of the psychologist Paul Bloom, who has written a book titled Against Empathy.
00:38:02.320 --> 00:38:09.199
He says, I've come to realise that taking a position against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens.
00:38:09.440 --> 00:38:12.719
A statement so outlandish it can only be a joke.
00:38:12.880 --> 00:38:24.159
And so I've learned to clarify, to explain, I'm not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbour, doing the right thing, making the world a better place.
00:38:24.480 --> 00:38:26.400
My claim is actually the opposite.
00:38:26.639 --> 00:38:30.880
If you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.
00:38:31.280 --> 00:38:32.480
He gives three reasons.
00:38:32.719 --> 00:38:35.599
First, he says empathy is biased.
00:38:35.920 --> 00:38:37.599
He says this as a psychologist.
00:38:37.760 --> 00:38:44.719
We are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background.
00:38:45.039 --> 00:38:47.199
Secondly, empathy is narrow.
00:38:47.360 --> 00:38:56.559
It connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:39:03.599
So the power of empathy, of course, is the individual story, but can we move beyond that to see the larger story it may convey?
00:39:03.920 --> 00:39:14.000
And thirdly, feeling another's pain can lead to empathic distress, which may in fact be counterproductive, preventing action or change of heart.
00:39:14.159 --> 00:39:16.559
In other words, empathy burnout.
00:39:17.199 --> 00:39:23.519
In place of empathy, Bloom argues for compassion, which may be a more distanced emotion.
00:39:24.079 --> 00:39:34.320
And there is a move in this, this is not precisely the backlash against empathy, but there is a larger move towards what one might call, uh and sometimes does get called rational empathy.
00:39:34.639 --> 00:39:45.599
Bloom is influenced here by a French cellular geneticist, uh, who's also a Buddhist monk, Mathieu Ricard, who meditates regularly.
00:39:45.760 --> 00:40:03.679
And Ricard makes a distinction between empathy, a key feature of which is effective resonance with the other, while making a clear distinction between self and other, and compassion, which is the altruistic motivation to intervene in favour of someone who is suffering or is in need.
00:40:03.760 --> 00:40:08.719
Whereas compassion implies a kind of altruistic motivation, right?
00:40:09.599 --> 00:40:15.280
So the assumption here is that empathy and compassion are, I could make many responses to bloom.
00:40:15.440 --> 00:40:17.440
I haven't got time, I've only got five more minutes.
00:40:17.679 --> 00:40:28.800
But um, it seems to me that uh here the problem that in both of these authors is that they're assuming both empathy and compassion are about responding to suffering only.
00:40:29.119 --> 00:40:38.559
And the advantage of empathy, it seems to me, is that it enables us to have effective resonances with another person's many experiences, not just suffering.
00:40:39.039 --> 00:40:47.599
We also need to remember, of course, that empathy is not just about emotion, it's not just about effective resonances, it's also about perspective taking.
00:40:48.320 --> 00:40:56.239
So perhaps, and I'm almost coming to my conclusion now, perhaps the distinction between empathy and compassion is not even the point.
00:40:56.639 --> 00:41:08.480
I'm interested ultimately in the ways in which we encourage people to develop their understandings of one another so that we may create vibrant social and political communities for the common good.
00:41:08.960 --> 00:41:14.239
This brings us full circle back to democracy and what we need to make it work.
00:41:14.960 --> 00:41:26.960
Here's a book hot off the press, I think three or four days ago, James Marriott the Journalist's The New Dark Ages, with the gloomy subtitle The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
00:41:27.280 --> 00:41:34.159
He sounds an alarm about the current decline in reading, which includes the inability to focus on long texts.
00:41:34.400 --> 00:41:38.639
This, he claims, has created a hostile environment for learning.
00:41:39.280 --> 00:41:54.000
So, in one sense, I think his book is an updated version of Nussbown's argument, if with a narrower focus, taking into account all the digital distractions which did not exist 16 years ago when Nussbone wrote her book.
00:41:54.320 --> 00:42:00.239
Marriott makes the point that a vital democracy requires literate citizens.
00:42:00.960 --> 00:42:07.440
He is worried that on TikTok and other platforms, charisma wins over reason, emotion over intellect.
00:42:07.599 --> 00:42:18.559
And he says, might we be forging an electorate that is as helpless, credulous, and poorly informed as the subjects of a medieval king.
00:42:19.599 --> 00:42:21.920
Finally, what makes empathy work?
00:42:22.159 --> 00:42:25.760
The exercise of empathy is in part a choice.
00:42:26.000 --> 00:42:32.960
We have to be willing to give it a go, choose to show up, listen, pay attention, learn, look, read.
00:42:33.280 --> 00:42:40.480
But there's also an element of this empathy journey that actually isn't strictly about our own choice or the work we do.
00:42:40.800 --> 00:42:49.519
You might want to call that the aha moment when we suddenly understand something previously unknown or completely opaque to us.
00:42:49.840 --> 00:42:57.840
It's about a turn of heart to understanding the other and their experience in a way you didn't imagine, and that's unpredictable.
00:42:58.000 --> 00:42:59.360
We can't force it.
00:42:59.599 --> 00:43:03.679
In Christian theological language, that moment is called grace.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:11.280
For the Buddhist who is meditating, their practice may lead to a depth of compassion unimagined.
00:43:11.519 --> 00:43:18.159
For the person who comes to a painting or novel or poem anew, the insight might startle.
00:43:18.719 --> 00:43:34.079
So the question is really, are we as individuals, as a society, willing to do the footwork to develop empathy and therefore a big enough imagination that we can encompass the perspectives and concerns of others in our daily decision-making and actions?
00:43:34.400 --> 00:43:39.119
Are we willing to take the leap and surprise ourselves about where we end up?
00:43:39.760 --> 00:44:13.760
Many of the themes I have been exploring this evening will be further developed over this academic year in series on the future of journalism, staging Shakespeare, language, Indian film, the question of what is precious to us, as well as a symposium on rhetoric, a festival of astronomy, and one-off lectures on the cello, offence, and the future of courtesy, performing Othello, what we can learn from the objects of the Holocaust, the literary figures of the wife of Bath and the Wife of Willston, the place of the magnificent in our lives, the purpose of yoga, and the poetry of John Dunn.
00:44:14.239 --> 00:44:25.679
These are just some of the offerings alongside the many lectures by our hopper of current Gresham professors in music, physics, business, IT, the environment, astronomy, maths and law.
00:44:25.920 --> 00:44:36.800
The academic year will end with our Sir Thomas Gresham lecture to be given, I'm glad to say, by an artist on June the 24th, the artist Sir Grayson Perry.
00:44:37.119 --> 00:44:46.000
So thank you for being here virtually and in person this evening, and we hope we'll see much more of you for many of these lectures over the coming year.
00:00:04.799 --> 00:00:05.839
Mills.
00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:10.080
So thank you all very much for being here, whether in the room or online.
00:00:11.199 --> 00:00:18.559
This evening marks the beginning of our new academic year, and traditionally the provost opens it, so that's what I'm doing.
00:00:18.719 --> 00:00:25.920
But it also marks the very first time that so many Gresham professors, past and present, have been gathered together.
00:00:26.079 --> 00:00:34.320
And if you're a past professor who's just coming in for the first time in several years, I hope that you've already found your name on one of the new boards.
00:00:34.479 --> 00:00:36.960
And if you haven't, please look afterwards.
00:00:37.119 --> 00:00:40.240
And we'd love it if you took your photograph uh by the board.
00:00:40.399 --> 00:00:48.719
But I was set a challenge by the uh director, Richard Smith, because it's the first time that so many Gresham professors have been gathered together.
00:00:48.880 --> 00:00:58.240
Um, he suggested that um I might think or I might consult with others in my household to think about a new collective noun.
00:00:58.640 --> 00:01:00.960
And give for such a gathering, right?
00:01:01.119 --> 00:01:09.680
And given that the grasshopper is our college symbol, let me suggest that we have a hopper of Gresham professors here tonight.
00:01:09.920 --> 00:01:12.319
And uh these are the past professors who are here.
00:01:12.480 --> 00:01:14.400
If your name is not up there, I'm sorry.
00:01:14.640 --> 00:01:17.359
Probably means you signed up after I got the list of names.
00:01:17.519 --> 00:01:24.239
Um, here is our hopper of current Gresham professors, um, and here we are back to those in the room.
00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:37.200
So, as I've said, this lecture opens the academic year, and we have especially focused on the arts and humanities this coming year, not least because we feel the world is in need of them.
00:01:37.519 --> 00:01:42.159
And of course, as always, we've got many lectures in the sciences and social sciences.
00:01:42.400 --> 00:01:43.439
But back to the arts.
00:01:43.680 --> 00:01:49.920
Iris Murdoch, the novelist and writer, put it like this: art is not a diversion or a side issue.
00:01:50.079 --> 00:01:58.000
It is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of all morality can be seen.
00:01:58.480 --> 00:02:01.040
So, what is empathy?
00:02:01.280 --> 00:02:04.079
I'm going to begin by reading something.
00:02:04.879 --> 00:02:07.920
Uh, and when it was written and where it was written is important.
00:02:08.080 --> 00:02:13.919
It was written in London in December 1914, a few months into World War I.
00:02:14.319 --> 00:02:19.680
I was at the Temple Church on Christmas Eve for Bach's music.
00:02:20.000 --> 00:02:36.240
The shimmering double church was full of old and elderly men, of women of all ages with a sprinkling of soldier lads brought along on what may be their last Christmas in this world, brought along by their mothers and sisters and sweethearts.
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Everyone, but it was perhaps that my own eyes and heart were opened, everyone seemed so altered from other perfunctory times.
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They were grave, sincere, aware of all it meant.
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With the first rasping notes of the organ tearing the veil of silent prayer, there came before my mind, as when a cloud rent suddenly shows depths of solemn moonlit sky, the fact that there also, there beyond the sea and the war chasm, in hundreds of churches of Bach's own country, I can see the Thomas Kirk at Leipzig, where he was cantor, and the church of his birthplace, Eisenach.
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There at this very moment were crowds like this one at the temple listening to this selfsame Christmas music.
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There also elderly men stayed behind, and many, many women, old and young, and a sprinkling of soldier lads brought for that maybe last Christmas at home and on earth.
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And they were praying like these, silently kneeling around me, and praying for the same mercies.
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So the eagle-eared amongst you may have noticed that we played bark when you came in.
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This passage evokes the power of art, in this case music, not only to stir powerful memories, but also to make a connection to others, those with whom we may discover a link through art despite a perceived division.
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The person who wrote it absolutely knew the power of evoke of art to evoke both memory and emotion.
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She'd been researching it for years in Florence, where she lived.
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This was Violet Paget, though the name she wrote under was Vernon Lee.
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And she was one of the very first people.
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The OED is a bit dodgy about first use here, so I'm going to say she was one of the very first people to induce the word empathy into British English.
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She built on the work of psychologists who had taken the term from the German word Einfüllum.
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And she understood it as the tendency to feel or project oneself into a situation or object, especially one that was unfamiliar.
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And it was regarded as different from sympathy, a much older word.
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It dated from the 16th century.
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And sympathy was much more about identifying with another.
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This is about sort of almost projecting yourself into the other.
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Lee was interested in aesthetics.
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How might a piece of art such as a painting activate the viewer's imagination?
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How might that heighten the viewer's sense of the painting and the vitality or energy of the viewer herself?
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She came to this notion of empathy, to kind of understand what she was trying to do, through seeking an empirically based account of aesthetic experience.
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For over a decade, in the galleries of Florence, like Vieufizi, she recorded her and others physical and mental responses to a wide range of pieces of art.
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She made meticulous notes on the physical changes they experienced when they viewed an object.
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And some of them, well, you know, did if did it make a difference that the weather changed?
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Did you feel a prickling on the back of your neck?
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Now this was at a time when physiology tended to dominate psychological discussions.
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The body was centre stage.
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But Lee was asking much bigger question: is empathy a product of our brains, of other biological factors, of environment or of upbringing?
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And these are the questions people still ask.
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She came to believe that empathy is largely a mental, not a physical process, imagination and memory at work with perception.
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This can lead not only to an emotional response to art, but to identification with the other.
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And much of this research, along with her conclusions, is found in her book of 1912, Beauty and Ugliness.
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And I just want to say that I hate to say this because I'm a bit of an admirer of Vernon Lee, as you've probably gathered, but the prose does tend towards the ugly rather than the beautiful.
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And the New York Times, when they reviewed it, said, it's quite tortured, this prose, but she was saying some very important things.
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All of you, if you get really interested in Vernon Lee, I'll tell you what to read, perhaps before beauty and ugliness.
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And in some of Lee's experiments in front of statues, she and others found themselves instinctively copying the pose of the statues that they were observing.
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So we've probably all known that, you know, if something's bending that way, we start to do that, right?
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This notion of mimicry was something that psychologists were increasingly exploring.
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For example, an audience will involuntarily imitate the facial expressions of a speaker.
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You will likely smile when I smile.
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You will yawn if I do, though you may also yawn anyway if I don't keep the content lively.
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So psychologists saw mimicry as central to empathy and empathy as having an important role in personality development.
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They also talked about emotional contagion when we automatically copy someone else.
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And when we get much further along in the lecture, you will see that people are making a bit of a backlash against this notion of emotional contagion.
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Neurologists and biologists who have worked on this since then have talked about mirror neurons.
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And on the handout, which I think you can receive at the end of the lecture if you'd like it, I've listed some fairly accessible books if you want to read more about that.
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Psychologists went on to identify two aspects to empathy.
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The first was cognitive empathy, perspective taking, and effective empathy, which is about a shared emotional response.
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And I really do think both of those are extremely important.
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You can't have one without the other.
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So I thought I'd better have a working definition of empathy, and this is mine based on those various, or my quick summary of those various insights, the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.
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And I also want to note here that I make no presumption that by exercising empathy, we are bound to take on or accept the perspective or the emotion of the other.
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Rather, the exercise we're undergoing is to try and understand it.
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So I'm going to come back to the arts in a moment, but first let's ask the question, why do we need empathy?
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Because I think the title of the lecture is Why We Need Empathy without a question mark.
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But I thought I ought to put a question mark by it.
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In her 2012 book, In Defense of the Humanities, Not for Profit, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that democracy needs the humanities.
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Citizens cannot relate well to the world around them by factual knowledge and logic alone.
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She believes that to be a citizen, we need to develop a narrative imagination.
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We need to learn how to be an intelligent reader of another person's story, a person different from ourselves, and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so placed might have.
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In other words, we need to practice empathy.
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The circumstances of our modern world are such that we need each other to solve the shared problems that threaten our survival as a species.
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And this makes the understanding of others vital.
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So Nussburn puts it like this.
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We live in a world in which people face one another across gulfs of geography, language, and nationality.
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More than at any other time in the past, we all depend on people we have never seen, and they depend on us.
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The problems we need to solve, economic, environmental, religious, and political, are global in their scope.
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They have no hope of being solved unless people cooperate in ways they have not before.
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Now Nassbum wrote this book 16 years ago, and I would say the situation has become much more urgent since then for a variety of reasons, but shot through all of that is technology which has developed at an unprecedented scale, speed, and scope, influencing our individual and shared lives in unexpected ways.
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Now, this association between democracy and the development of a narrative imagination to understand and sympathize with others is not new.
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In fact, it has its roots in the Enlightenment.
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And of course, the Enlightenment was that moment when those flatter forms of societal and political organization, that is to say democracy, were beginning to develop.
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The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith was a pivotal figure here.
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Yes, he is the man famous for his defense of capitalism in the Wealth of Nations, but in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments from 1759, he offered a theory of moral action based on sympathy, or as he put it, fellow feeling.
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He believed that sympathy is an intrinsic human quality, even in the most selfish of people.
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We cannot feel exactly what others feel, but we can share it to some degree through our imaginations.
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We can feel with one another.
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If another human being is suffering, Smith writes, by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter, as it were, into his body and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.
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And he would the same, you can feel another's joy in the same way.
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He doesn't only talk about suffering.
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Sympathetic passions allow both.
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A parallel development in the Enlightenment period was the rise of the modern novel, a narrative form that elicits our emotional identification with the characters and evokes our concern about what happens to them.
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We care.
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Think of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, 1748.
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Not everyone in the room may have read this because it is a very, very long novel.
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Perhaps some of you who read English were forced to read it.
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But it's about the suffering of Clarissa at the hands of her libertine suitor and her complicit family, and it is kind of the archetypal mid-18th century novel.
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And as the novel developed further in the 19th century, we might say that Charles Dickens, perhaps, brought, above all others, brought the conditions of the working classes in industrialized and increasingly industrialized Ingolln into middle class reading homes, creating a kind of sympathy for what was happening in those industrial cities.
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The historian Thomas Lequeur describes novels as they developed in the 18-19 centuries as humanitarian narratives.
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And he notes that many novels had a particular focus on bodily suffering.
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That's certainly true for Clarissa.
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And lots of realistic details, too.
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And this was the same time the autopsy reports were coming about.
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And so thus novels move the reader to compassion and perhaps to social action.
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So to sum up this section, democracy to function healthily requires the participation of its members in civic life.
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It requires us to understand a range of points of view and then to evaluate them using our reason.
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As I said before, we don't have to accept unquestioningly another's point of view, but we do need to know it and understand it if we're going to be responsible citizens.
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A narrative imagination in which we enter another's experience is therefore central to developing and building any social arrangements that seek for common good.
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It's also important in the quest for a meaningful life, both individually and communally.
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The stories we tell ourselves as a society shape who we become.
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Okay.
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When people talk about empathy, they often talk about stepping into other people's shoes.
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And they usually mean it metaphorically.
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But actually, I used to teach some of these themes at Stanford, and then the opening class session, I would always invite, not compel, invite the students to swap shoes physically.
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The exercise quite often brought them new understandings of each other.
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I always remember one woman putting on a man's work boots and saying how powerful she suddenly felt.
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The man put on her light summer flip-flops and said, I feel free.
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So anyone can swap shoes anytime.
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It's an exchange of experiences we can easily manage, though you will be relieved to know I'm not going to ask you to do it tonight.
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But the practice of empathy gives us the possibility of trying to understand the experience of others whose lives and worlds are outside our immediate orbit.
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And I'm going to make the case that we can do that through the arts, obviously.
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It's largely an act of imagination, and the writer Marilyn Robinson, the novelist and essayist, articulates it very beautifully in her collection of essays titled When I Was a Child, I Read Books.
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Community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly.
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In other words, community itself is necessarily a work of the imagination, and the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and the more humane the community will be.
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This begs the question: do we imagine our communities to be inclusive of others who are unlike us or not?
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As you all know, this is a pressing current question.
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For Robinson, the art form that has most profoundly trained her attention and developed her imagination has been the book.
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She writes of looking up at shelves and shelves of books as a child and thinking how wonderful it would be if she could write one of those.
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Well, if you know Marilyn Robinson, you know she's written quite a lot and won many prizes, including a Pulitzer.
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But the books of others have been vital for the development of her own narrative imagination.
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As she puts it, they have been a personal cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.
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So I want to now look at empathy and the arts.
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And we're going to do some actual looking in a moment.
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So we're going to be talking, I'm going to be talking or getting you mostly to be viewers.
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But let's remember the role of the artist who points out to us what we cannot see or what we do not want to see, who makes us pay attention.
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The American writer James Baldwin called the artist a disruptor.
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He wrote, Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war.
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And he does at his best what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation to make freedom real.
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Let's now look at some examples from the visual arts.
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The first of these is a sculpture called Invisible Man by the American artist Daniel Goldstein.
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I hope you can get a sense that it's a suspended sculpture, it rotates, made of 864 syringes, each tipped with a red crystal bead.
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So this cloud of arrows surrounds a negative space, which, as the work rotates, reveals a human figure.
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And I think you can probably see the shape of the human figure there.
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The artist Goldstein said of his sculpture, as someone who lived through the devastating early years of AIDS in San Francisco, this is a theme I call the presence of absence.
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The absence of an actual body reminds us of all those lost to AIDS, and yet that bodily shape at the center reminds us of the actual human bodies that suffer, live, and die with hope and faith when undergoing gruelling medical treatments.
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Now, pieces of art often have resonances with each other.
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And if you're looking at this, for some of you, in your memory of paintings, you might be reminded of something like this.
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Saint Sebastian, the martyr, who of course, this doesn't have many arrows.
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He hasn't got many arrows in him here, sorry.
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But in many paintings he has many arrows.
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He was a third-century Christian saint and martyr who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows during a period of persecution of Christians.
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Now I've chosen this one in particular by the Renaissance painter Il Sodomo because Vernon Lee, who I began with, spent a lot of time contemplating this painting in the Ufizi.
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She reflected on her physical reaction to it.
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Should she have a sense of the arrow in her neck as she viewed it?
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But she found that the angel over the scene mitigated that possibility for her.
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She reflected, when I cover the angel, the arrow business becomes more painful.
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That cheerful, busy, very alive angel sets up, I think, a feeling which destroys the arrow feeling.
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So I invite you to think, to do a little moment of practice of effective empathy and think about what the syringes of the invisible man and the arrows of St.
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Sebastian evoke for you, what they make you feel.
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But you don't have to report back in class today.
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So the invisible man in its shape and form has another resonance for me.
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And that is with this sculpture, Lazarus by Jacob Epstein.
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It's a 1947 sculpture.
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Epstein was the American-born British sculptor, very influential upon people like Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
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This was installed in the chapel at New College, Oxford, in 1952.
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Well, technically it's in the anti-chapel, and you can see it's in that space just before you enter the chapel, and it's in front of the great west doors.
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It's big, it's over seven feet tall, and I hope you can see that the bandaged body is facing the west doors, but the head is twisted around to face east and the altar right up at the end of the chapel.
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I've spent a lot of time looking at this sculpture.
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I was for a decade the Dean of Divinity at New College, and that's was often eyeballed me when I was behind the altar.
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And I've spent a lot of time contemplating it, and I'll just give you a nugget of what I think about it.
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There's an ambiguity to this, which I find deeply instructive.
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Is Lazarus gladly turning his head towards the east and to the light as he steps back into life from death, ready to grasp new life and send his bandages spinning off?
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Or is it hard leaving the dark safety of the tomb?
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Is he walking out into the light but only reluctantly?
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And he's therefore turning his head back to the comfort of burial, reminding us that new life and change is a struggle.
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So for me, this sculpture is a lot about the fact that as human beings, we often say we want new life.
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We might actually even genuinely want new life, but we can be very resistant to change.
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Now, the visual arts require our attention.
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I've just given you an example of a sculpture I attended to very deeply over many years.
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I recently read Patrick Bringley's book, All the Beauty in the World, which I recommend.
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It's about his 10 years working as a museum guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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He gave up a busy job at the New Yorker magazine because he was in grief.
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His brother had just died, and he felt he needed to do something else.
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So he took up this position.
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There he could circulate amongst all the galleries and spend hours every day paying attention, not only to the visitors, but also to the art.
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His telling detail that museum guards at the Met are given a sock allowance,$80 a year, helped me realize what it would like be, what it would be like to be in his shoes all day on his feet in the museum.
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And I tell you, I have a newfound appreciation for museum guards since reading that.
00:24:02.240 --> 00:24:08.079
But let me take one instance of his attention to the art in that museum.
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One day he was in the Middle East gallery, it was not a culture familiar to him, and arriving early one day, he was able to sit, in itself a luxury.
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And he says, I love the feeling of sitting in front of a work of art.
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And as he sat, he looked at a 16th-century dervish, a Sufi, a member of the mystical form of Islam.
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And as he was sitting there, he read a translation of the painting's inscription.
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For Bringley, the portrait put a face to the grief he had been feeling about his brother's death.
00:24:54.799 --> 00:25:01.839
It came from a culture and time utterly unlike his own, and yet there was a resonance.
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On the subway to and from work, he read about Sufism.
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Back at the museum, he requested that he be posted near the Dervish.
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And there he experienced a combination of identification and strangeness.
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Using one of my eyes, I feel an intimacy with this 16th-century follower of an esoteric religious sect.
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And then my heart beats, and he feels distant and strange.
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And then my heart beats again, and like the painting before me, he feels near again.
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This is an illustration, I think, of what the writer Rebecca Solner calls the faraway nearby.
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She describes empathy as a journey.
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We have to travel out of ourselves a little way to engage in it and to expand.
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Brinier's experience with the Dervish also reminds us that in looking at or reading about someone from a culture that is strange to us, an identification can occur.
00:26:03.359 --> 00:26:11.599
Someone, especially perhaps a fictional someone, does not need to be like us for us to identify with them.
00:26:14.240 --> 00:26:24.559
The interracial British novelist and essayist Zadie Smith writes of the character of Olive Kittridge in the white American novelist Elizabeth Strant's work.
00:26:24.720 --> 00:26:30.880
And I tell you of those two writers' ethnic backgrounds because it's relevant to the point that Smith makes.
00:26:31.200 --> 00:26:39.759
She writes, What do I have in common with Olive Kittridge, a salty old white woman who has spent her entire life in Maine?
00:26:40.559 --> 00:26:44.880
And yet, as it turns out, her griefs are very like my own.
00:26:45.119 --> 00:26:46.160
Not all of them.
00:26:46.400 --> 00:26:49.519
It's not a perfect mapping of self unto book.
00:26:49.759 --> 00:26:53.599
I've never met a book that did that, least of all my own.
00:26:53.839 --> 00:26:57.119
But some of Olive's grief weighed like mine.
00:26:58.160 --> 00:27:18.559
Certainly, I might turn from a writer like Elizabeth Strout towards a writer like Tony Morrison and find our griefs more closely aligned for obvious reasons like race and class, which two contingencies do so much to form a person's experience and therefore their sensibilities.
00:27:19.759 --> 00:27:24.880
But what passed between me and Olive was not nothing.
00:27:25.599 --> 00:27:39.839
I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people strange to me in life might be revealed through the intimate space of fiction to have griefs not unlike my own.
00:27:40.079 --> 00:27:41.680
And so I read.
00:27:42.240 --> 00:27:51.359
So I think this also illustrates that empathy is not about appropriating another's experience, but attending to it and attempting to understand it.
00:27:56.960 --> 00:28:01.920
The exercise of empathy as a journey takes us out of ourselves.
00:28:02.079 --> 00:28:05.200
And this leads me to talk about beauty.
00:28:06.319 --> 00:28:08.480
Perhaps controversially, I don't know.
00:28:10.160 --> 00:28:19.759
If the arts are regarded as a luxury by some, then beauty is seen as an exaggerated version of that, unnecessary while people are suffering.
00:28:20.319 --> 00:28:22.319
So what about the place of beauty?
00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:26.160
Vernon Lee wrestled with that question: what is beauty?
00:28:26.240 --> 00:28:27.759
And indeed, what is art?
00:28:28.079 --> 00:28:32.640
The end of the 19th century was a time when many people were talking about this.
00:28:32.799 --> 00:28:38.240
Some embraced the idea of art for art's sake, like Lee's friend Walter Pater.
00:28:38.559 --> 00:28:44.319
That made others fear that it was decadent and they wanted to find a moral purpose to art.
00:28:45.279 --> 00:28:59.119
Vernon Lee said something in between, that art was rather for life's sake, that art helps us not because it makes us good, but because through it we realize we're fully alive.
00:28:59.440 --> 00:29:04.559
This means that art is not purely instrumental and it still leaves a place for beauty.
00:29:04.720 --> 00:29:10.640
Not as a luxury, but as something which can take us beyond ourselves, opening us to a wider world.
00:29:10.960 --> 00:29:24.160
I'm going to read a passage now from Aris Murdoch, who I think expresses this better than anyone else I know, but I think you've probably all had an experience when you literally took in your breath because something was so beautiful it surprised you.
00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:28.640
This is Murdoch.
00:29:28.799 --> 00:29:40.079
I'm looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige.
00:29:40.720 --> 00:29:44.559
And then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel.
00:29:45.119 --> 00:29:47.200
In a moment, everything is altered.
00:29:47.440 --> 00:29:51.680
The brooding self, with its hurt vanity, has disappeared.
00:29:51.920 --> 00:29:55.759
There's nothing now but kestrel.
00:29:56.400 --> 00:30:01.039
And when I return to thinking of the other matter, it seems less important.
00:30:01.519 --> 00:30:10.960
And of course, this is something which we may also do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to clear our minds of selfish care.
00:30:12.000 --> 00:30:25.440
So this process, which she calls unselfing, means that the time we spend protecting, guarding, advancing the self and its prestige can be released so that we may spend it in the service of something bigger than us.
00:30:28.480 --> 00:30:37.519
While the visual arts both demand and elicit patient and sometimes repeated attention, theatre provides a different immersive experience.
00:30:37.680 --> 00:30:46.480
And I'm going to talk about just one play which has been on very recently, and I think it's still going around the country, and it's a brilliant play if you get a chance to see it.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:54.960
This is Punch by James Graham from 2024, which tells the true story of Jacob Dunn.
00:30:55.359 --> 00:30:59.839
Dunn lived in a socio-economically deprived area of Nottingham.
00:31:00.079 --> 00:31:09.680
He was out for a night of drinking and thrill seeking with friends when unprovoked he punched a stranger, a paramedic named James Hodgkinson.
00:31:10.160 --> 00:31:12.960
That single punch killed Hodgkinson.
00:31:13.200 --> 00:31:23.839
Jacob Dunn went to prison for manslaughter, and when he got out, he was lost, he was ashamed, he was without direction, he didn't want to associate with his old friends, but he didn't have another world to go to.
00:31:24.400 --> 00:31:31.200
The victim's grieving parents, through an organization called Restorative Justice, contacted Jacob.
00:31:31.359 --> 00:31:37.759
And through their raw, painful, and painstaking encounters with one another, all three of them were changed.
00:31:38.160 --> 00:31:41.279
It's not a neat story of redemption and forgiveness.
00:31:42.079 --> 00:31:47.920
Grief and guilt remained, but transformation did and continues to happen.
00:31:48.400 --> 00:31:58.640
So this is a play, and I should say that Jacob Dunn and Hodgkinson's mother, Joan, go around talking about this still.
00:31:59.119 --> 00:32:19.680
So this is a play in which the audience members are completely immersed and fully engaged emotionally, you're thrown in from the very beginning with the fast-moving, very frenzied early scenes in which Jacob and his friends are out partying and drinking, to the very difficult scene in which Jacob and Hodgkinson's parents, Joan and David, meet for the first time.
00:32:20.319 --> 00:32:25.759
One reviewer wrote, For the audience, it's an education in empathy.
00:32:26.000 --> 00:32:33.200
The play doesn't moralize, it simply places us in a room with these people and asks us to listen.
00:32:37.039 --> 00:32:43.519
So this takes us to the question of empathy in society and indeed the role of deep listening.
00:32:44.720 --> 00:32:55.359
Hands up, if you've ever wondered how on earth someone else could believe this or that or vote for X or Y?
00:32:55.519 --> 00:32:57.839
Has anyone in the room ever had that experience?
00:32:58.079 --> 00:32:59.519
There you go, right?
00:33:00.799 --> 00:33:03.920
And maybe you made some assumptions about those people too, right?
00:33:05.519 --> 00:33:11.119
So how do we understand someone whose views, political or otherwise, are so different from ours?
00:33:11.759 --> 00:33:18.079
I have found very helpful in this case the work of the sociologist Arlie Hoxchild.
00:33:18.400 --> 00:33:23.440
She teaches and lives in Berkeley, California, one of the heartlands of liberal America.
00:33:23.599 --> 00:33:26.799
No, maybe the heartland of liberal America.
00:33:27.200 --> 00:33:35.440
In 2010, she spent five years on and off living in the conservative Bayou County in Louisiana, getting to know the people there.
00:33:35.680 --> 00:33:43.279
It's a place of real poverty, environmental crisis, low educational rates, low life expectancy.
00:33:43.599 --> 00:33:51.759
But she wanted to go beyond a common assumption amongst liberals that those on the right were voting against their own best interests.
00:33:52.160 --> 00:33:58.640
So she befriended and listened to building contractors, auto mechanics, homemakers, gospel singers, and many more.
00:33:58.799 --> 00:34:04.400
She went to church with them, she went to potluck suppers with them, and she attended their political rallies.
00:34:04.559 --> 00:34:09.840
And she learnt about their fear of cultural eclipse and economic decline.
00:34:10.480 --> 00:34:18.320
That story is much more familiar to us now, a whole decade later, but not least because of Hoxschild's work.
00:34:18.639 --> 00:34:21.920
Though some political events may have had something to do with it too.
00:34:22.320 --> 00:34:26.960
But the point for this lecture tonight is how her understanding came about.
00:34:27.199 --> 00:34:32.960
She listened with complete empathetic attention to what she calls their deep story.
00:34:33.039 --> 00:34:37.360
And I have found that concept of the deep story very helpful.
00:34:38.960 --> 00:34:41.440
It's a story that feelings tell.
00:34:41.599 --> 00:34:48.559
It's useful because it removes judgment and tells us how things feel, not necessarily how they are.
00:34:48.880 --> 00:34:52.960
How something feels to someone else, not necessarily the reality of the situation.
00:34:53.199 --> 00:35:06.480
So she puts it like this: such a story permits those on both sides, we might now say all sides, of the political spectrum, to stand back and explore the subjective prism through which the party on the other side sees the world.
00:35:06.719 --> 00:35:14.719
And I don't believe we understand anyone's politics, right or left, without it, for we all have a deep story.
00:35:15.840 --> 00:35:36.800
Our deep stories obviously come out of our own circumstances and contexts, yes, but we might all recognise that, again, in the decades since she wrote that, those circumstances and contexts and ideas and our own deep stories are being increasingly manipulated in the post-truth age that is skeptical of both facts and experts.
00:35:37.199 --> 00:35:50.880
This is exacerbated by Section 230, which, as you may know, is a 1996 US law that prevents online platforms from being treated as the publishers of user-generated content.
00:35:51.280 --> 00:36:00.079
So they're treated just as platforms and therefore they can't be held responsible for anything on them in a way that the publishers can be for what they publish.
00:36:00.559 --> 00:36:15.599
So if you put this together with a large amount of AI-generated content, bots on the web, malign influences attempting to manipulate public thinking, and you will see that our deep stories are being very much shaped by many different forces.
00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:21.280
Now, I presumed in the title of this lecture that empathy was a good thing.
00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:24.159
Is there a case to be made against it?
00:36:25.119 --> 00:36:30.480
Last year, Elon Musk remarked that empathy makes us weak as a civilization.
00:36:31.119 --> 00:36:36.960
Of course, empathy, trying to understand those different from ourselves, carries with it risk.
00:36:37.440 --> 00:36:42.639
When we start that journey to understanding, we don't know where it will end up.
00:36:43.360 --> 00:36:46.400
And it might make us feel weak.
00:36:46.880 --> 00:36:48.880
Does it actually make us weaker?
00:36:49.119 --> 00:36:51.519
That depends on your definition of weakness.
00:36:51.760 --> 00:36:58.960
But certainly making the empathy journey will likely change us and how we see the world, and that can be threatening.
00:36:59.119 --> 00:37:03.199
Back to Lazarus's statue is he wanting change or not?
00:37:03.920 --> 00:37:06.639
Elon Musk is not a lone voice.
00:37:06.800 --> 00:37:16.719
There has recently been a backlash against empathy with several books arguing that empathy has gone too far and it jettison's logic in decision making.
00:37:16.960 --> 00:37:28.239
The most well-known of these books is one with the most unfortunate title, Suicidal Empathy by Gad Saad, who's a professor of marketing at the University of Mississippi.
00:37:28.480 --> 00:37:32.960
And that title has become something of a buzzword in some circles.
00:37:33.119 --> 00:37:36.639
And I've been really interested in the ways in which the literature has changed.
00:37:36.719 --> 00:37:47.360
So when you, if you get the handout, you'll see there's a quite a lot of books from the 2010s, the last decade, that are pretty positive about empathy.
00:37:47.519 --> 00:37:50.400
And there's now something of a backlash.
00:37:50.800 --> 00:38:00.719
But there are other arguments against empathy from a different point of view, such as that of the psychologist Paul Bloom, who has written a book titled Against Empathy.
00:38:02.320 --> 00:38:09.199
He says, I've come to realise that taking a position against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens.
00:38:09.440 --> 00:38:12.719
A statement so outlandish it can only be a joke.
00:38:12.880 --> 00:38:24.159
And so I've learned to clarify, to explain, I'm not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good neighbour, doing the right thing, making the world a better place.
00:38:24.480 --> 00:38:26.400
My claim is actually the opposite.
00:38:26.639 --> 00:38:30.880
If you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor guide.
00:38:31.280 --> 00:38:32.480
He gives three reasons.
00:38:32.719 --> 00:38:35.599
First, he says empathy is biased.
00:38:35.920 --> 00:38:37.599
He says this as a psychologist.
00:38:37.760 --> 00:38:44.719
We are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background.
00:38:45.039 --> 00:38:47.199
Secondly, empathy is narrow.
00:38:47.360 --> 00:38:56.559
It connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:39:03.599
So the power of empathy, of course, is the individual story, but can we move beyond that to see the larger story it may convey?
00:39:03.920 --> 00:39:14.000
And thirdly, feeling another's pain can lead to empathic distress, which may in fact be counterproductive, preventing action or change of heart.
00:39:14.159 --> 00:39:16.559
In other words, empathy burnout.
00:39:17.199 --> 00:39:23.519
In place of empathy, Bloom argues for compassion, which may be a more distanced emotion.
00:39:24.079 --> 00:39:34.320
And there is a move in this, this is not precisely the backlash against empathy, but there is a larger move towards what one might call, uh and sometimes does get called rational empathy.
00:39:34.639 --> 00:39:45.599
Bloom is influenced here by a French cellular geneticist, uh, who's also a Buddhist monk, Mathieu Ricard, who meditates regularly.
00:39:45.760 --> 00:40:03.679
And Ricard makes a distinction between empathy, a key feature of which is effective resonance with the other, while making a clear distinction between self and other, and compassion, which is the altruistic motivation to intervene in favour of someone who is suffering or is in need.
00:40:03.760 --> 00:40:08.719
Whereas compassion implies a kind of altruistic motivation, right?
00:40:09.599 --> 00:40:15.280
So the assumption here is that empathy and compassion are, I could make many responses to bloom.
00:40:15.440 --> 00:40:17.440
I haven't got time, I've only got five more minutes.
00:40:17.679 --> 00:40:28.800
But um, it seems to me that uh here the problem that in both of these authors is that they're assuming both empathy and compassion are about responding to suffering only.
00:40:29.119 --> 00:40:38.559
And the advantage of empathy, it seems to me, is that it enables us to have effective resonances with another person's many experiences, not just suffering.
00:40:39.039 --> 00:40:47.599
We also need to remember, of course, that empathy is not just about emotion, it's not just about effective resonances, it's also about perspective taking.
00:40:48.320 --> 00:40:56.239
So perhaps, and I'm almost coming to my conclusion now, perhaps the distinction between empathy and compassion is not even the point.
00:40:56.639 --> 00:41:08.480
I'm interested ultimately in the ways in which we encourage people to develop their understandings of one another so that we may create vibrant social and political communities for the common good.
00:41:08.960 --> 00:41:14.239
This brings us full circle back to democracy and what we need to make it work.
00:41:14.960 --> 00:41:26.960
Here's a book hot off the press, I think three or four days ago, James Marriott the Journalist's The New Dark Ages, with the gloomy subtitle The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society.
00:41:27.280 --> 00:41:34.159
He sounds an alarm about the current decline in reading, which includes the inability to focus on long texts.
00:41:34.400 --> 00:41:38.639
This, he claims, has created a hostile environment for learning.
00:41:39.280 --> 00:41:54.000
So, in one sense, I think his book is an updated version of Nussbown's argument, if with a narrower focus, taking into account all the digital distractions which did not exist 16 years ago when Nussbone wrote her book.
00:41:54.320 --> 00:42:00.239
Marriott makes the point that a vital democracy requires literate citizens.
00:42:00.960 --> 00:42:07.440
He is worried that on TikTok and other platforms, charisma wins over reason, emotion over intellect.
00:42:07.599 --> 00:42:18.559
And he says, might we be forging an electorate that is as helpless, credulous, and poorly informed as the subjects of a medieval king.
00:42:19.599 --> 00:42:21.920
Finally, what makes empathy work?
00:42:22.159 --> 00:42:25.760
The exercise of empathy is in part a choice.
00:42:26.000 --> 00:42:32.960
We have to be willing to give it a go, choose to show up, listen, pay attention, learn, look, read.
00:42:33.280 --> 00:42:40.480
But there's also an element of this empathy journey that actually isn't strictly about our own choice or the work we do.
00:42:40.800 --> 00:42:49.519
You might want to call that the aha moment when we suddenly understand something previously unknown or completely opaque to us.
00:42:49.840 --> 00:42:57.840
It's about a turn of heart to understanding the other and their experience in a way you didn't imagine, and that's unpredictable.
00:42:58.000 --> 00:42:59.360
We can't force it.
00:42:59.599 --> 00:43:03.679
In Christian theological language, that moment is called grace.
00:43:04.159 --> 00:43:11.280
For the Buddhist who is meditating, their practice may lead to a depth of compassion unimagined.
00:43:11.519 --> 00:43:18.159
For the person who comes to a painting or novel or poem anew, the insight might startle.
00:43:18.719 --> 00:43:34.079
So the question is really, are we as individuals, as a society, willing to do the footwork to develop empathy and therefore a big enough imagination that we can encompass the perspectives and concerns of others in our daily decision-making and actions?
00:43:34.400 --> 00:43:39.119
Are we willing to take the leap and surprise ourselves about where we end up?
00:43:39.760 --> 00:44:13.760
Many of the themes I have been exploring this evening will be further developed over this academic year in series on the future of journalism, staging Shakespeare, language, Indian film, the question of what is precious to us, as well as a symposium on rhetoric, a festival of astronomy, and one-off lectures on the cello, offence, and the future of courtesy, performing Othello, what we can learn from the objects of the Holocaust, the literary figures of the wife of Bath and the Wife of Willston, the place of the magnificent in our lives, the purpose of yoga, and the poetry of John Dunn.
00:44:14.239 --> 00:44:25.679
These are just some of the offerings alongside the many lectures by our hopper of current Gresham professors in music, physics, business, IT, the environment, astronomy, maths and law.
00:44:25.920 --> 00:44:36.800
The academic year will end with our Sir Thomas Gresham lecture to be given, I'm glad to say, by an artist on June the 24th, the artist Sir Grayson Perry.
00:44:37.119 --> 00:44:46.000
So thank you for being here virtually and in person this evening, and we hope we'll see much more of you for many of these lectures over the coming year.
