DOES READING MAKE US EMPATHETIC? DOES READING MAKE US GOOD?
A question from our office hours. One that I’m hit with on the regular — probably because I’m always talking up reading and probably because, given the neoliberal assault on reading, all of us are desperate for ways to encourage reading in ourselves and our communities.
Yes, I believe spending long periods of time immserse in fictional worlds, in the lives and subjectivities of others, in the mimicry game of literature, primes the limbic areas of our brains that enable and encourage empathy.
I believe all art in general is good for our humanity — good for us to think, and good for us to feel, and good for us to be.
That’s the short answer and, when I’m speaking in public, where I usually stop.
Reading ta jevi. The end.
I have, however, a slightly longer answer that’s a little more ambivalent.
Sure, reading can help increase our empathy — reading certainly helped me deepen my sympathetic channels — but as we all know, plenty of people throughout history were both consummate readers of literature and also on some straight up evil supervillain shit. Not just a few outliers either, but a whole lot of folks.
This is the very contradiction that Joseph Conrad chillingly (and famously) satirized in Heart of Darkness. Remember Kurtz, the universal genius that all Europe contributed in the making of? A great musician, a journalist, capable of magnificent eloquence who pens a report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, “a moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment.” At the bottom of which Kurtz appended a note “scrawled evidently much later in an unsteady hand”:
Exterminate All the Brutes!
The universal European genius lover of the arts — and consummate reader, I’m sure —who also happens to be a génocidaire.
What the Kurtz types make clear is that art does not necessarily improve anyone — the arts are not direct linear ameliorators of the soul. Art needs to be understood less as an instantaneous fix to the human condition and more as an invitation. Reading (for example) encourages us to deepen our sympathies for the purpose of the story and beyond. Clearly not everyone heeds the encouragement. In fact, plenty of folks will cry over a character in a story and then go put the boot into their real-world analogs the very next day.
Which bring me back to the Game Within.
You will recall my claim that our stories contain Games Within. Very important games that give stories their indelible immersive power. Now, one thing that game scholars talk about is that when people of different cultures encounter each other they often play games. “People will play games when they vaguely know each other, to get to know one another.”1 They might not speak the same language, but they will play games. I remember that from my own childhood — when I first came over from the DR I couldn’t have put two words of English together but I knew my way around a baseball diamond, knew how to knock a fucking ball into the next courtyard and how to catch anything.
Strangers play games not only to pass the time and “get to know each other” but because games offer glimpses into the characters of the people playing. As is often said in the RPG world: you want to really meet a person — play a few games with them. As for people who don’t play games — there’s a message in that, too.
Games with their binding rules and definitive win conditions invite us to play fair, to win and lose well. Games, in other words, invite us to practice character — to show, in Samwise Gamgee’s words, our quality. And because not everyone shows their quality during games (for example, if they cheat — or lose poorly —or win poorly, too), games help strangers
“find answers to important questions: Are you good enough to be part of my family? Should I trust you enough to trade with you? “This is how games passed between cultures ... Where language cannot reveal everything, something may still be gleaned from the silent, ludic routines of a game.”2
Games, at a deep level, introduce us to the world and introduce us to ourselves.
Like I’ve been saying, stories contain games as well, and these Games Within help us pass the time and help us get to know ourselves and others. They also ask us to show our quality: At the level of sympathy—at the level of compassion—at the level of character. The very best of these Games Within will invite us to deepen our humanity — to grow our souls.
Not everyone, however, wishes to know themselves or welcomes an invitation to show their quality. Same way we can cheat each other in external games, we can cheat ourselves in narrative ones (which is what I suspect the Kurtz of the world do).
But the very fact these Games Within exist and contain such powerful ameliorative potential is what makes the reading of fiction (and other arts) so impossibly, invaluably, important.
While it’s true that reading cannot make a reader sympathetic, much less good, it’s also true that a society without reading, without art, will never be sympathetic or good.
What We Learn from One of the World’s Oldest Board Games, by Samanth Subramanian, New Yorker, March 26, 2019
Ibid
Here's James McBride:
"If you're a writer and you're writing about race, the best thing you can do is forget about it and deal with the humanity of characters. You know what the boundaries are.
Now you have to see which characters can kick up against those boundaries or illuminate those boundaries, so — to make your story go. So I look at it from that point of view and also from the point of view that cynicism is like — cynicism in a story is toxic. You have to really have a desire to see the good in people, to them push past their boundaries"
Like I’ve been saying, stories contain games as well, and these Games Within also ask us to show our quality: At the level of sympathy. At the level of compassion. At the level of character. The very best of these Games Within will invite us to deepen our humanity — to grow our souls.
This reminds me of something I heard James McBride say about how you can't really have deep cynicism in literature.. because art has to expand the possibilities of our empathy for it to be transcendent.. for cynicism is the distancing, dismissive, default stance, but we want and need more to evolve beyond that; and that instinct towards growth towards heaven is hard-wired and the most transcendent art taps into that expansive potential.