With those who are a bit like us, we can short-circuit our lack of empathy by pretending the other person is us (or near enough). This is why it’s so hard to love other people, so hard to engage a true and honest compassion for those who are unlike us. She doesn’t even realize that raccoons don’t have tear ducts The only way for us to be someone else or feel as someone else is through the imagination-and even then, we’re still only ever us pretending at what it’s like to be someone else. The things others see and feel are alien to us. It is not yours and you can only guess at what it would be like to be me. My life and all that it contains is my own alone. From this starting place, the entirety of our unadulterated life experience is wholly our own. Rather than five feet outside ourselves or in that tree over there or in this hand here or even, more romantically, in the space between you and me-rather than any of the thousands of possible places for the self to reside, the general experience is that the έγώ sits firmly and (usually) immovably a couple inches behind the eyes. Proprioception gives us the sense that our thoughts and calculations and beliefs and rational self all exist within the geography of our skulls. The typical human experience is to perceive the world from behind the eyes and within the head. Even without that formidable personal origin, our biological nature prompts this initial self-concern as well. are products of a culture that is superbly focused on individualism and the rightness of personal experience. And we have a hard time seeing this kind of thing-because we begin in ourselves.įorget for a moment that most of us in the U.S. And what feels cozy and warm to me feels wrongheaded to someone else.
The shorthand of this is that everything that feels foreign to me feels comfortable to someone else.
I and you and everyone you know are by nature unable to project ourselves into experiences we have not had. I’ve argued for a while now that one of the most prominent powers of literature is its ability to promote empathy-and this without the reader ever noticing what’s going on.Īmong the greatest troubles when discussing faith and culture is that we all come from such different structures.
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