On Nov. 20 — which, as it turned out, would’ve been the 94th birthday of onetime Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan on June 5, 1968 — PBS’ “Nova” aired a fascinating program, “The Violence Paradox” — one that said a lot about the paradox of empathy in our own time.
Based on the controversial work of psychologist Steven Pinker, the program posited that civilization has become increasingly less violent — yes, despite a world in which every Middle Eastern, African and South American country appears to be protesting its corrupt leadership, Hong Kong students are fighting for democracy against China in a classic David-versus-Goliath battle; and school shootings continue unchecked in the United States.
But Pinker argues that it was the rise of government that fostered peace as it is in the interest of leaders to secure the peace and, thus, prosperity. (The problem with this, as “The Violence Paradox” acknowledges ,is that in securing the peace, leaders may quash their own people, for who wants to rule over an unruly people?
Nevertheless, government has been a civilizing influence — the program concluded — as has culture, in the sense of the arts and one art in particular, novel writing. Indeed, novelists scored highest on a test that shows you only pairs of eyes in differing expressions and then you have to pick from a multiple choice of words which one best defines each pair.
The novel, which developed in both Eastern and Western cultures, harks back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, as in “The Alexander Romance” (before the year 338), a work of historical fiction centering on the life of Alexander the Great that is far more fantastical than my new novel about him, “Daimon,” out from JMS Books Nov. 30. (And that, dear readers, is the end of my shameless self-promotion.) The modern novel is said to have been born in the 17th century with Miguel de Cervantes of “Don Quixote” fame but to have really taken off in the 18th century.
Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the exquisite 1939 film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights,” based on Emily Brontë’s tricky tour de force about two soulmates who lack empathy for others and leave a trail of destruction in their wakes.
What the novel does is to hone people’s innate sense of empathy and justice — which develops as early as age 3 months, as a truly stunning experiment with babies and puppets in the program demonstrates — by enabling readers to enter into minds and hearts different from their own. If you lived next door to the main characters in “Wuthering Heights” (1847), you’d probably be calling the police or pitching a “For Sale” sign on your front lawn immediately. But Emily Brontë makes their brutality — their palpable lack of empathy — intelligible, first by organizing it in time and space so that it cannot hurt us, which is what all art does, and then with her magnificent prose, mesmerizing Russian nesting dolls plotting and shrewd observations about everything from human nature to real estate. When Cathy tells Nelly “I am Heathcliff,” we can say to ourselves, Who among us hasn’t had a thorny soulmate? And when Heathcliff says to the dying Cathy, “I cannot live without my life. I cannot live without my soul,” who hasn’t expressed words to that effect at the gravesite of our most beloved?
Yet how many people read novels today? Women certainly do, more than men. More to the point, what has happened to empathy? The rise of President Donald J. Trump and his so-called “base” is a study in empathy’s eclipse. Witness his reaction to the Hong Kong protests. He’s for these terrific, beleaguered students who are waging a solitary battle against oppression, until, of course, he isn’t — because he has to keep his options open in his trade dealing with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He’s for getting rid of flavored e-cigarettes, which are damaging the lungs of our kids and killing them— because, let’s face it, they’re the ones who are using them, not adults trying to quit smoking — until he’s for the e-cigarette lobbyists whispering in his ear about big business. At least Utah Sen. Mitt Romney — a critic whom the president’s been cozying up to in an effort to shore up anti-impeachment support among the Republicans — said in a White House face-off between the medical establishment and e-cigarette manufacturers on Nov. 22 — the 56th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — that you’ve got to put the health of the kids first.
But will the president say, “No, the kids are not all right” in Hong Kong and America and stand with them? Not likely. Neither narcissistic El Presidente nor his base is particularly sympathetic. An historian I interviewed recently blamed this on the impersonality of the internet, but I told him the internet is merely the instrument in the decline of empathy in this country, not the cause. No, the cause is the simple fact that white people — the people who have been in power since the country was founded — are becoming a majority minority and no amount of Trumpism will stop that. They’re scared. I get it. No one likes to lose what he has. And many might be afraid, too, that people of color might treat them the way they’ve treated people of color.
But just because others gain doesn’t mean you have to lose. It doesn’t have to be a zero sum game. Yet Trump presents it to his followers as such, and they’re only too happy to believe him, because that’s how they see life to begin with. How many wealthy Trumpettes have said to me, “We need him for a few more years” — to bolster their small businesses, give them a tax break, deregulate the corporations they head, etc.? How many Jewish Trumpettes have said to me, “He protects Israel. Obama never did.” How many working-class Trumpettes have said to me, “These Hispanics and black people, these immigrants, they just game the system. These Democrats are socialists. They just want to kill babies. I don’t want to pay for some woman’s birth control. Trump protects our rights and our borders.”
The common denominator in all of these is that their rights are more important than your needs or interests. If you’re a person of color, an immigrant, a Muslim, LGBTQ, and even a woman who believes she should have control of her own body — fuhgeddabout. And that brings us at last to the empathy paradox: Many people have empathy as long as others don’t have more — money, power, possessions, beauty, brains, talent, opportunity — than they do. They’re fine with giving to the needy at holiday time. They’re less fine with the neighbor’s shiny new Mercedes.
But we have to become more like the babies in the program’s experiment, who instinctively reach for the “good” puppet that takes the ball away from the bad puppet — and runs with it. As I’ve written many times on this blog, hatred of hate is not hate. It is a kind of defiance and even a kind of justice.