What is empathy: a skill, a quality, a virtue – or something else?
This question, asked by academic Sarah Fox in her fascinating paper on historians and empathy which I wrote about here last month, has been haunting me ever since I read it (link below if you missed it).
I’d intended to give the question some serious thought in time to jot down my initial responses for today’s post, but as usual, time ran out as I scabbled to finish a key scene in my seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress.
Sitting down to write this blog, I discovered something different had happened instead.
By not thinking about empathy, the experience of its absence threw up a practical lesson about what happens when one fails to internalise the fact that a character who is ‘other’ really is ‘other’: the scene goes horribly wrong.
The scene in question was the break into Act 2. It’s a reaction beat to the collapse of three witch trials due to false evidence being given by a young woman, apparently schooled by a Jesuit priest. My mistake was to imagine how a rational person would react to this news, and then how this reaction could plausibly impact on my protagonist and move the plot along.
But…
Witch prosecutions are not rational. So why would the response to news of a Jesuit plot to frame three ex-Catholics as witches be rational, either? If my scene-driving character believed deeply in God, in the devil, and in witchcraft, then his reaction would necessarily be coloured by these beliefs, not matter how deluded we might find them.
My job as a writer isn’t to expose his delusion and pat myself and my potential reader on the back for our enlightenment. Good storytelling requires me to present to the reader the most convincing argument possible about his beliefs, and then demonstrate how his authority and credibility proved to my protagonist that this Jesuit truly did work for the devil.
If I can’t write that convincingly, if I can’t enter into the life and times of a Jacobean justice of the peace whose experiences were vastly different to mine, whose beliefs are alien, and whose motivation is incomprehensible in my rationalist world, then why am I writing about him at all?
Because isn’t that pretty much the point of fiction: to imagine the other? Every secondary character, however fleeting their appearance in one’s tale, is context for the protagonist and their evolving worldview.
In this practical iteration, therefore, empathy is a skill, part of our craft, a tool of the writer’s trade to be studied, learnt, and honed scene by scene.
Which certainly wasn’t an answer I expected when I read Dr Fox’s question first time around.
Meanwhile, how about this for a situation to try and get one’s empathetic head round?
Over on Twitter (X if you Musk), The Cromwell Museum tweeted about the battle of Philiphaugh, near Selkirk in Scotland, fought on 13 September 1645, when forces under Lt. General David Leslie defeated the Marquis of Montrose’s royalist troops.
Historical novelist Eleanor Swift-Hook added that Leslie granted quarter to some surrendering royalists, but was persuaded by his Presbyterian ministers, ‘men of God’, that mercy was a mistake, so he slaughtered not only the troops but their camp followers, too, mainly women and children.
She tweeted in reply to my horror at such inhumanity: ‘It’s hard to grasp the mindset of such men, but they saw ‘false’ beliefs as being more than a matter of personal choice. If you tolerated them, let them live, then you were allowing them to spread, and that meant you were allowing new souls to be corrupted into eternal damnation.’
As she said, it’s hard to empathize with such murderous certainty, then or now, but I guess that’s another reason for fiction: to acknowledge the worst in us without having to smell the gore.
On which happy note, it’s beer o’clock in the lovely September sunshine.
@HouseRowena on X (Twitter)
Rowena House Author on Facebook for my occasional diary about the C17th work-in-progress.
Link to Sarah Fox's article:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/archival-intimacies-empathy-and-historical-practice-in-2023/F2A7CD1F8C351B487586D9497471A6A8
4 comments:
I take the point about empathising with beliefs that are horrific to us. But there are layers and layers of conscious and sub-conscious belief here, and layers of justification. Perhaps some religious bigots of the past did sincerely believe that it was better to kill women and chlldren rather than allow a belief they didn't share to spread -- rather like wiping out a rat's nest.
But that comparison -- 'rat's nest -- was and is often used by anti-semites. It's age-old and justifies a lot of good old, enjoyable sadism, if you're that way inclined. 'What, me? A sadist? I'm just doing what has to be done, wiping out this rat's nest of Judaism/ witchcraft/ Catholicism/ perversion, or whatever excuse you favour.
And it's odd that these outbursts of sincere sadism co-incide with periods of political instability, change and fear. The idea that 'we must murder these people to prevent them damning others' was and is the go-to excuse to justify the murderous expression of an irrational fear. Such as the fear of being 'swamped' by 'small boats' or by the 'swarming' feral children of single mothers.
If you wouldn't extend much sympathy to a modern bigot and his/her thin excuses, why extend more to an historical one?
Hi, Sue. Very well put! History is replete with awful examples of hideous bigotry.
I think I should have made clearer that my attempts at empathy for the historical Other is motivated by a desire to better understand people in the past (including those who, on the surface, seem morally incomprehensible to a Western-educated contemporary mind). I'm not seeking to sympathyize or feel compassion for them, although I accept these reponses are implied when we talk about empathy, especially with young people.
The inspiration for this mini-series is how variable our understanding of the term 'empathy' is, as outlined in Sarah Fox's research. I don't know if that came across in either my August blog or this one. I certainly don't want to extend sympathy to modern bigots, but getting inside the minds of others does seem a worthwhile creative endeavour if one is going to write about our horrifically troubled past.
We seem to be misunderstanding each other, Rowena! Sorry about that. Trying to understand the minds of others is always worthwhile -- indeed, a necessity for a writer, unless things are going to be very one-sided.
But when I read, for instance, that 'eminent men' in the past were dead-set against women being lawyers or doctors because they 'believed' that women's minds and natures were too fragile to withstand the pressures of such a career, I always wonder just how sincere that belief was, even at the time.
My misunderstanding! Yes, it's a very interesting question. Belief & unconscious self-deception seem to be deeply embedded twins in our psyches, as far as I understand current thinking in the worlds of psychology & neuroscience. I'm exploring religiosity as a defence mechanism/coping strategy when faced with cognitive dissonance. My characters would never have understoid these terms, but presumably these psychological processes existed back then. That, at least, is one premise of the WIP.
Would love to discuss it with you. Your comment about convenient excuses for sadism really got me thinking.
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