I’m not sure how I came across Elaine Scarry’s essay “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People”, which is in the 2002 book edited by Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country?
It would have been when I was putting together a review essay and survey of sorts on whether engaging with the arts makes people more empathetic. (The jury remains out, though I retain a fair amount of doubt.)
She makes two claims, regarding ethics and politics.
The first claim aligns with those who are in general skeptical of the idea that the road to treating each other with respect, fairness, and kindness runs through our ability to empathize with others, to walk a mile in their shoes. As one of our national sages put it:
“First of all”, he [Atticus] said, “if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – ”
“Sir?”
“– until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
In the arts, the claim is that the empathy we develop in an absorbing work of fiction for the principal characters will better equip us to empathize with those we meet in real life. And outside of fiction, trying to empathize and understand cannot help but make us more generous to others.
But the problem, Scarry says, it that there are too many others, too many who are distant from us along this axis or that, such that it is beyond our human capacity to empathize with them all - we can barely understand the lives or circumstances or wants even of the people of our own town, much less further afield.
So what can we do? Well, if we cannot imagine the interior lives of others, and raise their concerns to the level of our own, we can act upon ourselves, and lower our self-concern, such that we become just one of many. She writes:
When we seek equality through generous imaginings, we start with our own weight, then attempt to acquire knowledge about the weight and complexity of others. The other strategy is to achieve equality between self and other not by trying to make one’s knowledge of others as weighty as one’s self-knowledge, but by making one ignorant about oneself, and therefore as weightless as all the others.
This is the method of Rawls’s “original position” from behind the veil of ignorance, and whatever one thinks about the details of the constitution Rawls believes we would come to agree upon from this state, I have always found this as the way to begin thinking about it.
And this leads to her political claim. Justice requires something of a social contract, so that the weak are not at the mercy of the strong, hoping for their empathy and magnanimity. It reminds me of Orwell’s criticism of Dickens, where Dickens (in Orwell’s eyes) believes that the world would be a better place if only the people with power could act more kindly to those without, without the need of any change at the social or political level.
Scarry led me to remind myself to adopt that weightlessness in private and public affairs, to attempt, at least, to see my concerns as of no greater moral concern than anyone else’s, which we know as an abstract moral rule to be right, but where I often need that reminder, imperfect as I am.