A friend recently mentioned that he's finding the "turns out we're able to find some sort of common ground with our enemies, even if it was tragically too late / even baddies have a noble motive" a little predictable at this point and was talking abt how he'd like more variety, and I think I understand where he's coming from—but also I can't relate in the slightest, because I could eat that story up every day for the rest of my life, y'know?
Anyway in Breaking Bread with the Dead (title borrowed from Auden, as quoted above), Alan Jacobs argues for reading old books, books which are strange and foreign to us, as (paraphrasing) an efficient way to practice the ability to have empathy for the other without truly identifying with the other (among other things). Necessarily, he thus positions the ability to have empathy for without identification with to be generally beneficial and desirable; I agree with him. This is in some tension with a current popular way of thinking that we should not accept the premise of a category of those who are "strangers" and should instead insist that everyone really is like us: the expansion of the definition of the in-group such that if one looks hard enough, one finds that even in the out-group there is a point of commonality. I don't think they're incompatible ways of thinking. That emphasis on expanding the definition of the in-group is very little defense against disgust, against finding someone whose otherness is so overt that no amount of sameness can convince us to overcome it. Empathy-for without identification-with, then, can help us to be less reactive to overt otherness—true strangeness that slams up against some previously unknown limit of our ability to recognize—long enough to make the choices we want to make, rather than ones governed by disgust or fear.
Reading old books is an education in reckoning with otherness; its hope is to make the other not identical with me but rather, in a sense, my neighbor. I happen to think that this kind of training is useful in helping me learn to deal with my actual on-the-ground neighbors, though that claim is not central to my argument here, and in any case there's nothing inevitable about this transfer... [...] But surely to encounter texts from the past is a relatively nonthreatening, and yet potentially enormously rewarding, way to practice encountering difference.
I've talked in the past how I think it's neat that humans have often used both fantastical storytelling and systemic abstract inquiry (like some of the Jewish tradition of text study) to perform a similar function, which is grappling with change, the idea of change, and wrapping our heads around the things we might need to prepare for change before it's truly necessary.
Of books, Jacobs argues "We can always, if they shock or offend us too greatly, turn aside and render them silent again. And there is a good chance that they will shock us. I want to stress here, and will stress again as we move on, the vital necessity of difference." It is not hard, I think, to see why this puts me in mind of FFXIV.
not really going anywhere with this, i just think it's actually very cool that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV is literally having people roleplay developing empathy. and not because of any desire that my media be morally improving or anything, but because...I find it comforting. it's like an emotional power fantasy. I so often get it wrong! I so often make situations worse instead of better! There are people who I love and who I know love me who I basically have no way to talk to because we made the wrong choices at the wrong times. I'm never gonna get tired of stories where we try to work things out and we actually work things out.