Empathy

The Better Angels of Our Nature

This article from the guardian is an extract from Steven Pinker's book 'the Better Angels of Our Nature'. In the book and in this article Pinker talks about the effect the printing press has had on society. His focus is on the drop in violence over time and the changes in society that have effected it. He talks about the invention of the printing press having a big effect on society, literacy became more common and reading allowed people to develop empathy by seeing the world through another persons eyes. This development of empathy coincides with violence levels dropping.

"The power of literacy to lift readers out of their parochial stations is not confined to factual writing. We have already seen how satirical fiction, which transports readers into a hypothetical world from which they can observe the follies of their own, may be an effective way to change people's sensibilities without haranguing or sermonizing."

"the full-strength causal hypothesis may be more than a fantasy of English teachers. The ordering of events is in the right direction: technological advances in publishing, the mass production of books, the expansion of literacy, and the popularity of the novel all preceded the major humanitarian reforms of the 18th century. And in some cases a bestselling novel or memoir demonstrably exposed a wide range of readers to the suffering of a forgotten class of victims and led to a change in policy. Around the same time that Uncle Tom's Cabin mobilized abolitionist sentiment in the United States, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (1838) and Nicholas Nickleby (1839) opened people's eyes to the mistreatment of children in British workhouses and orphanages, and Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) and Herman Melville's White Jacket helped end the flogging of sailors. In the past century Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, George Orwell's 1984, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse- Five, Alex Haley's Roots, Anchee Min's Red Azalea, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy (a novel that features female genital mutilation) all raised public awareness of the suffering of people who might otherwise have been ignored."

Although Pinker is not talking about what is known as 'escapist fiction' all fiction is a form of escapism and his writing points out some of the possible benefits not just to the individual but to society as a whole. Not small benefits, huge society changing benefits that may well have moulded the way we live today. I am starting to try and find a clearer focus for my essay. Escapism is a broad term and has so many guises and implications. I want to look at the pro's and cons of escapism and why it has a bad reputation. I think I should focus on fiction as my escapist activity and see where it takes me. I have found some interesting opinions on escapism from psychologists and authors, I think it is time to revisit my research and try to formulate a more detailed essay plan.




"Fiction is empathy technology."
Pinker