An Inquiry

 I am one of those people who believes that more empathy and compassion would be a good thing for society. And I hear people who share those beliefs say all the time that storytelling builds empathy, that one of the important values of storytelling is the building of empathy. They defend and advocate for more storytelling—usually their own—based on the idea that it is like a medicine of empathy for a sick population of isolated and self-centered people. Except the rise of seemingly narcissistic behavior and a lack of empathy coincides, correlates, with an explosion of storytelling through multiple television channels and more screen time. We are surrounded by story, by narrative, and we seem to just be getting worse as people. In fact, a lot of the story we see and hear is how terrible we are as people. Does storytelling really build empathy? I think that the mediums which we deliver story on actually destroy our empathetic connections as a community. Because we don’t have to leave...

 I keep seeing images in my head of some of the young men I have taught over the years—the ones with a certain. smug, insecurity on their face. They’re proud of their cleverness and also insecure about it. And I always senses that insecurity and figured that’d root out its source—which is the fact that cleverness isn’t how we build a happy life. To be clear, I love being clever. I love that I am clever. I enjoy clever television shows and plays and jokes. Cleverness is delightful. But cleverness is not a way to organize society, and these young men (in my recollection they were all men and, specific to this particular smugness, white) seemed to want it to be so.  I always figured that they would use their cleverness to learn, that they would dig themselves out of the holes that they built for themselves, have children and discover empathy, learn that their conclusions don’t matter if they don’t make people’s lives better, learn that love is the feeling that makes life worth li...