Learning experiences determine empathy’s level and targets

Evidence

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.” This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Recognition of shared ordinariness drives empathy more than exotic difference does; Empathy is selectively regulated by cognitive control to specific targets. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 638; Learning shapes which people evoke empathy and how strongly (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Learning shapes which people evoke empathy and how strongly #expands (0.95)
• The novel-as-empathy claim risks universalizing rather than respecting cultural particularity #complicates (0.74) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 32