“Imagine”, the San Francisco-based artist Wendy MacNaughton tells us, “what would happen in our communities if we slowed down enough to look at one another.”
Wendy has been thinking of this for a while: we no longer notice our fellow humans, we retreat to the safe (digital) cocoon of our beliefs, and we grow further and further apart, increasingly fractured. Her way of mending the rift? Pen and paper.
She took both out into the street, along with a table and two folding chairs, and invited strangers to sit down and draw portraits of one another. One minute, a continuous line, don’t take your pen off the page or your eyes off the other person (here’s what it looks like).
Of course it’s a trick. The drawings will be terrible. But you’ll have looked at a stranger’s face for a full 60 seconds. You’ll have seen them. They’ll have seen you. When’s the last time that happened with someone that was not your child or your significant other?
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Now look around the world.
Are we seeing the humanity in one another or just low-res outlines that allow to us to stamp everyone with one unifying descriptor that makes them the other? Terrorist, colonizer, racist, antisemite, subhuman. The labels are all around us in the week since the war in Gaza began. I’ve long stopped trusting in the relevancy of what my social media algorithms select, but I don’t recall it ever showing me people so convinced of their truth, mostly a simplistic version of it (this side is evil, that side is righteous), rarely a complicated, not to mention a conflicting version. For example a version saying that Hamas pounced to kill and terrorize, and that Israel’s defense forces responded disproportionately. (Blinded by revenge, it’s ready to march in as I write this).
A Romanian journalist on the ground in the region said something to the same effect: being in Israel and hearing the thundering sounds of scores of rockets launched from within Gaza was terrifying, more terrifying than in Ukraine (where he also reported from). But, he added, it’s even worse in Gaza, because it compounds a humanitarian crisis that has been going on for decades.
In the fog of so much violence, we can’t see each other. We seek those that have unequivocally taken one side, retreat there, and go through mental gymnastics to justify the suffering of others, just to ease our own discomfort and pain.
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“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
I heard this quote from Oscar Wilde a couple of days ago, and it rings true. We want others to recognize when we change, we believe in our possible redemption and second chances, but it feels harder and harder to extend this grace to others. A writer asks this directly in The Atlantic – “What Happened to Empathy?” – and goes on: “How emotionally healthy are we, as a people, when, in moments of profound and painful tragedy, we feel compelled to insert our political opinions or policy positions? Can we not, just for a moment, feel for the victims?”
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There have been studies showing a decrease in the levels of empathy over the past decades, along with numerous explanations – from our increasing loneliness, to technology facilitating isolation, to a dwindling number of close friends and community ties. What we know for sure is that empathy is not a given, it’s something you train. Seeing the other, feeling with the other, seeing the humanity in someone of a different race, religion, gender or even political affiliation requires patience, presence, and perseverance.
It requires training, or an empathy gym as psychologist Jamil Zaki has called it. (Novels, theater, immersion into the lives of others are the right reps in this gym). “Oftentimes when we encounter someone who's different from ourselves and has an opinion or a viewpoint maybe that we even abhor, it’s easy to just view them as being either obtuse or dishonest or both”, he says in a Hidden Brain episode. “But that's a mistake. It's something that psychologists call naive realism, the idea that your version of the world is the world. And I think that empathy at a deep level is the understanding that someone else’s world is just as real as yours.”
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I talked to my journalism students this past week about their expectations from our time together. On top of my list was that we listen to one another. Their list was way longer. Some of their expectations were obvious: good vibes, learning new things, getting a passing grade, but one stood out: that we create a space where we don’t judge each other.
That broke my heart. It’s what I wish I could have written in any context I joined during my lifetime, but rarely did people ask, and when they did, I was reluctant to put it out there. But these young people did put it out there. And they did it because judgement and labelling are something they encounter daily – people putting them in a box because of their shoes, their hair, their speech, their musical tastes. And it’s not just “the adults”. Their peers can be way more savage.
“What if our suffering is not just internal, but social?”, Xochitl Gonzalez asks in The Atlantic. “What if the human race has deteriorated? And what if we’ve deteriorated because we’ve begun to resent not only human interactions, but humans period?”
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I am naïve enough to hope we’re not there yet, but a strain of late-capitalist post-pandemic nihilism is pervasive. It manifests as loneliness, social media trolling, despair, it fuels a mental health crisis, and a gap of meaning.
There was an interesting thing Jad Abumrad, the founder of Radiolab, said in an interview recently. The show was born in 2002, and aired on a radio station that switched from playing (largely) classical music to one that was more curious about the world. The 9/11 attacks were savage, and the US foreign policy response was a disaster (and led to an invasion based on lies), but, for some – for many actually – it also led to a desire to know more: about the world, about other people, about other things outside their own interests. Radiolab was built on that foundation of awe, wonder, and the beauty of discovery.
Jad’s explanation mirrors some of my own experience. I found my voice as a writer and an editor around the same time, with a similar desire: to use narrative journalism to take readers into the lives of others, travel on their journeys, and learn of their dilemmas and obstacles. Hopefully, this would not only train empathy and thus reduce fear of that other, but it would provide ideas and solutions for our own lives, our own obstacles.
But engaging with stories that you didn’t know where they would take you, that might challenge some of your core beliefs, seemed more possible 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago. Even five years ago, although by then we had already entered a Trumpian post-Brexit era of truth as an ideological product of your tribe’s interpretation of the facts.
I thought, naively once again, the pandemic could heal some of the rifts. It didn’t. It just exacerbated them.
That curiosity Jad talked about, the one they built the whole show on, isn’t there anymore, or at least not in the same way. As an editor I’ve also felt this in DoR’s last few years; it’s part of why we stopped publishing. We closed off, stuck to our tribe, or turned so far inward that we lost interest in the world. Jad saw this polarization and lack of engagement, and wondered whether the stories they told could change, if they could maybe pivot from the “wow effect” to the “sigh effect”.
He landed on this solution thanks to country singing superstar Dolly Parton (Jad’s series on Dolly is a gift to the world) who kept telling him: “Don't bring your stupid way of seeing the world into my story.” Her story, her cross-over appeal, was something more complicated and nuanced.
“As journalists, we love difference”, Jad says in this amazing Ted Talk. “We love to fetishize difference. But increasingly, in this confusing world, we need to be the bridge between those differences. But how do you do that? I think for me, now, the answer is simple. You interrogate those differences, you hold them for as long as you can, until (…) something happens, something reveals itself. A story cannot end in difference. It’s got to end in revelation.”
For Jad, that revelation is found in the third – a space between the truths that collide, a space born of the struggle to interrogate our differences and hold them, a space for uncertainty and ambiguity and contradiction.
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Stories cannot end in difference, yet difference is what we fuel every day.
Turning away from certainty into ambiguity and contradiction is a hard ask and a bold more. It’s what I admired most about Libertate (Freedom), Tudor Giurgiu’s new film. It’s about a lesser known moment of the Romanian revolution of 1989, in Sibiu, where the Military and the Police (including the Securitate) shot at each other from opposite parts of the street, blaming one another for being among the infamous “terrorists” of the anti-Ceaușescu uprising. (Close to 100 people died in Sibiu, second only to Bucharest).
The movie doesn’t clarify who shot whom, who shot first, if anyone did it on purpose or if accidents led to all the deaths. Yes, the Army emerged back then as the moral victor, but were they? Was every soldier a hero? By extension, was every policeman a crook or a tool of a repressive regime? But, in the fog of violence, the movie says, plenty of people justified cruelty to their neighbors just because, during those days, affiliation mattered more than the humanity of others. When does one identity negate all the others and justify cruelty?
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I don’t have a better ending than Esther Perel’s post from a few days ago, also written in response to the tragedy unfolding in Gaza. It’s a plea for nuance, for empathy, for ambiguity, for care, for compassion, for humanity. Hope it helps.
“Be careful to separate people from the policies of their governments.
Be careful to separate people from the actions of terrorists who live among them.Be careful not to collapse history and context into narrow interpretation.
Be careful not to eschew complexity and nuance for the sake of memeification.Be careful to recognize that grief for one side does not mean hate for the other.
Be careful to understand that support for one side does not mean hate for the other.Be careful of gaslighting on a mass level: disinformation and denial of loss.
Be careful not to dismiss the excruciating and real pain of others. Do not make it worse.Be careful not to say things online that you would not say to someone in real life.
Be careful not to add hatred on top of hatred; we are all being crushed underneath its compounding weight.Be careful not to lose empathy for those with whom you disagree.
Be careful not to dehumanize others. Doing so dehumanizes you.Do not lose touch with the parts of you needed most:
Your compassion. Your humanity. Your care.”
SIDE DISHES:
There are many links above that are worth clicking on. Two stand out: Wendy’s experiment of strangers drawing strangers, Jad Abumrad’s Ted talk.
Do go see Libertate if you have a chance. It’s been in Romanian theaters since last weekend. Here’s where it’s playing now.
Jamil Zaki’s book on empathy, The War for Kindness, is essential reading.
No one is better at self-deception and convincing ourselves that we’re right than we are. Here’s the first of two part series of how (badly) we deal with cognitive dissonance, the moment when our actions and values clash.
The topics in this letter have been constantly on my mind. If you feel you’ve read similar pieces from me over the past year, it’s because you have. If you’re new to Draft Four, here are two of them: Us against Them and My facts, my truth.
Let’s go out on something lighter, but which requires just as much curiosity: a profile of one of the most powerful people on Earth right now, Taylor Swift.
The first point you bring reminded me of the 36 questions experiment of Arthur Aaron, where the last part was to ask the two participants (now not big of strangers anymore) to stare into each-other eyes for 2-4 minutes, to stay in that vulnerability and really see the person in front of them. It brings closeness, intimacy and humanity all together.
And for the rest of the article, thank you:) for reminding empathy and kindness should not be left in a corner while we deal with these realities.
You’re way out of line in calling the IDF “blinded by revenge.” They could have bombed Gaza to bits with no warning. The exodus of civilians is hardly ideal but they are being given a chance to save themselves before Hamas is rooted out and destroyed. Hamas, that slaughtered thousands of innocent Israelis and tortured them first, torching babies in front of their parents, raping women before sitting their throats, and slashing a pregnant mother’s belly, yanking out her baby, and killing it while it was still attached by the umbilical cord. Not to mention what they are surely doing to the hostages. A military that is “blinded by revenge” wouldn’t give civilians a chance to peacefully exit beforehand. A retraction is in order here.