Estranging Empathy

By Killian Quigley

Somewhere on the coast of Libya, on Thursday the fifteenth of June, about one hundred and thirty displaced persons were embarked in a small rubber dinghy.  It chugged away toward Italy, only to be intercepted a few hours later by smugglers, who confiscated the little boat’s motor before departing. Without means of propulsion, the dinghy drifted for a while, and capsized. By the time a local Libyan fishing vessel happened upon the scene, only four migrants were alive to be rescued. Two days later, fishermen working off Zuwara, in Libya’s northwestern corner, rescued twenty-five persons from another wreck. The survivors reported one hundred and ten shipmates missing, likely drowned. By the summer solstice, about two thousand migrants had been reported killed in the Mediterranean.

“All that concerns the Mediterranean,” wrote the English naturalist Edward Forbes, “is of the deepest interest to civilized man, for the history of its progress is the history of the development of the world.” In Washington, D.C., on Wednesday the twenty-first of June – the very same solstice – the acting American solicitor general, Jeff Wall, defended the legality of Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” to the Supreme Court. The order, key parts whereof had previously been stayed by lower courts, aimed to enact a ninety-day ban on entry to the U.S. by persons from six Muslim-majority countries: Libya, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. It also sought a one hundred and twenty-day prohibition on American acceptance of any refugees whatsoever. On the twenty-sixth of June, the Supreme Court temporarily authorized the Order’s enactment – albeit in an altered, and limited, form – and declared its intention to deliberate further in an October hearing.

Extrapolating from recent trends, more than fourteen hundred displaced persons will die in the Mediterranean over the next one hundred and twenty days. (The summer sea sees heightened traffic, so if the rate changes, it is likely only to increase.) A monumental catastrophe unfurls daily off Europe’s southern margin, sometimes within eyeshot of Italy and Greece, places we in the West enjoy regarding as the wellsprings of our enlightened, benevolent democratic societies – of the civilization, progress, and development beloved of writers like Forbes. But so much for civilized benevolence. Our response to the catastrophe has proven a monumental moral disaster.

A “failure of empathy,” a “crisis in empathy” – among the public-spirited, these have become common epithets for the West’s brutal fecklessness.  They are seductive diagnoses, but their meaning is vague, and they don’t point toward an obvious cure. Without clear concepts, we risk deepening our collective indifference – lives are at stake, and language matters. Empathy’s a young word, first used in English in the late 1800s to approximate the German Einfühlung, which describes the immersion of a spectator in a work of art. In the twenty-first century, we more commonly use it to denote a person entering imaginative and emotional community with someone else. Empathy, we now say, can create kinship among persons who might not conventionally feel bonded to one another.

This transformation in meaning is striking, but it isn’t a sundering; ethics and aesthetics are, and always have been, intimates. Thus the activism that’s energizing contemporary theater in Germany, a country that received nearly nine hundred thousand refugees in 2015 alone. At the Maxim Gorki Theater, in Berlin, and at the Munich Kammerspiele, some of the newcomers have helped form troupes of performers-in-exile. Their productions summon empathy in both its significations, artful as well as interpersonal. Empathy, they imply, might actually work best when contact between persons is facilitated by art. Drama’s mediating power may be requisite, here, despite these players’ experiences being so extraordinary that they would seem to require no representation whatever.

The idea that theater has a special capacity for connecting audiences to unfamiliar others is not new. In the late eighteenth century, the English playwright Richard Cumberland composed The West Indian, which imagined the arrival in London of a mysterious stranger named Young Belcour, a man of uncertain background who had been raised as a foundling in Jamaica. Belcour is, as someone observes, a “Creolian,” or Creole, a person of European heredity born in the colonies. By the eighteenth century, Jamaica’s sugar plantations, and the enslaved persons who worked them, had become crucial fixtures in Britain’s increasingly globalized economy. Despite, or perhaps because of, the colonial connection, the Caribbean was regarded prejudicially by many Britons. For Belcour, this makes border-crossing a problem: false but popular theories of climate and constitution make him an object of metropolitan suspicion. His origins are taken, by many Londoners, to have left him ill-suited for life in England, if not actually inferior to the English.

Cumberland’s play aims not only to document this prejudice, but to satirize and undermine it. By way of moral exemplar, The West Indian presents Stockwell, a wealthy London merchant who works to disabuse his compatriots of their bigotry. He acknowledges that Belcour’s “manners, passions, and opinions are not as yet assimilated to this climate,” but admonishes his auditors that the Creole “comes amongst you a new character, an inhabitant of a new world, and both hospitality as well as pity recommend him to our indulgence.” (At the end of the play, Belcour will be revealed as Stockwell’s son, establishing another, and less abstract, sort of linkage.) By delineating Belcour’s real virtues, and critiquing the bias that assails him, The West Indian encourages its audience to broaden its empathy – Cumberland and his contemporaries would have called it “sympathy” – to admit “a new character” to their consideration, or at least to anticipate a future moment (“not as yet”) when such admittance might occur.

The West Indian sought to accommodate persons like Belcour to English compassion, and so to incrementally widen Britain’s moral imagination. This involved redefining what community could mean in eighteenth-century London, by encouraging empathy for a type of stranger that audiences might not instinctively accept. But The West Indian’s ethical limitations are stark, and for us they are instructive. The play is, ultimately, more an attempt to enlarge the cast of English characters than to disabuse its spectators of national prejudice tout court. Furthermore, Belcour is the inheritor of a West Indian plantation: to admit him, the play suggests, would be an economic as well as a sentimental boon. And Stockwell’s sympathetic request is markedly provisional, or at least proleptic: bear with Belcour, the argument goes, because his conformity to established norms is only a matter of time.

In the end, The West Indian asks its audience to recognize the surprising suitability of the stranger, not to make a place for unassimilable strangeness. Thinking empathetically, in this instance, means projecting comfortably familiar features upon the unknown. And it’s for precisely this reason that The West Indian is worth contemplating today. When we lament twenty-first century crises of empathy, we’d better ask why our empathetic impulses incline toward certain persons, and away from others. We’d better ponder how we’d respond if the object of empathy seemed so unlike ourselves that we couldn’t imagine them into familiarity. What happens if the stranger doesn’t want to be like us, or not in the way – or to the extent – we would prefer? What if I attempt to empathize with someone, but they don’t seem interested in participating in the exchange I’ve initiated?

These matters preoccupy Heretics (Herejes), a recent novel by the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura. First published in Spanish in 2013, and in English (in a translation by Anna Kushner) earlier this year, Heretics opens with an instance of extraordinary – and depressingly recognizable – popular moral failure: the refusal of Cuban and American authorities to admit the European Jewish asylum-seekers who entered North American waters in the spring of 1939, aboard the German liner St. Louis. A related plotline concerns the theft of a piece of Dutch Golden Age art – a study for Jesus Christ, by Rembrandt van Rijn – from one of the refugees. Padura follows the sketch to seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where an aspiring and talented Jewish painter endures the stultifying, and ultimately catastrophic, prejudice of extreme conservative members of his own clan. The Rembrandt reemerges from obscurity in 2007, at a London auction house, and the mystery of its meanderings – investigated, faithfully if languidly, by erstwhile policeman Mario Conde – makes a loose constellation of these several scenes.

Heretics is, most vitally, a novel about communities – about how they’re formed, how they operate, and how individuals can, and must, relate thereto. Frequently, it is bitterly, bracingly skeptical of group identities that rely for their coherence upon a sense of exceptional commonality. This spirit leads one character to a surprising and memorable analysis of Nazism: “what the German national socialists most wanted [was] to be other and eternal, to have a feeling of belonging as strong as that of the Jews…And to achieve it, they had to make [the Jews] disappear off the face of the earth.” Heretics repeatedly suggests that a moral society establishes itself not through the ties that bind – “faith in God, in a prince, in a country” – but upon a fundamental respect for the unbound, “for the substance that differentiates us: our free will and our intelligence as human beings.” Above those who would empathize with newcomers in the conventional sense, Heretics values the figure of the “tolerant stranger,” whose regard for the essential freedom of others is not predicated on any sort of kinship, actual or potential.

Late in Heretics, a young, twenty-first-century Habanera named Judy disappears, and Conde’s search for her supplants the Rembrandt investigation as the novel’s central emotional concern. As disaffected as she is intelligent, Judy had, before her vanishing, become “tired of the story that we’re all alike, when she [saw] that we’re nothing alike.” As he tries to figure whether Judy has fled the country, Conde interviews one of her former teachers, who insists that what matters more than the fact of fleeing or staying put “is the freedom of people to leave or to stay.” Through Judy’s case, Padura gestures toward a deeply challenging kind of acceptance: the admission of irreconcilable difference, and of the freedom not to assimilate. It isn’t enough, by these lights, to extend the empathetic self to synchronize with the stranger. Instead, behaving ethically involves recognizing the limits of the self, and acknowledging the fundamental strangeness of that self in relation to every other.

To estrange empathy in this way need not mean discarding it altogether. But it must entail holding our assumptions and judgments up to the light, as well as ridding ourselves of any craving for pseudo-utopian sameness. And art can help, though not necessarily in the way we typically imagine: Heretics informs us that, like great theater, literature needn’t work by putting us in touch with our most private and most authentic selves, but by alienating us from them. From a weirdsome distance, we better apprehend the parts of the performance, and of the text – the players, the language, the gestures, and the stagecraft. We are left confronted, above all, by circumscription – by empty spaces, by bodies, and by boundaries – and we glimpse the possibility of an odd, but essential, commonality: the community of the circumscribed, the alien commons. We reckon not with sameness, but with ineluctable difference, and we acknowledge the vitality, and vulnerability, of the dissimilar. We concern ourselves, ultimately, not with closing the gaps between, but by being compassionately strange, and by asking what kind of scene we’d best arrange.

First published in MAKE 17—Belonging, March 16, 2018. Image courtesy of the print issue’s designer, Joshua Hauth.