Martha Nussbaum begins her recent review/essay on Katherine
Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity and Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (“Sewage Lagoon," TLS, 10/12/12 by enlisting Dickens to speculate
on the difference between data and narrative in describing human suffering. “It
is said of Louisa Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times that she learned of the poor of Coketown as if they were so many ants
and beetles, ‘passing to and from their nests.’” Nussbaum, who teaches
philosophy and law at the University of Chicago, then goes on to brilliantly link
Dickens to groundbreaking work in social psychology. “What Dickens knew
intuitively has now been confirmed experimentally. C. Daniel Batson’s
magisterial work on empathy and altruism shows that a particularized narrative
of suffering has unique power to produce motives for constructive action.” In
his essay “Human Rights, Storytelling and Narrative,” (The Journal of Human Rights, Vol l0, No. 1), Titus Levy delineates literary techniques of both
empathy and alienation in the context of a more modern British novel, Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Human suffering is so
ubiquitous. The connoisseur has so many choices and vantage points from which
to view it (genocide, apartheid, famines and earthquakes) that there is
literally a Darwinian struggle in which the varying catastrophes with which
mankind is afflicted or which he afflicts upon himself compete for our
attention. Just opening the mailings of human rights organizations like
Medicins Sans Frontieres and Amnesty International can be mind numbing. Kony 2012, about the exploitation of children by the Lord’s Resistance Army, received over
93 million hits. But there were all kinds of problems with subsequent calls to
action, not the least of which was that the creator of the film, Jason Russell,
had a mental breakdown in which he was found wandering naked and incoherent in
the streets. Kony 2012 was sui generis and unless you are a Bono, the odds are
not high that your story will be heard. This is where literature and genius
come in handy. “The English novel was a social protest movement from the
start,” Nussbaum remarks, “and its aim (like that of many of its American
descendants) was frequently to acquaint middle-class people with the reality of
various social ills, in a way that would involve real vision and feeling.”
Another aspect of empathy that Nussbaum doesn’t discuss in her essay is the
fact of its curative effect on those who might otherwise have perished from
self-absorption.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.