Empathy with us

“We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance,” Martha Nussbaum begins.[1] No, the danger is not imminent economic collapse or looming environmental disaster. At least we discern such crises, but the worst of all “goes largely unnoticed, like a cancer; a crisis that is likely to be, in the long run, far more damaging to the future of democratic self-government.” Nussbaum’s crisis—I am not making this up—is declining enrollment in university humanities courses. Somewhere, I suppose, a shoemaker envisions the collapse of civilization brought about by the rising price of leather.

Unless we solve Nussbaum’s crisis, democracy, decency, and critical thinking—words she leaves undefined and repeats like a mantra—will all disappear. But to solve a crisis one must identify its cause. So why is it that students are choosing to study economics or chemistry rather than English or French? Nussbaum’s proffered answer, of course, has nothing to do with what literature professors teach or how they teach it.

When I was growing up in the Bronx, the owner of the local Jewish deli, whose meats smelled vaguely rancid and whose bagels seemed to start out already day-old, attributed his failing business to the vulgarization of taste. In much the same way, since I started teaching literature some thirty-five years ago, humanities professors have been attributing declining enrollments to their students’ materialism, careerism, and the philistine desire for profit. As the title of her most recent book indicates, Nussbaum adopts the same shallow and self-serving explanation.

The book’s conclusion cites Harvard’s president Drew Faust, who laments “a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees.” Faust asks whether universities “have become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?” Once the all-purpose scapegoat was “society”; now it is “the market.”

Can it really be that students are more materialistic now than they were in that proverbial era of backwardness, the 1950s, or in the 1980s, the so-called decade of greed? I teach Northwestern’s best-enrolled humanities course, and have served as master of two residential colleges, and so I have had ample opportunity to ask students themselves why they do not take more literature courses. Not one has ever answered, directly or in an apologetic code, that in these difficult economic times, one needs to devote every minute to maximizing future income, which, after all, is what really counts in life. On the contrary, they all respond by describing the utterly pointless literature courses they have actually taken in high school and college. Given how those courses have been taught, they are right: it only makes sense to avoid any more of them. Not materialism but a nose for nonsense drives them away.

These students describe three ways in which teachers kill an interest in literature. Most boring is an approach one student called “condescension.” It consists in measuring Shakespeare, Milton, or Tolstoy against “our” values, by which is meant the unquestioned beliefs of today’s professoriate. If a classic author denounced the baneful effects of sexism, colonialism, or capitalism, he is deemed “progressive,” but should he have insufficiently appreciated the harm of heterosexism or the benefit of recycling, he is dismissed as “reactionary.” Read this way, literature can teach nothing because it presumes that the truth is already given. Somewhere in Solzhenitsyn a character wonders why she has to read all those nineteenth-century Russian novelists who made ideological errors that any contemporary sixth-grader can identify. Good teachers do the reverse: they allow Shakespeare and Tolstoy to challenge our beliefs and so free us from the complacency of present certainties.

Even more often, interest in literature suffers because it is taught as a sort of crossword puzzle. The idea is that, for some reason, authors do not express anything directly, but instead devise a complex code of images, alliterations, obscure references, Biblical allusions, interlingual puns, concealed quotations and—above all—symbols. Students rapidly learn how easy it is to find symbols. As a last resort, there is always water, because no matter what the story, somebody sooner or later or later is bound to wash or drink. And off the student goes, discovering allusions to baptism, the flood, or amniotic fluid. He earns his A and never again picks up a work of fiction.

The most reliably deadening approach, easily combined with the other two, is to treat the book as a historical document. The student learns that Bleak House depicts the deplorable social conditions of England in Dickens’s times, as of course it does. But what makes a work great—in fact, what makes it literature in the first place—is that it transcends its times and engages issues in ways that interest people who do not care about the author’s historical period. One does not read Tolstoy to learn about tsarist Russia; one becomes interested in tsarist Russia because it produced Tolstoy.

None of these reasons for students’ distaste for reading have anything to do with what Nussbaum calls “the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain.” As this sort of phrasing suggests, Nussbaum appears to regard the market as deficient because it is not designed to teach everything one ought to know. In much the same way, I suppose, one might fault physicians for the thin norms of bodily functioning. Besides, the market does teach quite a number of important values, including ones Nussbaum claims to appreciate, such as the futility of blind conformity and unreflective adherence to old ways. As every one who has studied the old Soviet Union knows, it is precisely market economies that reward creativity and the willingness to take risks for a potentially better idea.

I happen to agree with much of what Nussbaum says about the value of literature. She speaks eloquently of great novels as the best way to see the world from perspectives other than one’s own. In her terms, literature engages us in “the narrative imagination. This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself.” Or as I prefer to say, we learn to identify (a term virtually banned from current literary criticism as philistine) with people whose experiences and beliefs depart from our own. None of my students are nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox aristocrats, but most come to experience the plight and transgressions of Anna Karenina from within. Readers trace the very sequence of her thoughts as she is thinking them, an experience that no psychology text can replicate. At the same time, they experience how Anna’s actions affect her betrayed husband, emotionally stunted lover, and wounded son, whose thoughts they also trace. As the novel develops, readers come to see the complexity of moral issues that, from any single point of view, might seem all too simple.

Nussbaum correctly observes that the humanities can teach “empathy,” allow us to “experiment with other intellectual positions and understand them from within,” and engage in “critical thinking” about our own beliefs. In so doing, such courses allow us to appreciate that there may be good reasons for positions we do not accept. As John Stuart Mill wrote, “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” But it does not seem Nussbaum really means what she repeatedly says. In practice, her book stresses the importance of empathizing with the beliefs of humanities professors resembling herself.

People rarely need coaching to appreciate their own opinions. I have never heard someone complain, “Yes, you only see things from my point of view, why don’t you try your own for a change?” What requires instruction and effort is discovering how a person with whom one is quarreling or a member of the opposite political party sees things. What reasoned arguments and deeply felt experience have led to the other set of beliefs? Before empathy, or even understanding, can begin, one has to be able to paraphrase those beliefs in a way the other would acknowledge as accurate. One does not rely on one’s own newspaper’s description of what opponents believe.

Throughout Not for Profit, Nussbaum mentions current social issues, but time after time, and without exception, she presents the leftist one as the only possible one for a decent person to hold. Her prescription to “think critically” never applies to the pieties of the American academic intelligentsia. Nor does the “tyranny of custom” ever include intellectuals’ custom of supporting or apologizing for tyrannical ideologies.

As Nussbaum tells the story, those dedicated to economic growth insist that care be taken “lest the historical and economic narrative lead to any serious critical thinking about class, about race and gender, about whether foreign investment really is good for the rural poor.” “Educators for economic growth” want to be sure that people turn out morally obtuse because “moral obtuseness is necessary to carry out programs of economic development that ignore inequality.” But is there really anybody who wants to produce moral obtuseness? Does such a characterization result from empathy with others’ positions? And would it not be a form of critical thinking to question what professors, as well as businessmen and Hindu nationalists, think about “class, race and gender”? Nussbaum affirms the need for racial and gender equality while also endorsing affirmative action, without ever allowing that reasonable people might find a conflict between the two or asking whether affirmative action has always and everywhere produced desired results. In her world, the right intentions never have unintended consequences that opponents have witnessed before.

Unless they have a proper humanist education, “males learn that success means being above the body and its frailties, so they learn to characterize some underclass (women, African Americans) hyperbodily, thus in need of being dominated.” Moreover, “white people who feel great compassion for other white people can treat people of color like animals or objects, refusing to see the world from their perspective. Men often treat women this way.” So they do. But isn’t it also worth asking whether nonwhite peoples ever look on white people or other nonwhite people as animals or objects? After all, it wasn’t Europeans who committed the Rwandan genocide. Do women never refuse to feel compassion for men or other women? In countless passages of this sort, the direction of criticism goes relentlessly one way. How seriously could Nussbaum mean her call for empathy, understanding diverse points of view, and thinking critically about one’s own beliefs?

For Nussbaum recognition of cultural differences is always good, but stereotypes are always bad. It never seems to dawn on her that stereotypes, whether negative or positive, are descriptions of cultural differences. The moment one generalizes about a culture’s distinctive qualities one is constructing a stereotype. When my students encounter this contradiction, their faces assume the expression we recognize when people must accept a lie everyone knows is a lie but no one can point out. They know that, in practice, the problem is not stereotypes as such, but only negative stereotypes, and not all negative stereotypes, just those directed at someone other than “males,” “Americans,” or “white people.”

For most of her book, Nussbaum insists, as do so many educators in her tradition, that educators should concern themselves not with teaching facts, only fostering skill in critical thinking. In literature courses, that is largely true, provided that one means genuine critical thinking. I would much rather my students acquire the skills to appreciate great realist prose than memorize the names and patronymics of minor characters in War and Peace. I don’t care if they never learn to locate Smolensk on the map. Still, there are limits. I wish more of my students, who are very bright but often woefully ignorant, came to class already knowing who Napoleon was. It would also help if I did not have to identify the Sermon on the Mount. Surely at some point factual ignorance impedes critical thinking itself.

But here again, Nussbaum does not really believe what she is saying. She is quite concerned with facts when students accept the wrong ones. Her tone becomes particularly sinister when she speaks of regulating facts themselves. We must be certain that students get only “factually accurate historical information.” Is it only because I am trained in Russian studies that I wonder who exactly is going to decide what is “factually accurate” and that “inaccurate” will turn out to mean “politically inconvenient”? For that matter, Nussbaum also wants to exercise “selectivity regarding the artworks used” to teach empathy, or we might wind up empathizing with the wrong people.

Great art does indeed teach one to see the world from new points of view and to experience life as others do. But after Nussbaum has appealed to the right sentiments, it turns out she wants to open only the minds of others. The minds of those who agree with American humanities professors are apparently already open enough as it is.

Notes
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1. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, by Martha C. Nussbaum; Princeton University Press, 178 pages, $22.95. Go back to the text.