The Believing Game
Empathy should spur action, but that action needn’t be blind acceptance.
Last week, as I was prepping a lecture on writing summaries for the Persuasive Writing class I teach, something unexpected happened: I had a minor epiphany.
There’s a version of a myth about college professors that might make it seem like having a minor epiphany is “all in a day’s work,” or maybe, more accurately, an occupational hazard. You know, sitting up here in our ivory towers so close to the divine and all, these things just happen. Sorry to burst any bubbles; that’s just not the case. I love my job and can’t imagine doing anything else, but being a college professor is a lot like any other job—in turns inspiring, exhausting, agonizing, and boring. If I’m being completely honest, prepping a lecture on writing summaries would generally fall into the last category.
But then it happened. I was reading about “The Believing Game” a writing exercise developed by University of Massachusetts Amherst Emeritus Professor of English Peter Elbow. The basic idea is that in order to understand one’s own thinking about an issue, it’s important to try to “try to believe things that we don’t believe--especially things we don’t want to believe,” according to Elbow. In my Persuasive Writing class, I have the students summarize a writer they may disagree with, really trying to imagine why that writer might believe what they do. It occurred to me then that the believing game, and the act of summarizing another’s argument well, is an act of empathy.
Of course, in retrospect, I was primed for this minor epiphany. I spent the past seven years working on a book about the role of empathy in the writing of literary journalists from the nineteenth century through today. My argument is that writers like Margaret Fuller, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, and Adrian Nicole Leblanc, among others, invite readers into their subjects’ lives in a way that “news of the day” journalism does not. Empathy, I argue, is a central feature of literary journalism.
Having been immersed in this project for so long, I can’t help but see empathy everywhere. But it’s not just me. Empathy is having something of a moment right now. And yet, it’s clear, there are limits to empathy, or, to what we are willing to empathize with. It is this thought that made my epiphany feel at first obvious and then, moments later, scandalous. There are some views out there today that I do not want to inhabit—not even for a moment.
While I’ve long known that white supremacist views persist in the U.S., I never imagined in my life—I was a teenager during the “colorblind” nineties—that they would reemerge from their dark corners into the mainstream national conversation, for example. Or, I’ve often said that social scientists couldn’t have devised a more perfect experiment than the Covid crisis to expose rifts in our society. Did you ever think that educated people would have to advertise that they “believe” in science? I didn’t. Yet, here we are.
So, I recognized as I wrote my lecture notes, that what I was asking student to do was more than just restate an author’s opinion in your own words—as I might have more blandly described summarizing in the past. But rather, I was asking them to perform a radical empathetic act. We’re not just thinking about what the author of an essay is saying, but we’re trying to imagine why they might hold those opinions in the first place. I assured my students that I wouldn’t force them to inhabit beliefs they found abhorrent—there’s no such thing as forced empathy, after all. But I challenged them to think about not just what their argument against an author might be, but indeed to consider what motivated the author in the first place.
Still, this can be uncomfortable. Today, when so many matters feel like what I call “third rail issues,” our natural defensive posture is to distance ourselves from those we disagree with. In this climate, just trying to imagine why one might hold a different view feels like walking too close to that third rail. If it’s uncomfortable—even dangerous—why do it?
To answer that, I have to give credit where credit is due. I asked that question in my Persuasive Writing class: Why might we want to try to summarize—to empathize with—a view we find to be at best wrongheaded and at worst abhorrent? A student in the front row shot up her hand, “So we can shoot it to pieces.”
Exactly right. Empathy should spur action, but that action needn’t be blind acceptance. Rather, as my student wisely pointed out, sometimes inhabiting another’s point of view serves to show us why the view is misguided. Then, in having considered it from both sides, we are all the better prepared to argue against it.