Building Life Skills for Personal and Social Transformation in June

“Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.” - Albert Camus

There’s a trap that Robert Greene calls death denial, in the final chapter of his book The Laws of Human Nature. Escape from that trap is freedom. The process of escaping from death denial is a life skill, and Greene’s book could be thought of as a guidebook for life skills. Chapter 2 is the one on empathy.

There are excellent resources to help us build our capacity for empathy such as this TEDx talk by Helen Riess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baHrcC8B4WM and the TEDx talk on how to have a good conversation by Celeste

Headlee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6n3iNh4XLI

and the synopsis of another book you may have seen when I first sent it out a year ago, herewith appended again.

We could master these skills. That mastery could be part of the post-pandemic world. And then…anything is possible.

Arthur

Book: (Roman Krznaric) Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It (2014)

The author “is a founding faculty member of the School of Life and advises organizations, including Oxfam and the United Nations, on using empathy to create social change.” - from the book cover

It begins with an observation on the radical power of empathy: that it can not only transform our personal lives; it can also transform our societies. Empathy can create a revolution. Unlike those old-fashioned revolutions that change governments but don’t address the root causes of the conflict, this revolution, by changing how people treat each other, could henceforth empower everyone [as global citizens]. Here’s his definition of empathy: …the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions.

In the very first pages, the author cuts to the chase with the Six Habits of Highly Empathic People: 1. Switch on Your Empathic Brain. 2. Make the Imaginative Leap. 3. Seek Experiential Adventures. 4. Practice the Craft of Conversation. 5. Travel in Your Armchair. 6. Inspire a Revolution.

To help you switch on your empathic brain, the book provides a brief overview of how we’ve been taught to think that humans are self-centered (selfish) by nature. This retrospective includes contributions from Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) whose view of our natural state was a war of all against all. Then there was Adam Smith’s (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) idea that if we act in our own self-interest, society benefits. And along comes Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) to tell us about the survival of the fittest in other species.

And yet by a long shot, this theme of selfishness has never been the whole story. Adam Smith and Charles Darwin themselves had made contributions that told a very different story – about the tendency to cooperation and mutual support throughout human society and the animal world. And since about 1990, countless observations on non-human primates have provided incontrovertible evidence that not only cooperation but mutual concern – empathy – is deeply rooted in the nature of humans and non-human species alike.

Then, as he invites you to “make the imaginative leap,” Krznaric tells you about the four barriers to empathy you’ll have to get past. First there’s prejudice: the negative assumptions we often make about people we’ve never met and the stereotypes we have about groups we’re not part of. Second there’s authority: We tend to obey authority, whether we are Germans obeying the Nazi government in Germany in the 1930s or Americans obeying their government going to war. A third barrier is distance: An earthquake in China may devastate the lives of tens of thousands of people, but it’s far away and we just won’t understand it in quite the way we would if it happened right here where we live. The fourth barrier is denial: We hear news of fresh disasters almost every day, and it’s understandable that we would tell ourselves it’s not our problem – even if things we have done or failed to do might have prevented or mitigated the suffering we are hearing about.

The book then describes three steps to get us past those barriers: 1) Humanize the “other” (illustrated with the story of Nazi party member Oskar Schindler). 2) Discover what you share and what you don’t (illustrated with the story of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a privileged white woman who was author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a very influential albeit sentimental anti-slavery novel). 3) Empathize with the enemy (illustrated with the story of Mahatma Gandhi).

In stories of people who have had transformative experiential adventures in empathy (St. Francis of Assisi, Beatrice Webb, George Orwell, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara; and less well known figures such as a notorious Ku Klux Klan leader in Durham, North Carolina, Claiborne Paul Ellis), the book invites us to take up this “extreme sport.” It also suggests the idea of establishing “Empathy Travel Agencies.”

Practice the craft of conversation. For your own practice of the craft of conversation, Krznaric offers six qualities that will help: curiosity about strangers; radical listening; taking off your mask; concern for the other; a creative spirit; and sheer courage. He mentions the Human Library movement founded in Denmark in which, instead of borrowing a book at the library, you borrow a human being for a conversation. His own initiative was Conversation Meals, in which the menu lists – instead of food – good questions for starting a conversation with a stranger. Calgary is the home of the world’s first Empathy Week, and of the newly opened Humainologie Gallery + Store, where two chairs invite visitors to meet a stranger. This chapter on the craft of conversation is an excellent guide.

Books, movies, and art (including photography) allow us to travel in our armchairs and build our empathy from there. In 1930, the film All Quiet on the Western Front received the Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s an anti-war movie told from the perspective of a German soldier. Produced in Hollywood and based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, the film “contains what may be the most powerful empathic scene in cinema history.” Paul Bäumer, the main character, jumps into a trench to escape gunfire. A moment later, a French soldier jumps into the same trench. Startled at the proximity of the enemy soldier, Paul stabs the Frenchman in the chest. Over the hours that the Frenchman survives before dying, Paul is gradually devastated by remorse over what he has done. He tries to revive the Frenchman and at last removes from the dead man’s coat pocket his identity papers and a picture of his wife and children.

When it premiered in Germany the film received from the rising Nazi movement a response much less cordial than an Academy Award, with Joseph Goebbels leading a street demonstration outside the theatre. It was banned in Germany six days later. The film “was an international blockbuster seen by millions of people around the world. Its empathic, antiwar message had an electrifying effect that went far beyond the movie houses. ‘Having seen All Quiet on the Western Front I became a pacifist,’ remembers the film historian Andrew Kelly. So too did tens of thousands of others.”

The author concludes with a chapter on how to inspire a revolution and another on the future of empathy with additional ideas waiting to be actualized – perhaps in Calgary. This book is a perfect choice as our reference for action in the year ahead.