Department of Empathy

I TRIVIALIZED RAPE

I was torn about whether I should start my piece this way. It made me reach deep down into who I was and confront – in a way that was excruciating and unsettling – my former self. But when I thought about this essay and what I wanted to get across, this was the only way I deemed fit.

When I was in my mid-teens, I trivialized rape.

It’s not that I believed rape was ever right. Nor did I think that women, through their clothing, professional choices or personal decisions, invited rape. If you had asked me if rape was ever justified, I don’t think I’d fumble, hesitate, give an ambiguous response, or outline certain circumstances in which it was. I would have given you an inelastic no.

The problem, I realized, is that I knew what rape was, but I didn’t understand it. My knowledge of the subject was both limited and distanced. It was an uncomfortable topic, which is why neither my school nor my social circle ever talked about it. It had a stench of taboo, and like a stale piece of garbage, it was meant to be discarded outside the house, deposited in some faraway landfill where it would be invisible, forgotten, and after a length of time, decomposed. I didn’t know of anyone in my milieu who had been raped, studied rape, or worked with survivors or perpetrators of rape. And this lack of understanding manifested itself in the trivialization of rape in my language. “I raped the repeat button on this song.” “He Facebook-raped (fraped) me by putting up an embarrassing post through my account.” “They encroached our territory first. Of course our soldiers should storm in, pillage their villages, rape their women and terrorize their children; how else do we project strength?”

It’s not hard to figure why such casual misogyny didn’t prick my conscience. The sociologist within me is bursting with desperation to jump out and make a meal of this conversation. We’ve all met people with privileged backgrounds, impressive educational credentials and respectable professions, who – after a succession of drinks, or in a moment of passion, or sometimes just plainly – slip out a misogynistic belief, a sexist idea, a homophobic slur. The thoughts, lurking in the deep recesses of your mind, never acknowledged or expressed, are now out in the open, for all to see. These are the thoughts that hold the reins to your heart, dictating your preferences, worldviews and urges. There’s enough blame to go around. The hyper-sexualization and objectification of women in the media. The problematic portrayal of women (and men) in movies. The dire dearth of female perspectives in history and literature. The underrepresentation of women in the upper echelons of politics, business and academia. Your house where you see your mother either relegated to the kitchen, or coming back from the office and diving into her second shift of laundry and dishwashing. The lack of female voices in the news. And in policymaking. And in the judiciary. All of these realities reinforce each other and work insidiously to perpetuate a structure of patriarchy.

To maintain a structure, you need to be able to defend it. The moral logic undergirding the structure needs to be evident and compelling. Patriarchy gives life to the narrative that men are at the top of any structure because of physical and psychological merit. Similarly, women are at the bottom not because men have placed them there, but because they lack the qualities – inherently found in men – to succeed. This narrative in turn justifies, and hence sustains, patriarchy. The consequences of this self-fulfilling logic keep the structure alive. Because of their ‘justified’ superiority, men get to write the stories. For hundreds of years, men have been the authors of and the pivotal protagonists in almost all chapters of history – the victories in war, the accomplishments in science, the attainments in the arts, the expansion of literary boundaries, the achievements in politics, and the successes in business. Because men are infallible heroes without which progress is unimaginable, they are allowed to conduct themselves with impunity. Why should they face consequences for abusing a woman verbally, physically, sexually? Why should they be punished for bullying women at home or harassing them in the workplace? Why should they suffer any penalties for prejudiced or discriminatory behaviour? They shouldn’t, because if they do, who’s going to lead our society into the next decade of development? Let them be. Let boys be boys, and men be men. Society should excuse them for grabbing a woman by the pussy. Or engaging in revenge porn if the woman chooses to end the relationship. Or trivializing a traumatic experience like rape, by making a casual and thoughtless reference to it.

Although the remark is thoughtless, I now know what lies beneath it. The idea of raping a button, fraping by posting material from another person’s account without their consent, or using rape as a justifiable war technique, is steeped in the notion that men control women, and can say and do as they please, without license or consequence. The woman’s existence is insignificant and irrelevant. (It’s no surprise that the #MeToo movement has made so many men uncomfortable. Not only do women now have control over the narrative, but men have to face consequences – legal, societal, and financial – for things they had thought were acceptable. A common retort one hears from men is that nobody knows what the rules are anymore. The fact is that the rules had never been written because it had been in their favour for the rules to not exist.)

Writing about my moral schema as a teenager made me squirm. Paradoxically, it gave me a sense of catharsis. I recognize why trivializing rape is problematic, both in terms of undermining one’s experience of it, and in terms of contributing to a pervasive rape culture. What stood out to me in this exercise of self-reflection as interesting and important, was the fact that all those years ago, I had known that rape was wrong, but I had not understood why it was so. None of the books I had read, the movies I had watched, or the people I had interacted with growing up carried a story about rape. I did not understand that rape is a way for a man to exercise control over the woman, and rob her of her power. I did not try to feel the powerlessness and trauma that she experiences. I did not try to imagine the stigma she is subjected to. Or the odds she needs to fight, to emerge as a survivor. I did not realize that men get raped too.

I did have awareness. But not any empathy.

EXCITING REACTIONS IN A CRUCIBLE

You don’t have to look too hard or think too deep to figure out that societies around the world are getting increasingly polarized. Just turn on the news or scroll through your feed on Facebook, and you’ll be inundated with stories about protests, protests against those protests, ugly debates, and propagandist hosts on TV ingratiating themselves with like-minded pundits and bashing those with contrarian positions. If you’re unlucky, you might have witnessed or been part of such a polarized exchange in your workplace or classroom. If you’re really unlucky, you might have seen this play out over a family dinner.

In one of my previous pieces, I explored the effect that our information consumption patterns have on the narratives we believe. The narratives we believe in become the realities we subscribe to. And when my reality clashes with your reality, we both retreat into our own worlds because they’re more comfortable. The consequences of this are grave and two-fold. First, you start to believe your own version of reality, actively rejecting any conflicting viewpoint or contrarian evidence. You tend to avoid nuance and complexity, and paint the world – your world – in simpler, monotonal colours. Second, you view those with different narratives than yours as wrong or malicious. Spotting an economic and political opportunity here, the media swoops in, exacerbating these divides, providing customized ideological echo-chambers to their intended audience.

The result is obvious, and often pernicious. We don’t speak to or with each other. We talk past each other. We engage not in dialogue, but in self-serving monologues. Just think about the protests that have sprung up in the wake of the horrific and tragic murder of George Floyd in the US. The Black Lives Matter protests are focused on bringing about systemic and sustainable changes to policing in America to stop the disproportionate targeting of black lives. Different pockets of the movement and the country are calling for different degrees of change – reforming the police to adequately address racial bias embedded in recruiting and training, defunding the police to reprioritize government funds and invest them in other public and community services, and abolishing the police to essentially create a clean slate and start afresh. These protests have been met with counter-arguments from people uncomfortable with the changes being demanded. The people on the other side do believe that what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were unnecessary and unfortunate, but they don’t think the solution lies in fundamentally reimagining policing. Conversations around Blue Lives Matter have cropped up on the internet and in various parts of the country. What’s interesting is that the whole country saw the same video – the last 8 minutes and 46 seconds of Floyd's life – in horror and shock. Yet they have vastly different responses to the situation – one side sees his death as another datapoint in a depressing yet familiar pattern of racist police violence inflicted on the black community, making systemic transformation in the police force the only solution to the problem. Another side does see the numerous deaths as unfortunate, but not necessarily connected by a thread of systemic racism. There are good police officers who serve the community and contribute to the public good, they say. You can throw out the rotten apples, but not the whole barrel.

These two narratives are fueled by forces in the media that provide to their audience a comforting ideological shelter in a time of uncertainty and passion. And they paint the other side as antithetical to any social progress.

“Defunding the police is a radical-left idea. Do they think that starving our public servants, heroes of our community, will bring about any good? If you defund or abolish the police, who do you call if there’s a burglary in your house?”

“If you think policing in America is fine as it is, and doesn’t require any fundamental changes, then you’re upholding centuries of racism and white supremacy that are inherent in our police force. Unless there’s systemic reform, you’ll continue to see stories of George Floyds and Breonna Taylors in the news.”

It is valuable to ask why people subscribe to these different narratives in the first place. It’s a question I’ll come back to, but for now I’d like to spend some time on the dangers of excessive polarization.

Diversity is both necessary and healthy for a democracy. Diverse people – with their own perspectives and experiences – make the contest of ideas more robust. Granted that many countries, as they practice and realize democracy, do not look like the idealistic theory of democracy we revere. Maybe the leaders elected and the policies enacted in a democracy aren’t that democratic. But what democracies allow for is a space where controversial ideas can be raised, housed and propagated. The institutions of a free press, the rights of free speech and expression, and counterbalancing branches of government, even if flawed, allow different ideas and ideologies to thrive. And it is there – and not the halls of parliament or congress – where the heart of democracy lies.

This heart beats not when diverse ideas simply co-exist, but when they interplay. Let’s say A and B are different thought-currents in a crucible. If they exist as disparate forces and don’t engage with each other, you’ve still got a diversity of ideas, but what good is it? It’s as good as a segregated society. It’s only when A and B interact that exciting reactions start taking place in the crucible. When the molecules of one idea mingle with those of another, new solutions start to form. You get an alloy of the best elements, held together by the forces of cooperation and compromise. For a democracy to function healthily, compromise is more important that co-existence. You could have groups that co-exist, but compete with each other. Social and moral competition inevitably leads to one idea or ideology defeating the other. The outcome is democratic, but polarizing. It is only when different groups empathize with each other, understand where they come from, and seek common ground on issues – engage in interplays – that the crucible of democracy yields the best solutions.

Polarization prevents these interplays. People retreat into their own comfortable chambers and stay there. They don’t want to engage with each other because it would disturb their identity and philosophy. It’s not just race. Factions have formed around issues of immigration, feminism, political correctness and censorship, wealth distribution in a society, LGBTQ+ rights, and gender identities. That there are different views on a subject is not problematic. The problem arises when these groups don’t speak to or engage each other.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

How do we move from coexistence to engagement? Before we explore that, it’s worth spending some time on where I believe society should be headed, and why.

Kevin is straight, white and male. He lives in an upper-middle class neighbourhood, and goes to one of the relatively well-endowed schools in the state. One of the mandatory assignments he needs to do to graduate from high school is a thought-piece on the residents of a housing project just outside his city. He visits the project and arranges an interview with a few of the people living there. He listens to them speak about their childhood – the neighbourhoods they grew up in, the schools they went to, and the friends they spent time with. He tries to imagine the pictures flashing through their minds when they speak about their parents – the jobs they had and then didn’t; the way they admonished them as teenagers and were admonished by the police; their visits to school playgrounds and state prisons. Kevin soaks in the residents’ stories about their own run-ins with the police, almost a rite of passage for a few of them. He is both overwhelmed and captivated by things that seem foreign to him – the food they ate growing up, the aspirations they harboured for themselves, the relationships they got into and got out of, and the people they drew inspiration from. He tries to step into their shoes as they walk from one place of employment to another, carrying the burden of all the years they’ve fought through, only to be stamped and rejected. At the end of every conversation, he is left amazed by the residents’ understanding of the world, and the hope – to realize the promise of their country – that some of them still hold onto. As Kevin drives back into his neighbourhood, he feels a sense of confusion and guilt. Confusion at the divide between the world he lives in, and the one the residents of the project inhabit. Guilt for the privileges in his life that now begin to sharpen into focus. He stays up all night writing about his interviewees and the systemic racial and economic inequities baked into their realities.

In university, Kevin signs up to participate in a human library. The term 'library' is slightly misleading because you don’t get to ‘borrow’ the person you want to have a conversation with. Someone is randomly assigned to you. When Kevin enters his booth, curious to find out who he’ll be spending the next three hours with, he’s surprised and nervous to find a black transgender woman in front of him. Having never known a transgender person, the usually garrulous Kevin feels handicapped. Recognizing his unease, the woman says that it’s all right. He doesn’t need to say the right things. That’s part of the reason why they’re in the booth together. She talks about her years growing up and her struggles with coming to terms with her identity. The burden of pretence she had to carry with her for the first fifteen years of her life. The loneliness she felt at home, and the shame she felt outside. The periods of self-blame and guilt interspersed with thoughts of suicide. The hours she would spend at the library, and then on Google, reading about gender dysphoria. The joy she felt when she first saw a trans person on television, and the dejection she’d often feel when people would debate her identity. The moment of acceptance, and coming out, and honest conversation. The rage, the shock, the support. The community she had found. The two people in her community who had been shot in the last couple of years – one of them, fatally. Gender politics. Activism. Legislation. Kevin hangs on to every word, suspended in awe, through the three hours in the booth. Very rarely has he felt this stirred.

Kevin takes a few elective courses in sociology. He learns about how history is deterministic. How he has enjoyed racial, economic and sexual privilege all his life. And how our lived realities shape our worldviews. He realizes that he a lot of learning, and a lot of unlearning to do. He decides to read books and watch movies about worlds he is wholly unfamiliar with. And although literature is helpful, it’s distanced. He wants to examine, explore and experience the intricacies of a life he’s not lived or seen. And the best way to do that is to speak to people who live those lives. He tries to expand his network of friends and associates. All of this is hard. But necessary.

Kevin becomes more sensitive to the cultural climate of his country. He recognizes that the greatest privilege he has is the privilege of political representation. So it behoves him to work toward extending that privilege to those without it. He becomes an ally to organizations fighting for social acceptance, equal representation, and fairer employment and housing policies. He organizes human libraries in his community to bring strangers together in a booth for thirty minutes and exchange stories about their day. These booths become crucibles for ideas and connections. Eventually it dawns on him that he can create a greater dent in the community by running for elected office. Through the process of political campaigning he engages with different groups – with often competing interests – to understand their aspirations. He promises to reflect these aspirations in government, striving for compromise and cooperation as much as possible.

Obviously Kevin is an idealistic concoction of my imagination. But what if we could have a society where we educated and raised people like him? Take a moment to think about the state of your political culture and national discourse right now. Spend some time to reflect on the schism between those advocating for a national mask mandate to contain the pandemic, and those protesting any regulation on mask-wearing. Or those fighting for gun regulation, and others calling for the preservation of their second amendment rights. Or those who believe that America's immigration system violates the sanctity of her borders, and those who think that it makes the country stronger. These different views make American democracy more vibrant and vigorous. But when these views don't engage in any meaningful interaction, and people don't relate to or empathize with each other, all you're left with is a landscape of warring ideologies slinging mud and labels on each other. The political triumph of one side is seen as a loss to the other, furthering societal polarization. Policymaking – now a win-lose game – inevitably produces less optimal outcomes. It is easy, comforting even, to remain ensconced in our ideological ivory towers. But the effect this has on the health of our democracy is less sanguine. An apathetic society creates an ideal environment for conflict and confrontation, deepening our social fault lines.

Now imagine the brand of politics and policymaking we could build if citizens like Kevin reformed institutions and institutional culture through the exercise of empathy, understanding, and compromise. We can build bridges between the political, cultural and ideological factions we have divided ourselves into. Like Kevin, we can will ourselves to connect with others, and see the world through the prism of their experiences, structural constraints, and personal choices. We might not be able to walk in their shoes, but we can ask them to describe their gait. We may still disagree on a number of things, but at least we’ll have a better shot at understanding where these differences stem from; we’ll be diverse and united, not diverse and divided. That is when we can reap the advantages of a robust democracy. Building empathy in a society should not be an abstract idea limited to reflective conversation and political campaign speeches. It should be treated as a matter of public policy. Doing this is hard, but absolutely necessary.

DEPARTMENT OF EMPATHY

This might come across as a radical idea. It probably is, given that no country has tried this. Sure, we have institutions in place to inculcate and cultivate morality, good behaviour, and social mores. The family – viewed as the fundamental building block of a society – plays an integral role in shaping people’s moral code. Your parents are your first role models. Home is where you learn the importance of honesty, respect, and hard work. This is why many of us tend to trace delinquency or criminality to a dysfunctional family or a troubled home. Religion serves this function as well. We rely on churches, synagogues, mosques and temples to spread a message of love and peace in a community. (I find myself chuckling as I write this as it’s not uncommon to find some of these same religious houses embroiled in moral and monetary scandal. Also, look at some of the most ‘religious’ places around the world – how are they faring in terms of peace and stability?) The institution with the greatest impact on the morality of a nation is the school. Education does not only build knowledge of the sciences, mathematics, history, literature and the arts. It builds morality. It tames our inner savage, and tranquilizes us with ideas of order, cooperation, and justice.

But all of this is different from empathy. As a private individual, I could be respectful and peace-loving, and yet not understand, or empathize with people who look, speak or love differently. Empathy involves more than knowledge. Knowledge is certainly step one; you can’t empathize with a person or a situation if you’re not aware of them. But empathy requires you to push yourself beyond the realm of awareness into that of understanding and feeling. It is a conscious and difficult exercise. You need to not just dispel your own opinions and biases, but also adopt somebody else’s paradigm. Because it involves both unlearning and learning, it can get emotionally exhausting. And uncomfortable.

I’m sure most people will agree that building empathy is a good thing, and something we should encourage. But why frame it in terms of policymaking? Why does the state – or agencies of the state – need to dictate and govern something as abstract as empathy? And more importantly, how does it do it? Why don’t we leave it to the institutions of family, religion, and education? I try to address some of these very legitimate questions through this piece. But before I do that, I’d like to underscore: this is an argument for why governments should pay attention to building empathy, as they do to education, defence, fiscal and monetary policies, justice, law and order, natural resources and energy, and social cohesion. I acknowledge that different countries, based on their historical, social and political contexts, might translate this into policy in different ways.

First let’s start with the why. I’ve already spent some time on the dangers of social polarization. A more empathetic society helps people understand each other better, and melt the ideological, cultural and moral divides between them. One consequence of this is constructive engagement. Instead of different groups spewing their own stories, direly disconnected with each other, you’ll have a stronger collective initiative to understand diverse perspectives.

Imagine a society with two groups of people – rich investment bankers, and poor janitors. As the condition of wealth and income inequality worsens, the gulf between the two groups widens – not just in terms of their monetary status and power, but also in terms of their attitudes toward each other. The janitors believe that they have been exploited by vampire squid-like bankers, and that the bankers influence politicians to skew policies to favour the rich, diverting national resources away from the working class, as a result of which you have the rich enjoying excesses of wealth, and the poor struggling to cope with structural constraints and the cost of living. Unhappy with the state of affairs, the janitors organize protests outside the offices of these financiers, sometimes resorting to violence – throwing stones at the glass windows of their offices – to express their frustrations. The bankers, annoyed with the demonstration of anger, request for additional security from the police. As members of the police force start surrounding the offices, they get into clashes with the protestors, exacerbating the unrest. After they make their way out of the offices, some bankers meet at a golf club for dinner and discuss the day’s events. They talk about how the protestors, instead of investing their talents and energies into entrepreneurship and education, choose to be ruled by their passions. "Some of us grew up poor, but we harnessed our skills and got here. I’m sure if one of them climbs up the ladder and gets to work in our office, they’ll look out of the window and see a bunch of disgruntled people channelizing their anger the wrong way. And if they hate the law so much, why don’t they elect people who will represent their interests? Everyone owns an equal share of this democracy."

Each of these groups believes in and perpetuates its own narrative, justifying its own position and attacking the other's. Each group revels in the successes it achieves and the validation it receives from its members and associates. What is lost is an opportunity for constructive dialogue on income and wealth inequality, its causes and ramifications. Would a more empathetic society be able to minimize this inequity? I don't know. But it would be better prepared to have a holistic conversation on the effects of structure and individual initiative on socioeconomic inequality, than an apathetic one.

By encouraging exchange and dialogue, an empathetic society sows the seeds of social and racial equity. The clash between the bankers and janitors harks back to the protests following the murder of George Floyd I spoke about earlier in this piece. While I believe America will be able to absorb the shock of this moment and move forward, it will remain susceptible to greater division unless the different groups understand and empathize with each other's views on race and policing. The level of empathy in society determines the level of engagement and cooperation in the body politic. By lubricating frictions between ethnically, educationally and economically diverse groups, empathy serves as a palliative for the tensions in a democracy. Because empathy focuses on compromise over competition, the outcomes of empathetic decision making tend to be more palatable and less contentious. Such societies are less politically mercurial, and more open to dialogue and engagement. Empathy therefore begets empathy. Empathetic societies are also conducive to more robust and balanced policymaking. Imagine the progress we could make on climate action if environmentalists, scientists, economists, industrialists and activists engaged one another and struck meaningful compromise. Sticking with wealth inequity for a moment longer, think about the policy solutions we could come up with if the ideas and aspirations of bankers and janitors, capitalists and unionists, academicians and corporate executives, were thrown into a crucible and allowed to ferment. Think about the kind of immigration reform that's possible if people stopped casting moral aspersions on each other and engaged in an intimate dialogue on the socioeconomic ramifications of various immigration policies. Simply put, empathetic societies are able to deliver better social, economic, political, and environmental outcomes for their citizens.

A national empathy building exercise – the kind that Kevin goes through earlier in the piece – cannot be outsourced to the family or a religious institution. A family shelters you from unfamiliar experiences. It is a fundamentally homogenous unit, that limits your interactions to other groups of a similar background. Religion falls short as well. In fact, empathizing with a person of another faith and trying to understand their perspectives of the world, might go against the grain of your own proselytizing religion. The institution that offers the greatest promise – in terms of both the scale of impact, as well as the impressionable nature of its audience – is the school. Cultivating empathy in schools solidifies a foundation of a compassionate citizenry that will better your country’s social, political and economic future.

One of the thorns jutting out of this conversation is the question of handing the state more control over the country’s educational curriculum. There are of course severe problems with this, not least of which is the authority that it grants an administration to plant the seeds of its own political and moral ideology in a generation of future voters and politicians. Empathy building, in spirit, cannot and should not, be tinged by any political persuasion. One way to achieve this is by adopting the model that many countries use for apolitical policymaking or supervision – independent bodies. Most central banks, for example, fall into this category. Yes, such institutions are also susceptible to politicking. But we already have many instruments to minimize the impact of undue partisan influence – independent nominations, equal representation of different ideological leanings, fixed terms, rotating leadership, and defined selection criteria (it wouldn’t be intellectually inflammatory to suggest that a person nominated to such a body should have sufficient experience in education, and zero experience in corruption or malfeasance).

What exactly can this body do? A number of things.

It can recommend – or mandate, if there is legislative support for it – a shelf of books and movies that students should consume to develop a keen understanding of people who occupy very different realities. Literature transports you to places you cannot physically visit. Wouldn’t it be great to transport our children’s minds to completely unfamiliar territories – the worlds of religious and racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, refugees, and other marginalized groups. But shouldn’t empathy work both ways? Shouldn’t the minority also understand the structures and institutions that uphold the majority? They should, and such literature should also be prescribed, but obviously with the intention of appreciating the power structure, and not justifying it. The curriculum should also include time and space for conversations on these books and movies, so people can reflect on their learnings. In the spirit of empathy building, students should be encouraged to adopt the perspectives of different characters in that piece of literature, and chart out the world from their standpoint. Granted, this can be emotionally – and intellectually – exhausting. But the exercise is a powerful tool for students to appreciate and understand a diversity of thoughts, personalities and motivations.

Another issue faced by educational institutions is the homogeneity of its faculties. If all your teachers are of a certain race, gender or religion, their own biases and proclivities will trickle down to their students. Depending on the level of legislative and judicial constraints, this body should make recommendations ranging from incorporating diversity into school faculties to unconscious bias training programs for teachers.

All of this is still distanced. Like Kevin realizes, there is no better way to build empathy than to have conversations with others. Obviously you can’t engineer society to make people live next to and interact with each other. But what you can do is make an empathy exercise mandatory for educational progression. For example, students can be required to participate in a human library to graduate from high school (or university). You'd be paired up with someone from a different community for a semester, and then asked to reflect on your relationship with them at the end. The idea of being forced to engage in conversation with someone – and then write or speak about it – does seem awkward. Also pairing up people from different communities (whatever these communities may be) only serves to underscore the difference between the participants. But the exercise is not bound by a script, an objective, or a set of conversational topics. The purpose of the human library is to help you melt away the shackles of perception and prejudice, and see others for who they really are – people with stories. Sharing stories is the best way to build a bridge with someone, and cross over to the other side. In the vein of encouraging conversation and engaging diverse perspectives, you could also organize student-driven conferences and 'hackathons' around addressing social, racial, economic and environmental issues. Young people are not mired in political or institutional thinking. They tend to be more creative, bold, innovative and collaborative than their representatives in political office. Also, given that they have a vested interest in solving these problems, it only makes sense to co-opt them in the wider public policy process. You might think all of this sounds prescriptive. But if the state can prescribe mandatory physical education, standardized tests, or volunteering, it can extend that to empathy building.

How do you measure the success of this program? You can measure people’s knowledge and competency in subjects like math and science through standardized exams. You can measure the effectiveness of physical education in schools through a bunch of datapoints – weight and fitness, engagement in sport, and health outcomes in the future. You can’t really quantify empathy. Nor can you operationalize it. The traditional tool of measuring educational success – tests – does not work here. Sure, you can track the number of conversations your students have had with people of another racial or socioeconomic group, or you can record the movies on anti-racism and fluid gender identities your class has watched. But that’s not the point. All your students might read a book on feminism and write stimulating and reflective pieces on gender relations in society. But that doesn't necessarily indicate how many of them actually internalize this view of the world. You can administer an empathy questionnaire created by some psychologist to see how students fare. But that’s not the point either. Empathy building as an exercise is not meant to be measured. It’s meant to embed a culture. And the fruits of this culture may manifest – months, years, decades later – in the form of constructive dialogue, diffused social tensions, greater diversity in elected representatives, and a more open political culture.

Why would an administration do this? We've already explored the social and political merits of an empathetic society. But as is often the case, the obstacle to policymaking does not lie in operation or apparatus, but in political will. For one, by coaxing the confluence of ideas and cooperation of ideologies, empathy building threatens the power of dominant institutions. These institutions often have the resources to lobby governments and shape policy. Also, any political victory is steeped in a power imbalance of some kind – the triumph of your ideology over another. Why should a victorious administration upset this imbalance and mar its chances of future success? Politicians in democracies have a short-term view – they are bound by a political calendar of four to five years, within which they need to demonstrate their accomplishments to the voters. An initiative like empathy building is essentially long-term. Not only are the results unguaranteed, but also the political outcome of this national experiment could work against your partisan interest. All of this is true, but as Elizabeth Warren often says (I had to get a Warren reference in this piece), it boils down to the question of where power truly lies. Asking whether politicians want something wrests power away from where it actually belongs in a democracy – the citizenry. If the people of a country support an idea, their elected representatives should as well. So the question should shift away from why a government should do this, to why the electorate should demand this. The electorate, unlike politicians, does not have a narrow time horizon. Ideas like climate policy and racial justice that some countries are fighting for are not achievable or realizable in the short term. Yet the cries for action are loud because people want to build a better future for their children and grandchildren. I believe that people, by and large, want to bequeath to posterity a kinder, more equitable, compassionate and stronger world. And if injecting more empathy into society is the only way they can achieve it, they can, and should demand it.

Empathy should be viewed as a natural resource. Just as a country harnesses its stock of oil, natural gas, forests, and people for industrial and economic progress, a society can tap into its reserves of empathy to prevent or weather racial and social tensions. Conventional resources can be depleted in quantity or corrupted in quality. Empathy can only be multiplied. Traditional resources yield cars, refrigerators, computers, and banking services. Empathy yields something even stronger – a cohesive and robust democracy.

THE POWER AND INTIMACY OF STORIES

You can engage in all the empathy building you want in school, but what good is it if it isn’t reinforced by your social circle? Retreating into your sheltered bubble of socioeconomic homogeneity at home limits the extent of any ideological or moral transformation. Which brings me to the importance of sharing stories. Stories are the most powerful tool we have to connect with one another. You could read sociological theories around race and racial relations, and comb through statistics on unemployment, educational outcomes, incarceration and political representation – and still remain unstirred by the dry and distanced words and numbers. Hearing someone’s story about their struggles with racial prejudice, their experiences with the police, their efforts at securing a job, and their activism in fighting race-blind policies, is what colours (pun not intended) your understanding of race. Listening to someone’s story is the purest exercise in both realizing and exercising empathy.

By drawing out pictures in the canvas of your mind, stories help you visualize and feel experiences. That’s why when people want to explain a complex idea or subject, they use analogies or analogous stories. When businesspeople pitch a product or a service, they often rely on stories to help the audience visualize their need for the item being sold. People build connections on dates, not by talking about their life philosophies and beliefs, but by sharing anecdotes from their childhood, school or work. When someone tells you their story, they invite you into their world. They’re open to being intimate with you. It’s the same reason why we’re drawn to books and movies on other people’s lives. Even journalists often employ tools of fiction to drive their reportage home. A story about a Syrian refugee crossing the Mediterranean is far more soul-stirring than a dispassionate piece about the Syrian refugee crisis.

I started this piece by talking about my teenage understanding of rape – it was limited and shallow. It’s only through stories of sexual assault survivors that I could appreciate – and internalize – the sociological and psychological dimensions of rape. I hope I am now cognizant of how the simplification of the idea of rape – through trivialized expressions – contributes to a culture where people legitimize the exploitation of power. I hope that every time I participate in an academic discussion on rape, my opinions are coloured by the stories of people's experiences. And I hope that these stories shape my relationships with women – in the workplace, in the bar, and at home.

Stories are political as well. If the American story you believe in essays the great American heroes who drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the foot-soldiers of the civil rights movement who helped to achieve racial progress, and the protestors who were guaranteed the right to fight for more rights, then America represents a beacon of hope and freedom to you. But if the story you subscribe to is bookmarked by slavery, racial subjugation, and neo-racist policies, then the American experiment is by no means a success. The fact is that both these stories are true. But if people continue to believe in their own version of reality, and don’t attempt to understand the other’s, they will hold onto divergent and discordant views on the country, race, policing, and politics. Politics is nothing but the contest of stories. It’s why one of the first things emperors did when they conquered new lands was burn down their public libraries. They destroyed their stories and replaced them with their own. Even today, countries are engaged in the politically tempting act of revising history. In a society susceptible to polarization and division, the conscious and collective exercise of empathy is not just useful. It’s critical.

A CALL TO ACTION

We don’t need to wait for our state to create a Department of Empathy. Or prescribe a curriculum for empathy building. Or for our ideal slate of elected officials to change the fabric of political culture in the country. There’s a lot we can, and should do today. Pick up a book about privilege from the bookstore. Watch a documentary on an ethnically marginalized community. Speak to someone with a different political persuasion, and ask them about their story and their worldview. Reach out to a person of a different sexual orientation to understand the forces shaping their actions and behaviours.

The next time you get into an argument with someone, don’t dismiss them. Abandon your position for a minute and adopt theirs. Then educate them on your position. And if you can’t get your point across, share a story. In light of the tense climate we find ourselves in, you might be tempted to view this as futile, but don’t be overwhelmed. Remember: most great things in life start with a single conversation.