since feeling is first 
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things 
will never wholly kiss you; 
—e.e. cummings

As usual, e.e. cummings was on to something. We feel before we think. Words are a process built to describe—to translate—those feelings into thoughts with agreed-upon meanings. So far, so good. But feelings are anything but a zero-sum game; there is always a remainder, a residue, that most words cannot fully describe. Feelings are not mathematical, and even math has amounts left over after computation.

Feelings are more complex than the systems describing them. Sure, feelings might begin with the initial electric impulses fired from neuron to neuron within our brains, but soon enough the nuance of personal experience kicks in, way before any of us can think of the words to describe why. And when we do find the words, we tend to crop the edges, lop off the remainders that elude precise description, preferring thought packages that over time we have considered more easily digestible and translatable between us. But too often such translation sacrifices the ineffable gold of difference that resides just beyond what we choose to define. 

These remainders—at least in an America that prizes straight talk and bottom lines—elude our simple expression and become trash, discarded by our baked-in moral urge to adhere to category and function, and left to blow away in the wind. And that’s OK. Even better than OK. Yes, we need clarity to build an IKEA bookcase, but not everything is IKEA furniture.

And not all of those remainders are trash.

It’s good that some of the residue resists translation. And as our world changes, some of it now feels like treasure. Our current sea of cultural consciousness shows us that meanings can slosh over definitions and other divides—and our culture is the better for it.

Otherness was once something untranslatable in polite company, but things change—and when they do, language is often found wanting. For example, binary and cisgender pronouns have given way to they/their. Of course, they/their feels and sounds awkward, precisely because the grammar is a vestige pointing to an outdated worldview. Sooner rather than later, syntax will catch up with new inventions or more relaxed meanings. Language ought to fit us—not the other way around. 

It’s not hard to find examples of our idioms falling short of how we really feel. Our past heroes, who were speaking for us and fighting for our freedoms, were contending with outdated syntax in their own times, and the stakes were high. Perhaps they are our heroes precisely by nature of the way they demanded a more distinctive, edgier, and more profound picture of their identities—not just the thought, but how it really feels. 

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that “[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” Thankfully, we’re two decades into a new century. But reminders of old categories remain in the idioms and their long-ascribed meanings that we still use, and that still trips us up in unexpected ways. Even in the above quote, there’s that pesky use of “men” instead of people or humans. We know what Du Bois means, but it still rankles a bit. If he were alive today, I believe Du Bois would massage the knots out of his strained syntax.

Time and again in his masterly prose, you can feel Du Bois fighting against the constricting idioms of his time, describing his racial identity as 

born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (“Strivings of the Negro People,” The Atlantic, 1897) 

The cisgendered, male-centric realities of yesterday give way to new angles on such idioms today, in this case not just two-ness but triple consciousness, thanks to current thinkers redefining identity for Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC), transgender people, and others outside old categories.

Syntax changes because language is alive—at least as long as we are. Changes can cause irritable reactions, grumpiness, and curmudgeonly responses in the short term. But over time, my money is on multiple consciousness when speaking about race, gender, and the million other feelings that identify us.

Read this essay as a plea, or a plug, for the untranslatable in our lives. The urge to explain, to categorize and label every single thing under the sun, to amass not only data but metadata about our world and ourselves, would seem transcendent and seemingly unescapable. Yet the power of mystery remains, as difficult to detect as dark matter, emitting neither light nor energy, coexisting with what we know (or think we know), refusing to behave according to known labels or categories. And when you add it up, there is way more remainder than sum. 

I would argue strongly for the embrace of the untranslatable in all things great and small. We bump up against untranslatable words when moving from one language to another and finding that we are not able to find the right word or to have its sense satisfactorily expressed. But we really don’t have to leave our own language to run up against the same sensation.

“Tradutore, traditore,” is an Italian saying than connects translation to betrayal. Perhaps we are traitors to even try to translate the feelings that outdistance our thoughts and break longstanding syntactic rules. But we have to try, and we can’t let stand the closefisted reactions of those who would ignore the residue, the remainders and the leftovers. We mustn’t be traitors to what we truly fear, desire, and keep secret. 

Back to e.e. cummings. If indeed feeling is first, then the spoken and dramatic arts show us where words are not enough, where actions speak, where pictures are worth a thousand words, and where nothing (thankfully) is pure. Poets and playwrights and troubadours use the language to its fullest extent and beyond, and when they come to the rim of the well the real fun begins. 

The poet Pablo Neruda knew this, writing:
 

Si cada día 
dentro de cada noche 
hay un pozo 
donde la claridad está encerrada. 
Hay que sentarse a la orilla 
del pozo de la sombra 
y pescar de la sombra 
y pescar luz caída 
con paciencia.

(If each day 
falls inside each night 
then there is a well 
where clarity is locked within. 
One must sit on the rim 
of the shadow of the well 
and fish the penumbra 
and trawl the fallen light 
with patience.*)

There is a clarity of feeling locked within the well of shadows. Our fears, desires and secrets are our own, often invisible not only to others but to ourselves. When we use language to trawl the fallen light, we are bound to get some—but not all—of what’s there.

That’s why I, as a playwright, feature the untranslatable whenever possible. And that’s why the living body interprets best, opening itself to, and bumping up against, an immediate present; our flesh feels the pinch of limitation as well as the occasional satisfaction of an exact fit. I like it when words can’t quite comprise the feelings I’m trying to express, precisely because I need bodies on stage to add dimension and impact to the collision between meaning and what remains. When character is revealed, there needs to be more than just a psychological solution to a human problem. There is a lacuna, or lexical gap, where mystery resides and where no quantized or fully defined equivalent can be found.

Still, when faced with lacunae, I have a choice: I can fill the gap with action, movement, dance, or song. I can invent a new word to attempt to comprise and represent the remainders (Shakespeare did this many, many times). Or I can leave the gap for what it is: unfilled, missing, and open for meaning. 

When I ponder it now, I realize that these are the moments when I love playwriting the most. In such moments, we are doing our soul’s work. 

The untranslatable lives every day in dreams and wakefulness. We feel it when there are obstacles placed in front of what we desire, when we must confront our fears, and when we feel that our deepest secrets might possibly be outed somehow, some way. It will always be there beyond the frame of our vista, just out of bounds in the field of our lives’ play. Some feelings aren’t simply untranslated, but untranslatable, in the immediate present of our realities. But even if they can’t be rendered, they can be mined toward a new language of the future. The nuance of how we live our lives when old phrases won’t suffice is not as scary as the curmudgeons and reactionaries would have us believe. Our language is supple, and changeable. Our feelings are free, have a life of their own, and happen at the speed of light. 

*The author’s own translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Si cada día cae”

The post In Defense of the Untranslatable  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Empathy has been touted as a necessary quality in leadership, the solution to a wide range of social ills and a central component of social justice. If we see from another’s perspective, imaginatively experiencing her or his thoughts, feelings or predicaments, we will open up lines of dialogue, ameliorate conflicts and grievances, and engage in more ethical or socially responsible action. The problem, however, is that empathy is much more uneven and unpredictable than these narratives convey.

Empathy is often seen as a tool for overcoming the vast chasm between the privileged and the not—yet it remains rooted in that chasm, and may even reinforce it. One international development program, for example, creates greater empathy among staff by having them live and work with a “poor family” in a “developing context” for three or four days. Development practitioners and government officials might feel that they have accessed “the truth” of poor people’s lives and struggles—and that they can therefore speak more confidently on their behalf. Poor people’s own voices recede further from view.

Claiming intimate knowledge of “the other” can also contribute to violence. After 9/11, Raphael Patai’s book “The Arab Mind”—a now-infamous account of Arab culture and psychology—furnished US military officials with ideas for torture at Abu Ghraib. Accessing other people’s psychic worlds became a technique of control and violence rather than understanding and sympathy. A torturer empathizes with her victims to determine what will be most humiliating to them. Empathy can thus become weaponized.

Even in more benign empathic narratives, the repeated mapping of the “empathizer” and “sufferer” onto social and political hierarchies reinforces inequality. Privileged (middle class, white, and/or Western) people cultivate their affective capacities and skills, but the less privileged (poor, non-white and/or non-Western) “other” remains simply the object of empathy—their own emotional complexities are never engaged.

An ad for Nike, which uses empathy research to understand—or create—the desires of their customers. Image courtesy of Brett Jordan/Flickr.

One way to gain deeper insights is to turn that usual hierarchy upside-down, focusing on expressions of empathy from those who are marginalized. You can see this at work in Jamaica Kincaid’s famous novella “A Small Place,” where the native Antiguan narrator inhabits the consciousness of a “white, Western tourist” who has travelled to Antigua for “four to ten days in the sun.” This exercise reveals how the privileged tourist’s very existence—her relaxation, pleasure and freedom—depends precisely on repressing knowledge of Antiguans’ suffering as well as the links between slavery, colonialism, and contemporary tourism in the Caribbean. Approaching empathy from the “other side” can expose the implicit power structures that surround us—leading to a more accurate, and possibly productive, empathy.

Empathy’s issues continue in the workplace, where its economic value does not accrue fairly to everyone. Better, more productive workers are those who seem to cultivate positive feelings (such as empathy and optimism) and subdue negative ones (such as anxiety and anger). But this improvement is not equally available to all. As critical management scholars have argued, those most able to capitalize on emotions in the workplace tend to be white, middle-class men. When men exercise empathy it is interpreted as a skill. Empathetic women are just seen as women. For them, empathy has no market value.

The rise of what is being called the “empathy economy,” meanwhile, focuses on using empathy to grant corporations more power over consumers. Better and more accurate empathy, one can argue, has allowed multinational companies like Nike and Microsoft to get inside the heads of potential customers—inferring (and in fact producing) their needs and desires before they even recognize these themselves.

By empathically entering the psyches of potential customers, companies can transform vulnerabilities into feelings of lack—to be remedied through buying a product or service. Empathy here is not promoting ethics or morality, but profits and growth.

Given the ever-increasing divides between rich and poor around the world, it would be ridiculous to assume any unproblematic link between empathic knowledge and social justice.

A sign at Occupy Wall Street. Photo courtesy of C-Monster/Flickr.

Better, perhaps, to follow the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that empathy is morally neutral. There is no guarantee that “seeing through the other’s eyes” is premised on, or likely to generate, relations of care or compassion. We should attend to empathy’s inherent unevenness.

When we do, we can judge more precisely our empathetic failures. What we interpret as empathic feeling may be projection, appropriation, or wishful thinking. If empathy depends on the ability to accurately infer the affective states of other beings, it may be much less common and more elusive than we assume.

In Aminatta Forna’s novel “The Memory of Love,” for instance, the protagonist Adrian Lockhart, a British clinical psychologist, travels to Sierra Leone convinced that he can help people heal following the nation’s 11-year civil war. His efforts are frustrated by unfamiliar emotional patterns and norms that alienate him from his patients and colleagues. The more he tries to master Sierra Leone’s complex culture, the worse things get. Adrian can help people only when he lets go of an empathy premised on knowledge of “the other” and instead opens himself up to being transformed by what he encounters. In allowing himself to become vulnerable, Adrian lays the groundwork for mutual forms of empathy and solidarity.

Finally, we might be able to acknowledge the limits of even the most developed and self-aware forms of empathy. “Feeling right” is not enough. Complex structural problems can never be overcome solely through the force of feeling. They require deep political work, including policy and legislation as well as social-movement building. Empathy alone cannot solve ingrained hierarchies of power because it is produced in and though those very hierarchies. When the structural conditions underlying persistent social and economic inequalities remain unaddressed, such cleavages become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation.

This is not to say that feeling—including empathy—has no role to play in addressing inequality and injustice. Though empathy is ambivalent and fallible, it points to our persistent longing for connection and reciprocity, which are necessary for the development of real solidarity across social, cultural and economic differences. But in a world where hope and opportunity are distributed unequally, we need to ask what kind of connections we want.

The post Is Our Culture of Empathy Perpetuating Inequality? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Newspapers and magazines were quick to report these results. A few were skeptical. Maria Eugenia Panero was one of several psychologists that tried to replicate the findings. In 2016, she was a lead author of a report that failed to replicate the exciting conclusions of the first study and found “no significant advantage” in literary-fiction readers when it came to theory of mind. Basically, Panero and her co-authors suggested, the study seemed too good to be true because it wasn’t true. Or at least, it wasn’t definitive.

We spoke with Panero about why this investigation appeared to be so compelling and what we can know regarding art and empathy.

Q: What can you tell us about the relationship between empathy and theory of mind? 

A: You can think of theory of mind as a component of empathy. Theory of mind is a form of cognitive empathy: I know the thoughts and feelings that someone else has. This can have many levels. First-order: I know what X is thinking. Second-order: I know what X thinks Y thinks. Third order: I know what X thinks Y thinks Z thinks. And on and on. It gets to be really meta at the higher orders. And then there’s also what I call emotional empathy–I actually feel the feelings of someone else. And finally, there is compassion: I act to relieve your pain.

Q: How does one measure theory of mind?

A: There are several oft-used measures. We used a widely used measure that is sensitive to individual differences in adult theory of mind called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test developed by Simon Baron-Cohen. You are asked to look at pictures of someone’s eyes and to decide what that person is thinking or feeling. You are given a choice of four adjectives to choose from. This measure has been criticized as being too much of a vocabulary test. In our study and the original study that we tried to replicate, we only had native English speakers participate. Because if you’re not a native English speaker—or even if you are!—if you just don’t have that level of vocabulary, you could do worse on the test and that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have lower theory of mind. Right now this is pretty much the only measure that can be used for adults. The others are used for young children, but are easy enough for adults that you would not get any individual differences. We need new adult measures.

Volunteers rehearsing for a production of The Beggar’s Opera. Photo courtesy of Nick Ansell/Flickr.

Q: Why did the experiment fail to replicate?

A: Well, the original study had very small effect sizes. That’s a statistical term, and it reflects the fact that when you actually look at the average scores on the Eyes test after each kind of text, the differences between the means are very small. When you have tiny effect sizes, things are not likely to replicate. It was just not a robust finding.

Another reason why we did not get a difference in the Eyes test between literary and popular fiction, as they did, is that both kinds of fiction are really about mental states. So there is really no good theoretical reason to expect literary fiction to prime theory of mind more than popular fiction might.

Q: The original study got a lot of press. Why? Are we “cheering for” empathy? Or novels? 

A: Absolutely. All of the above. Pretty much anything that gets published in Science gets a lot of attention. But we want to believe in literature. We all have this intuitive sense; we’ve been moved by a work of literature at some point or a novel has helped us or we’ve related to a character. We all want to believe that there is something there. We just haven’t been able to prove that scientifically. So for a study to say, oh we found the proof—that’s just really exciting. It pulled at the heartstrings. Also [with regard to] autism-spectrum disorder, one of the things that people with autism struggle with is theory of mind. If we can find a way to help that’s exciting.

Q: There’s a long history of arguments about whether experiencing art can make us better people. What can psychology tell us about that? And is empathy a part of that?

A: Now I’m in the Arts and Mind Lab in the Psychology Department at Boston College, directed by Ellen Winner; we look at any kind of overlap between arts and psychology. We often sit around and ask these questions. While there have been many claims that the arts make us better people, more moral, more empathic, there has not been much clear evidence that this is so. The arts might help you because you like them! And so you might be more focused, or it might relax you. But we just haven’t seen that it actually makes us “better.”

One thing that the original study showed, and that we did replicate, is that people who read a lot of fiction throughout their lifetime do have higher theory of mind (as measured by the Eyes test). But note that this does not say anything about causality: reading fiction might improve theory of mind, but it is also plausible that people strong in theory of mind are drawn to fiction.

There have been studies of the effects of other types of art. Theater has been shown to help kids with their social skills and with empathy. But studies need many control groups to rule out alternative interpretations. For example, theater might help with social skills just because kids are interacting with other kids that have similar interests. Perhaps you would get the same results with sports if that child preferred to do sports. There are studies that may show a correlation (like kids who study music do well in school) but it’s really difficult to prove causality (like music improves academic performance).

Q: Let’s turn this around. Maybe the arts don’t help us understand people, or empathize with them, but maybe people who understand and empathize well are better artists?

A: I want to say yes but I don’t have any specific scientific evidence. As a writer you have to know what your audience is going to understand or not understand. Or what information you want your characters to have. As an actor you have to really understand the point of view of all of the characters and the circumstances that are happening. So I definitely want to say yes; I just don’t have any real evidence for that. It could be that people who happen to have high theory of mind gravitate toward the arts, or that being involved in the arts helps someone increase their theory of mind.

Q: What made you want to study empathy?

A: I used to be an actor. I studied musical theater in New York and I became really interested in my own experience as an actor trying to research characters and understand the lives that they—you try to connect emotionally with the characters, feel those emotions. I actually became more interested in that than actually doing it! Then I found this lab, the Arts and Mind lab, where the principal investigator and most of the grad students in it come from an arts background. The lab director, Ellen Winner, used to be a painter, I used to be an actor, there’s another student who used to be a musician. We all come from arts backgrounds and come up with questions from our own life experiences.

Q: Have your experiments confirmed or denied your own experience?

A: In my master’s thesis, I looked at actors and dissociation. Dissociation is typically referred to as a bad thing. There are dissociative disorders that include multiple personalities, or having depersonalization, that is, experiencing a disconnect between your mind and body—looking in the mirror and not being able to recognize yourself. So it’s not a good thing. There’s also a part of dissociation that has a lot to do with fantasy and absorption. If you’re constantly fantasizing, you have your head up in the clouds, that could be a bad thing, you can’t really function. But a small amount of fantasy is fun, it’s healthy, it helps us to relax, and to see things in new ways.

What I saw in the theater world was this really big push for actors to “become” another character and really step into their shoes and live their lives and feel their emotions. And that really was taking a toll on some people. I thought that that was pretty similar to dissociation, to feeling a disconnect from your true self. In my studies I found that actors do tend to score higher dissociation measures compared to non-actors. Which again could be a bad thing. But the type of dissociation they have is this absorption-slash-fantasy type of dissociation, which is related to empathy and perspective taking. So it’s not like they forget who they are. They’re in control. That was really fulfilling for me to find because it was what I thought I was seeing in my own experiences—so it was nice to be able to find that scientifically. As long as you can control it, it’s just part of your art.

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