PWF16 opened with an address by Roman Krznaric, titled On Empathy. His talk made it clear that this was to be main theme of this year’s Perth Writers Festival.
Empathy, Krznaric believes, now has wider social importance than it has ever had. It is part of a revolution in human relationships. We live in an age of hyper-individualism. Empathy offers us a lens into a more communal way of thinking.
After losing his mother as a young child, Roman Krznaric lost all his childhood memories and sense of empathy. Later, he felt the need to regain his ‘empathic self’. In considering the origin of the word, he explained that it was coined in 1909 and comes from a German word, einfühling. Now, it refers to stepping into the shoes of another, and differs from sympathy in that it is a shared emotional response, rather than a feeling of pity or compassion. However, it is divided into affective empathy, which a child can feel fairly early (in the preschool years) and cognitive empathy, which means having a sense of what it is to be the other person. This arises slightly later in the maturation process. It includes an awareness that you don’t actually have to agree with the other person: you just have to understand their thinking.
To be fully empathetic, Krznaric believes, we need to develop six habits:
Habit 1: Switch on your empathic brain. We are not only homo sapiens, we are homo empathicus! Even so, empathy is something we share with many other mammals (e.g. Bonobo Chimps).
Habit 2: Make the Imaginative Leap (into the other person’s mind). To avoid misjudging others, we need to see something of the self in the other. We should empathise even with the enemy.
Habit 3: Practise the Craft of Conversation. As we do so, we should focus on the other person’s feelings and needs – really listen to the other! It might help to have a conversation with a stranger about meaningful things.
Habit 4: Seek Experiential Adventures. Move into experience! Like George Orwell, try living below the line for a period of time.
Habit 5: Travel in Your Armchair. Put yourself into the other person’s shoes – someone from another culture, another time, another place. A defeated enemy would a case in point.
Habit 6: Inspire a Revolution: We often hear of horrors on a huge scale – e.g. the holocaust, rather than examples of mass empathy in action – e.g. the anti-slave movement.
Conclusion: Empathy opens the doors of our moral concern and then laws and rights wedge it further open. Balance introspection with ‘outrospection’. Change the MBA to an MES – Master of Empathy Studies. Change ‘I think, therefore I am’ into ‘You are, therefore I am’.
Perth Writers’ Festival 2016
18 – 21 February
