Visit theallusionist.org/sentiment to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, howl at the linguistic moon.
In this episode we’re in our feelings - or, at least, prodding some of the words in the lexicon that are about feelings, it’s not an emotionally rousing or demanding episode to listen to, I don’t think; no hankies required. However I will issue the content note: there are mentions of death, cancer in adults and babies, and suicide. There are also a few category B swears.
On with the show.
HZ: I was struggling with trying to figure out really what the difference is between sympathy and empathy. Can either of you help me help myself?
SANDHYA DIRKS: Okay. Ooh, this is complicated because these are complicated words that have gotten all tangled up in each other.
HZ: I have had to look up ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’ so many times - today alone - to try to fix in my mind what the difference is, because I do find they are often used as if they are interchangeable - which my descriptivist brain should be fine with, but clashes with my hankering for semantic clarity. Both words share the ‘path’, same as in ‘pathos’ and ‘pathetic’, which was Greek for emotion or suffering. ‘Sympathy’ has been in English since the late 16th century, and etymologically means ‘feeling together’, so it’s a feeling you share with someone else. ‘Compassion’ is a Latin translation of the same thing. Meanwhile the word ‘empathy’ is a relative newcomer to English, from the early 1900s, and it is more about understanding someone else’s feelings without having to have those feelings yourself. But, like feelings themselves, it’s difficult to keep these words tidy and defined and not confused.
SANDHYA DIRKS: Sympathy does involve understanding from your own perspective. But empathy involves you doing the work to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.
HZ: Like a projection.
SANDHYA DIRKS: Right. For example, we've gone through this hellish year where my baby had cancer. And so maybe the only people that can have sympathy for me are folks that have gone through something similar, that have had a sick child; but y'all can have empathy for me, right? You can understand that that must feel horrible. And those are both very noble things. It's so funny because like empathy's become the emotional connector du jour of our epoch, where there's radical empathy and everyone talks about empathy and "We need to have more empathy," but it seems like empathy has become this thing where it's about you feeling what someone else feels, you trying to walk in someone else's shoes for a mile.
HZ: But that’s what ‘sympathy’ is supposed to mean! Although, empathy is an English version of the German translation of the Greek εμπάθεια; the German version was einfühlung, and it meant ‘in feeling’, so more like entering into someone else’s feelings. Which I think has more in common with the way ‘empathy’ is often used.
SANDHYA DIRKS: So in this weird way, it ends up recentering the self within somebody else's experience.
JULIA FURLAN: I also think that the reason that we don't use sympathy as much as empathy is because of shame, and people feel that if somebody has sympathy for you, then they pity you. And that means that you should be ashamed of something, sometimes.
JULIA FURLAN: I'm Julia Furlan. I use she/her pronouns. I am an audio professional, which is my latest term for the many things that I do: I edit, I host, I teach.
SANDHYA DIRKS: My name is Sandhya Dirks, and I am a correspondent for NPR on the national desk. I report on race and identity, but really what I report on is power and systems, and specifically systems of power.
HZ: In the audio industry that they and I work in, empathy is venerated as the way to draw in an audience and explain something about the world via a story from a real person’s lived experience. Not in this show, of course, if I catch an emotion round here I squash it with my sturdiest dictionary. But Julia and Sandhya have thought deeply about how empathy is deployed in factual storytelling; it can be very bewitching, the notion of changing minds by changing hearts.
SANDHYA DIRKS: I feel like it's actually like a manipulative way to kind of say, “Look, oh, I've done something, I've cared, I'm a good person. That's enough. I care about this thing that's happening to this poor poor person.”
HZ: I suppose it's like a safe context in which to kind of rehearse what your own response might be when something happens to you.
JULIA FURLAN: It’s like the ultimate choose your own adventure. It's like you're in the thing and you're trying to figure out what you're gonna do from there.
SANDHYA DIRKS: We've borrowed somebody's story in order to have an emotional meaning for ourselves, in order to feel like we have compassion for other people, but has anything actually changed? Has our compassion actually grown? Have we reckoned with our own undigested grief? Probably no. And so it creates the sense of having done something, when in fact, all we've heard is a story.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I'm always really interested in the question of how we communicate complexity. Story as this sort of very highly structured entry point is one way that journalists in particular are taught to communicate complexity. And so we see all the time that like the lead in a news article has to start with a human interest: that what we're trying to talk about is all of the factors that have led to significant delays in airports, and that's actually about the pandemic and hiring practices and shifting labour laws and the financial state of the airline industry; but the opening paragraph has to be about an 18-year-old who's been stranded in the airport for 36 hours and had to sleep on a yoga mat, because we need an entry point into complexity. It's too much. It's too big. We can't just look at a system and be like, "Oh yeah, look at this system. This is bad!" We want to know: how is it impacting people? And that is, for a lot of people, a useful entry point. But I think we overuse it, and as a result, lose sight of things that actually can't be explained well via anecdote or via personal individual experience.
My name is Hannah McGregor. I am an academic and a writer and a podcaster living on the traditional and unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. And I am the author of A Sentimental Education, out now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. My book is about the conundrum that I think many people who love literature and storytelling encounter at some point in our lives, which is that books have been incredibly meaningful to us; stories have shaped who we are; and yet any claims that reading or listening to a particular kind of podcast or watching a particular kind of movie make you a better or more empathetic person: those claims really fall apart the second you apply any pressure to them. So what do we do with the kind of irreconcilability of: I believe that stories have meant a huge amount to me and have shaped the person I have become, and yet highly literate cultures are not kinder.
HZ: Well, now you put it like that, that does seem like a flaw.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It does, doesn't it?
HZ: Or maybe they'd be worse.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Maybe they'd be worse, you're right. We haven't been AB testing. But I certainly think, built into this sense of reading makes you better is, of course, a deeply classed argument that is based on the sort of tradition of who can seek out a liberal arts education, who has the leisure time to engage in reading for pleasure, these kinds of questions. So there's I think often a lot at stake in the idea that I, a person who spends time reading, am just a more empathetic and kinder person. And again, you know, look at people who are middle class and highly educated, and then look at folks who maybe have not had access to education, to formal education or who don't read. And are they crueler people? Are they less empathetic people? Again, I don't think any argument that suggests that would actually hold water.
HZ: I don't know where I achieved empathy from. I do think I have it now, but the stories that were prevalent when I was a child were not nice ones; they weren't kind, they were like fairy stories where a witch would make you vomit diamonds at best, but a wolf might eat you. Or it's like Roald Dahl, where you feed some poison to your grandmother.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yep. Yep. So those are stories with their own lessons. It's just that in that particular tradition of the fairytale, the lesson is a cautionary one that it's the establishment of taboo and the creation of a set of acceptable behaviors. And that's one tradition of children's literature. And then there's another tradition of children's literature, which is about watching children learn to be kind and be rewarded for being kind. And that's the tradition that I certainly grew up reading. Am I kind because I read all of these books where like plucky girls were kind and were ultimately rewarded for it?
HZ: Well, there's no control experiment.
HANNAH McGREGOR: No way of knowing.
HZ: So: inconclusive. What do you think about the recent trend for "be kind" just being a slogan?
HANNAH McGREGOR: So this, when I asked the question, like, "Am I kind because these books made me kind?" part of what's loaded into that question is, is kindness at all useful, particularly as a politic. And any evocations of kindness as a universal good, any requests that we all put our differences aside and find our common humanity immediately makes me suspicious. Like that's the moment when the sentimentality radar starts pinging.
HZ: It can be a bit of a thoughtstopper, can't it?
HANNAH McGREGOR: It is a thought stopper. It is absolutely a thought stopper. "Be kind" suggests - it has a kind of implicit second clause after it: "Be kind instead of…” - right? Be kind, don't be critical. Be kind, don't think too much about what's going on here. And it's that implicit second clause, that kindness needs to supplant critical attention to the conditions of our world.
HZ: Or complex thought.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes.
HZ: I approve of kindness, when appropriately applied, for sure. But I preferred it when it was subtext, not text.
HANNAH McGREGOR: And when it becomes an imperative. The moment it becomes an imperative, it becomes a way to then label those who are kind, and those who are not.
HZ: And how do you quantify kindess - is there a test to prove it? How do you even know what kindness is, it might vary in any given situation! Also it’s a bit of a buzzword at the moment, but things could change semantically for kindness at any time - ‘sentimental’ was similarly a catchword in the 18th century, when in many European cultures there was a trend towards work about emotions in philosophy and the arts: theatre, novels, music, paintings, sentimentality all over the place. But with every trend there’s a backlash, and sentimentality was discredited as self-indulgence and too much feeling precluded enough thinking. Thus by the end of the 18th century, ‘sentimental’ had become a diss. And more than two hundred years later, it still hasn’t escaped that.
HZ: How would you define sentimentality?
HANNAH McGREGOR: Oh, with great difficulty. It's an incredibly slippery word. But in general it is kind of a mode of storytelling or a form of culture that is extremely interested in the emotional landscape, and that is particularly interested in the way that we can use emotion to overcome difference. Sentimentality was also a genre of writing, starting in the 19th century, maybe starting earlier, but certainly sort of coming to the forefront in the 19th century with books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, that have very particular genre logics, like a sentimental novel does the following things in the same way we can expect like a sci-fi novel to do the following things. The genre of the sentimental novel emerged out of the same historical moment as the sort of cult of domesticity.
HZ: The sentimental literature I just mentioned before, that flourished as part of the Enlightenment movement in 18th century Europe, was mostly written by men and about big feelings; but in 19th century USA, sentimental writing was associated with women and the emotions were packed up neat and tidy and definitely not epic.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It's predominantly women's writing, not exclusively, but largely women writing sentimental novels, and they tend to be novels that are about women learning to be the way that they ought to be. So women learning emotional self management, domestic management, and white women, explicitly white women, learning how to become the kind of angel in the house that was the paragon of white femininity. And that very frequently took the form of these stories about girls encountering emotional challenges and learning to deal with them so that ultimately they can mature into the kind of women that we need in order to reproduce the white nation state, is the sort of goal like the reproduction of whiteness via becoming a mother and wife.
HZ: What was the reason for that trend flourishing in the 19th century? Was it increased literacy amongst white women?
HANNAH McGREGOR: Very much so. Yeah. Increased literacy, increased access to authorship, increased access to education, as well as like a particular kind of logic of empire at work, because the 19th century is kind of the peak of British imperialism. Sentimentality is also a sort of technology of imperialism, that says, like, "Look at how white women make the world better. Look at how white women can provide the stable domestic space that men can return to." That sort of helps the empire to establish continuity despite the chaos that is the actual reality of imperial expansion. It's violence, it's chaos, it's war; but at its heart, we have the angel in the house making everything continue smoothly and beautifully.
Sentimentality can also be a relationship we have to a piece of culture that itself is not inherently sentimental. So I have a sentimental attachment to, say, that movie or that book or that place, because of the way that I have imprinted an emotional narrative onto it.
Part of my interest in sentimentality was realizing the role that it played in my own process of responding to my mother's illness and then death. So my mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was eight - and then died by suicide when I was 16 after a terminal diagnosis. And through that period, I really attached myself to these stories because they made her death make sense, because that was a thing that women did. And in the process, it gave me a script; it gave me a sort of way of managing what felt completely out of control. And also, it stripped away her complexity as a person, because once you have turned a person into a sentimental trope, they're not a person anymore. They're not complex and messy and somebody who I had screaming fights with and disagreed with about stuff; now they're just an idea about what a mother becomes.
And it took me a really long time to realize that my application of these sort of sentimental tropes to this personal experience was stripping away so much of the nuance and the complexity in it, and stripping away so much of the person that she was. But the thing is that when you strip away that very helpful framing that makes everything make sense, you then have to stare deep into the howling storm of meaninglessness; that you just have to say, oh, people die because no reason. There's no reason. Because we're meat. Because we're made out of meat, and sometimes our meat goes bad and then we die.
HZ: Well, that's the reason: meat decay.
HANNAH McGREGOR: That’s the reason. And that is a lot harder, I think, to wrap your head around than these sort of lovely tidy tied up with a bow, you know, “She died because she was too pure for this world.”
HZ: Or she had a kind of picturesque but unnamed wasting disease with no obvious symptoms until she breathes her last.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes. Yes. Precisely.
HZ: There's a lot of literature centered around children with dead mothers.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Mm. It's very useful to have a dead mother.
HZ: Do you notice much sentimental stuff people say to you regarding your mother's illness and death, then or now?
HANNAH McGREGOR: Absolutely. The hardest thing, I think, is encountering the way other people want to sanctify her, that people want your dead mother to be a saint, because that's what a dead mother is for. And that is a thing that people have wanted to apply to me in some way, a sort of, "Well, you got to become the person you are because she died, and isn't that beautiful?"
HZ: Oh. That's a variation on "Everything happens for a reason".
HANNAH McGREGOR: It is absolutely a variation on “Everything happens for a reason.” It helped you become the person you were sooner because you went through, you learnt - people really wanna reframe it, and I’m just like, what a...
HZ: Without suffering, you would have been an insubstantial person, of course.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Absolutely. Can you imagine me without a major childhood tragedy?
HZ: What if we would have been better without some of the things happening,
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yeah, what are some of the things were genuinely just bad? What if I'm becoming worse? But also, just what a way of stripping her of her own humanity, of being like, “You were just a trope in somebody else's life journey.”
HZ: An inciting incident.
HANNAH McGREGOR: “You were just an inciting incident.” But we love doing that to people, right? We love taking people and turning them into side characters in our lives, who have something to teach us and then helpfully exit before they gain any complexity.
JULIA FURLAN: What it makes me think of is that stories are keyholes. Like you're looking, you think that you're getting the full picture, but your eye is up against the keyhole. And you're really just seeing whatever that's given to you. And I think that that, that part of it is the biggest problem that journalists and “storytellers”, whatever you call yourself - “audio professional” is what I use so that I don't have to say any of the other things - but there's so much manipulation that listeners or readers do not get, because they're not getting the full context. And when you pick up a microphone in our profession and you point it at someone, there is no way that you can get the full context of someone's humanity. And if you're having empathy for somebody without the full context of their humanity, I don't know how that works, exactly.
SANDHYA DIRKS: It's not just a keyhole. When we talk about empathy, it's also: the idea that you can get outside of yourself, that we can imagine someone else's experience is so audacious: because human beings are not that freaking imaginative. I mean, like a unicorn is just a horse with a horn! We did not go that far to get to our most magical creature. We just like grafted two things on top of each other. So the idea that you could actually fully imagine yourself as someone else - and this becomes most problematic when we are asked to imagine somebody who is sitting in the crosshairs of systems that are completely different from us, or systems that work for some folks. If you are white, if you are male, if you are of a certain class, those systems were built to work for you. They were built to work against other folks. And you can't empathize your way through understanding how those systems are operating on people. And so I think that that's where empathy as a narrative strategy really becomes manipulation, because it's this idea that you can feel someone else's pain and their pain then is their only thing. That's who they are. That's what they are reduced to. Rather than not only a complex, fully lived human life, but also to understand that is what is happening to them, isn't just an emotional process, it's also a systemic one.
HZ: Yeah, that's the thing about story as well, just often the reduction of people to trauma and to their lived experience and not their thoughts and ideas.
JULIA FURLAN: Yeah, because otherwise, I mean, struggle is really boring, you know? Like actually living a struggle experience, living a traumatic experience, living the repercussions of that traumatic experience, and especially if it is over a lifetime: that is not an exciting experience. It is hard. I mean, I guess it's not always boring, but it's not great. And when you put someone on the worst day of their life or in the worst period of their life in the middle of your story, so that it can take a turn and up the emotional stakes, you're doing that on their back, you're doing that by putting them in that position. And it's not fair.
SANDHYA DIRKS: You're also doing it to center the audience.
JULIA FURLAN: Exactly.
SANDHYA DIRKS: And that's so that the audience can empathize, and if you're making things for a certain audience and the audience is somebody like you, then you're skewing that person's story to center the viewer rather than the liver of the life. And empathy is a way to hit us emotionally. And when you're talking about hitting someone emotionally, you're talking about manipulating them, right? I love this idea, I'm even tempted by it, this idea of purely connecting through emotion; but it's impossible. We have to separate between empathy as it works and empathy as this beautiful idea. Because I do think actually empathy is a beautiful idea. We want to feel connected to each other, right? And so I think empathy is this incredibly noble concept. And I think we have to remember that before we start to tear it down. I also think that in practice, it does a lot of absolving us, and a lot of hiding its actual more nefarious operational status, which is to often reify and reinforce power dynamics, and that it's absolutely a manipulative technique.
HZ: Hannah McGregor, at the time you and I are talking, I'm in England and the queen died a few days ago, and it is a very sentimental time. And the impact of the sentimentality, of course, is to shut down any critique of the institution of monarchy, let alone any examination of what the queen personally may have done.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And so in that moment, we can see how sentimentality is being used as a call to find a common ground that explicitly denies the possibility of engaging with politics or history in any real way, that the suggestion is that we must unite around this shared feeling of mourning and that within that shared feeling of mourning, we can't actually say anything specific, because to be specific would disrupt the sentimental urge. Which is why sentimentality is often so depoliticizing.
HZ: It's a very effective form of propaganda, because it does really stop people doing anything.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yep, yep. Absolutely.
HZ: Rather than rousing them to action, it's sort of the opposite thing. It's like a kind of sleepy gas pumped into our brains.
HANNAH McGREGOR: It is a sleepy gas pumped into our brains. And a lot of critics of sentimentality have essentially argued that very same thing, that sentimental novels - and sentimental culture in general - is meant to make us feel good, and feel like we are doing something, while actually causing no change of any variety.
SANDHYA DIRKS: And this is the other reason that story gets privileged so heavily: it's because we don't wanna bore people by talking about systems. We just wanna talk about people's feelings and emotions. But when you do that, you keep things in the level of the psychological. And when you do that, you're actually limiting what the story is telling, because it's just telling a story that's sort of based in this kind of arbitrary idea, that we are only bound by our emotional selves. Which is not how the world works. People get how power operates, if you just take them there; if you share with them some of the ways in which these systems are functioning around these emotional experiences, people will follow you, because they get it, because they recognize it. But otherwise, you're basically denying the way in which systems work, right? You're creating an invisible force field. You're not naming it.
It's connection without analysis, right. It's connection without understanding. And it doesn't mean we should stop telling stories because you know what? I love stories. And I love fictional stories, and I love non-fictional stories. And I think they're so powerful. They really are. The reason I talk about this and I shit on empathy and I shit on stories is because I love the idea of those things. I just think we have this illusion that they exist in a way that they don't. And I would like us to try to use them in the best way possible. So stories are all bullshit, but also they're magical and we should do a better job of understanding what they're capable of and the ways in which they manipulate us and others.
HZ: I like to think that people can achieve empathy without seeing an identifiable story before they're willing to make that leap. But perhaps I'm being naive, or optimistic.
HANNAH McGREGOR: I think that these kinds of identifiable stories are one of many possible building blocks in creating your own sort of empathetic relation to the world.
HZ: Granted, thinking about, say, stories in the Bible where they pop It into a parable, so kind of slips into the brain a bit easier than, “if you were generous to your fellow men and shared your stuff, that would be a good thing to do.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: Mm-hmm, yeah. The allegorical instinct is there throughout Western literature. And I also think is so much messier than we tend to actually see, because often we pull these allegories out and then just hold onto the allegory without returning to the original story. So we've got all of these biblical allegories where we're like, “yeah, yeah, yeah, a thing happens - anyway, the allegory is turn the other cheek.”
HZ: “OK, I’ll figure out how to go multiply my fish.”
HANNAH McGREGOR: But go back and read the actual story and you're like, sorry, how do we get to “turn the other cheek”? The stories are messy and wild and weird, and then we pull out the allegory and say, “Oh we can stop paying attention to the details. Here's what it actually means.” It's a similar compulsion to be like, “Here's the messy incomprehensible stuff of reality; let's just pull out the allegory. Let's just find the kernel.” But in the process of deciding what constitutes the kernel, we are always applying a particular lens. You gotta decide what the moral of a story is; and that moral is not inherent. It's not natural. It's not spontaneous.
HZ: Well, I was just thinking the colonel’s in the living room with the lead pipe. I suppose those are the preconceptions I've come with.
HANNAH McGREGOR: See, I'm just thinking about popcorn, so, we're different. We contain multitudes.
HZ: I'm always thinking a bit about popcorn.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Also, homonyms.
HZ: I feel like I've made you be quite critical of sentimentality while we've been talking, but there is also usefulness to it. At the very least, there's an emotional vent for people or they're able to access an emotion within themselves that perhaps they had been unable to access, or deliberately avoiding.
HANNAH McGREGOR: There is a place for emotional reactions to things. There is a place for feeling in our politics. And attending to emotion is not automatically or inherently depoliticizing. In fact, sometimes taking our emotions seriously can be a really important political intervention sometimes. It doesn't have to be a sort of opiate of the masses. There needs to be room for emotion within these critiques that we are engaged in. And I think refusing to let those things be divided off, refusing to say, “Over here on the one hand are people having an emotional reaction to the Queen's death, and over here on the other hand are those of us who are too smart to fall for that, and we are better than them because they're doing feelings and we're doing brains and brains are better than feelings” is a trap for everybody involved, because it turns those of us who are critical of the monarchy and British imperialism into people who hate feelings and love when old ladies die.
HZ: That's just coincidence.
HANNAH McGREGOR: But it also means it is its own form of stripping out complexity, right? Because, OK: I have absolutely no interest in the monarchy as a system, and the death of the Queen made me miss my lovely British nana, who loved the Queen so much. And I loved that woman. And the Queen connects me to her in a way that did cause me to have an emotional reaction to the Queen's death. And I don't have to pretend that I don't have an emotional connection to this whole complex series of events in order to also not like the monarchy. And an insistence that I can't have a sentimental reaction to the Queen and still be critical of the monarchy is an insistence that sort of traps us all in an either/or version of the world. And the reality is, we can have sentimental reactions to things; often those sentimental reactions connect us to our own histories, to our loved ones, to stories that have been meaningful to us. And you don't have to slice that part of yourself off in order to also be somebody who thinks about history.
HZ: Yeah, also she was one human being as well as figurehead of an institution. And you can have differing feelings about those things.
HANNAH McGREGOR: Yes. Yeah, you can.
HZ: I mean, I don't have to, but…
HANNAH McGREGOR: No, you don't have to.
HZ: But one might.
HANNAH McGREGOR: One could.
HZ: So we're not - to make it clear to people - we're not saying don't be unempathetic in the sense that don't care at all about your fellow human beings.
JULIA FURLAN: Not at all. Yeah.
SANDHYA DIRKS: Care so much! Care more, but don't care at the limits of yourself. And don't, don't care without understanding, without analysis, isn't really understanding. Right. So like it's also the limits of empathy.
HZ: Don't have no empathy, but don't stop at empathy. Empathy is just the beginning.
SANDHYA DIRKS: Oh, I love that.
HZ: It's not the beginning and end of the work.
SANDHYA DIRKS: Empathy is a doorway. It's a way in, but you still have a whole world to explore. If you feel empathy for somebody, that's just a starting point.
HZ: You heard from, in order of appearance, and also reverse order of appearance: Sandhya Dirks, Julia Furlan and Hannah McGregor. I’ll link to all of them at theallusionist.org/sentiment. Sandhya Dirks and Julia Furlan are audio makers, and Hannah McGregor is an academic and a podcaster - her shows include Witch, Please and the Secret Feminist Agenda. And her new book about emotion and sentimentality in storytelling is A Sentimental Education, out now.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
immanent - that’s immAnent with an A not an I, like how I used to have to introduce the Allusionist -
immanent, adjective: existing or operating within; (of God) permanently pervading the universe. Often contrasted with ‘transcendent’.
Try using ‘immanent’ in an email today.
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