That Invisiblilia Episode on Empathy

I referred yesterday to an Invisibilia episode from this last April, "The End of Empathy." It got name-checked in the dramaturg's introduction to Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a play by Will Arbery in which white conservative Catholic characters debate the place of empathy in Trump-era conservatism. The Ann Coulter-ish Teresa argues strenuously against empathy, sounding some of the same notes as Sohrab Ahmari has. Basically, we're sick of empathy.

I've written previously about empathy at conferences before. Empathy has long been registered as one of the primary benefits of theatre. Since acting is by nature a matter of stepping into another person's shoes, and since so many plays are about getting the inside view of someone else's perspective, empathy is a primary tool theatre folk like me use.

But, for such an integral-to-the-craft notion, empathy is fairly recent. The term is just a little over a hundred years old unless you attach it to the related-but-not-quite-the-same term sympathy. It's  terminally vague and inconsistently defined from discipline to discipline. Is empathy merely a matter of perspective-taking, imagining how the other feels in X circumstance? Or does empathy imply a synchronization between empathizer and empathizee (terms I've made up just now)? Is empathy where you lose yourself in the other's feelings? Does empathy with someone mean you agree with or endorse them? Or is that sympathy? Which should medical professionals practice? Teachers? Officers of the law or courts? Does empathy lead to kindness? Does kindness require empathy as a prerequisite?

There's scads of debate about this across the disciplines and over the decades.

I'm skeptical about empathy. That is, I have a kneejerk distrust of any unqualified praise of empathy. That said, I have even more distrust for those who throw up their hands and decide to hell with it.

The Invisibilia episode caught my attention. I've listed to most of it. I have some issues with it.

It's a bit of a meta episode. Hannah Rosin, one of the hosts, introduces Lina Misitzis, a producer who's essentially trying out for a position at Invisibilia. Rosin gives Misitzis an interview she had with one Jack Peterson. Misitzis was to turn this interview into an Invisibilia piece. She decides to go a different direction.

Before we hear her direction, though, Rosen has us listen to her initial version of things.

Peterson is a former incel, a disaffected young man who for a while decided that his perceived difficulties with women were due to (1) his own unattractiveness and lack of virility; and (2) the fact that women ("femoids" as his fellow incels referred to women) were irrational, evil beings dedicated to harming men, mainly by refusing to have sex with them.

In the original Rosen interview (I should say, the edit of the interview as Rosin imagined it), Jack retells his own history with an unnamed woman (M) with whom he had a long on-again/off-again affair through his teens. This affair seems, as Jack tells it, well-salted with a lot of unhealthy and flat-out abusive dynamics, including Jack hacking into M's accounts and sending nude pictures of her to her college, boss, and family. He'd call and cry and say if she leaves him he'll commit suicide.

After yet another long-distance altercation in which M said she didn't want to see him again, Jack flies to her location and begs her to take him back. In his account, she has him strip down to his undies (to make sure he isn't armed) and then proceeds to strangle him. A half-naked Jack escapes, bangs on a window for help. Someone calls the police. When the police arrive, Jack asserts that he's suicidal to "protect" M from being arrested. This apparently starts his journey into (or is it out of?) incel-dom. After a few of the mass shooting incidents where incel-identifying men slaughtered people, he began to step away from the movement, eventually becoming a sort of spokesperson for former incels. He is 25 now.

Then we hear the version Misitzis produces.

Alarmed by what she sees as Rosen's credulity in trying to get into Jack's head, Misitzis presents a different version of the story, one that casts Jack's actions in a much different light. Specifically, she reviews Jack;s tale through the lens of women she knows (the many, many women she knows) who have suffered at the hands of stalkers and abusers. Her version is pretty stark: Jack, who has a history of abusing M, refuses to take no for an answer and flies to her location uninvited. She is apparently alarmed enough to ask him to strip to his undies to make sure he's not armed and planning to hurt her. This is, Misitzis offers, classic abuser behavior.

Misitzis underlines this point by re-cutting Jack's recorded account--but interspersing it with accounts of a woman (not M) who describes her abuser's actions. Thus we get a back-and-forth dynamic instead of a monologue: Jacks says I flew to her. The woman says One day he shows up out of the blue at my house, begging to talk to me.

Why, Misitzis asks, must we really feel empathy for Jack, who seems even now to have narrated himself into the position of victim in this story (he even goes so far to suggest that he's suffered much more than M ever has)? Why is it his side of the story we hear, his I-really-learned-from-this transformation that gets the limelight? This is, Misitzis suggests, a typical (and typically Invisibilia) peon to empathy, one that in her view demonstrates why empathy is such a problem concept.

By this point in the podcast, I'm mostly around the lake. I have a whole lot of feelings about what's happened so far--not just with Jack but with the producers.

More tomorrow.