the people you love are not people.
The only way to reach an authentic empathy is through and beyond characterization.
There are a number of studies that suggest people who read more fiction tend to be more empathetic. And while empathy, like any tool of perspective, is useful, it is also fundamentally neutral and contingent on context. Characterization, similarly, is a neutral and useful tool, but neutrality is not without consequence. We may empathize with heroes, villains, and secondary characters (recall the “I am not the main character” trend), but this is nevertheless a form of anthropomorphization. Where this might become dangerous is in how popular culture frames our interaction with reality. It’s obvious that characters are not the same as real people; nevertheless, the potential consequences of fictional characterization seem to drive our interactions with others.
Is your wife a narcissist? Is your husband a slob? Sure. But not really. Useful terms are just as reductive as they are practical, because usage itself revolves around minimizing variables. As with the errors of certain sciences—corrected by Chaos Theory—anything understood in a vacuum loses sight of its true complexity. Of course, this is not to excuse slobbery or narcissism (get a therapist, both of you), but characters, even “complex” ones, are developed through a filter of a few basic traits that define their relationship to reality. This is subhuman at its core. Whatever empathy we might draw from reading fiction is also fantasy. Useful fantasy, nonetheless, but a fantasy that can justify murder in the same breath. A common cliché is to ask, “What’s the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?” The answer is perspective, which is not to say that there is no evil, but an evil act is built on context, and context is an emergent retrospective product. As we create history based on a multitude of contexts, it becomes even more retroactive.
The ultimate issue with empathy derived from interacting with fictions (or even personality tests) is that these fictions take place within a specific perspective and moral context—one important to the individual, but a far cry from what might be considered Truth.
The next literary movement is fermenting in the brains of a few experimental writers. It will likely be unreadable to us, featuring uncanny humanization, deconstruction, and the death of any coherent literary or thematic sense. Some might suggest that postmodern literature has already done this, but it’s impossible not to extract theme from the current literary structures and standards. And where any theme is absolutely present, characters cannot be people, because they always exist in service to the theme. Even in our own lives, the danger of therapy is the creation of narrative, the creation of meaning where there really need not be any. It is making capital-T Truth out of thin air. And while that is a beautifully human capacity, there is more truth where those structures collapse (consider the difference between Newtonian and Quantum physics, for example, though we are still in the process of trading one story for another).
The next literary movement will come to us like Shiva. Anthropomorphization will become anthropology, then anthropology will wither away to make way for something else, much like Marx’s “state”. We will reject it. We probably already have. But it will feature people, and maybe, like with AI, the final question we might ask about our characters is, “Are they alive?” And in a sense, if they are more than characters as we understand them now, then yes, those Frankenstein monsters of future literature may very well be alive. Maybe then fiction will produce real empathy, something expansive, something we’ve never experienced before. But as long as the character orbits the theme, we fiction readers will continue to turn our real lives into fictions and continue to believe that characters are useful enough facsimiles of ourselves. Because to whatever extent, they are useful.
An authentic empathy is just out of reach.
And we are blocking our own way, for now.