Here's a short quiz to test your empathy.
If someone you disagree with dies, do you:
a. Find something nice to say
b. Say, "C'est la vie!"
c. Celebrate and throw a party
d. Break into their tomb and steal their stuff
If you answered 'A', you have empathy. If you answered 'C', you belong on Twitter. And if you answered 'D', congratulations: you are literally Voldemort, which means you have zero empathy.
One of my life's goals (we all need goals, even if they're stupid) is to figure out why so many kids (as well as adults) liked the Harry Potter books so much. At first I thought it was because JK Rowling makes an effort to ensure that the reader likes the characters before killing them off. This is quite rare these days (take murder mysteries or sci-fi movies, for example). Or maybe it was because it's a chance to watch people growing up right in front of our eyes. As you certainly know from the movie, at first the characters are primarily interested in obtaining calorie-rich nutrients. By the end they're talking about souls and risking their lives, just as their ancestors did, to defend their civilization. It's amazing to watch.
Professor Dumbledore in an earlier incarnation
Or maybe it was that in that magical world, there are no rules. Not only are there no Health & Safety bureaucrats mandating fire extinguishers, carbon monoxide detectors, seat belts, or safety helmets. There is also no punishment for any of the multitude of crimes the three members of the Potter crime syndicate commit, which include grand theft auto, arson, assault with deadly weapon, assault and battery, conspiracy to commit sedition, hippogriff rustling, manufacturing of illegal drugs, accessory to kidnapping, attempted murder, bank robbery, practicing medicine without a license, and (no doubt) overdue library book.
But now I'm convinced that the seven books are a 4000-page manual on how to experience empathy. Here's my evidence:
The most fanatical fans also tend to be slightly autistic—almost as much so as fans of Star Trek: The Original Series were back in the day, though I suspect that few Potter fans ever built a high-gain TV antenna so they could pick it up on a small UHF station in far away Steubenville, Ohio while in Pittsburgh, PA. Not that I know anyone who ever was geekish enough to do that. No.
One attribute of autism is difficulty experiencing empathy, or cognitive empathy as psychologists call it, which is the ability to infer the emotional state of others. Empathy is essential for communicating with other humans. Without it, we can only lecture and harangue each other.
As I mentioned, the defining trait of the villain, Voldemort, is that he utterly lacks empathy. He has literally lost part of his soul. This leads him to defeat twice: at the beginning, when he could not imagine that Harry's mum would defend Harry, and at the end, when he could not imagine that Narcissa's love for her child would overcome her loyalty to him. It seems to me Rowling is saying that whats-his-name's lack of empathy is what leads to his downfall.
Contrast that with how the heroes act. They shed tears and console each other when someone dies and feel shame when they do something wrong. They're able to infer each other's emotional state without verbal interactions. And by scrutinizing the details about how the characters interact, children automatically learn how to feel empathy. This is no trivial thing: it requires one to construct a model of the other person in one's head as a sentient being, what psychologists call Theory of Mind.
Not everyone can do this. If a child is mistreated or stressed, or if they feel worthless and inadequate, they may cut themselves off as a form of self-defense and lose the ability to feel empathy.
Empathy is something kids desperately need to learn, and I suspect it's one reason the HP books sold over 500,000,000 copies while other books on magic and dragons were just silly fantasy stories that now sit on remainder shelves at Barnes & Noble stores.
As I describe here, HP is not just a cute children's story. It is also a subtle work of developmental psychology that demonstrates how a lifetime of seemingly insignificant events—often occurring through nonverbal communication—can motivate a person to make a painful act of courage to defend their civilization. The fans were not just mindless fanatics; they were searching for that.
Contrast JK Rowling's understanding of empathy with that of the three trans activists who recently tried to dox her for expressing an opinion with which they disagreed. (Or for that matter, my own left-wing friend who tried to dox me.) They were unable to recognize, understand, or predict that their intended victim would be annoyed and how she would respond. It is a classic demonstration of low empathy.
This is what the Twitter world is destroying. Without nonverbal feedback, it's nearly impossible to imagine what the victim of one's tweet is experiencing. And so, simple emotions expressible in 280 characters, like hate and outrage, come to predominate by the force of natural selection.
nov 30 2021, 5:25 am. updated dec 05 2021
