View from the Precipice

In Part 1 of this essay, I explored the difficulties of applying the Golden Rule, which focuses on how an individual person should treat another, to group behavior, where collective responsibility takes the place of individual responsibility. Why should I have to pay reparations to or make special accommodations for the disadvantaged just because I happen to belong to a group that has benefited from wrongs or inequalities for which I’m not individually responsible? How is that fair or just? These are important and challenging questions if we are seeking to create a fair and just society for all, not just formulating rules for interpersonal relations.

I also examined the logical outcome of philosopher John Rawls’s thought experiment in support of applying the Golden Rule to situations where groups are asked to assume responsibility for ameliorating social inequities for which they might not be individually responsible. Imagine yourself in an “Original Position,” says Rawls, not yet born and without any knowledge of how, when, where, and with what kind of body or brain you will be born. Given the freedom to pick the kind of world in which you will spend your future life, your only rational choice would be a society in which the inequalities between different groups, whether natural or imposed, are evened out or ameliorated by some kind of social welfare mechanism. After all, you could very well end up a member of a disadvantaged group.

Rawl’s thought experiment neatly expands the scope of the Golden Rule from the individual to the group, saying, in effect, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto anyone you might become.”  From the “Original Position,” a fair and just society for all is identical to a fair and just society for me.

The only problem with Rawls’s thought experiment, as I said in Part 1, is that his “Original Position” has no room for fully functioning persons, only purely rational beings. Persons are shaped by their genetic inheritance and the circumstances of their birth, including family histories—the topic with which we began—and a whole host of material influences and concerns that, for a conscious being not yet born, are simply inconceivable. Among these influences are those emotions and drives that lead to bias and tend to derange the proper workings of a rational mind. They are, for this reason, verboten in the Original Position, where what we like, love, prefer, or desire as individuals is to be put aside in favor of strictly rational decisions and conclusions.

But emotions and drives are also what impel persons to interact with other persons and, in doing so, try to make sense of their behavior in an act of imaginative identification we call empathy, which is nothing more than putting yourself in another’s place and trying to experience the world as they do.

Now there may be room for empathy of a strictly cognitive variety in Rawls’s Platonic Beforelife—he does, after all, ask us to imagine ourselves born into a variety of situations and conditions—but there is no room for its emotional variant, sympathy, where we are expected, in addition, to feel what it would be like to be a particular person (aside from our post-natal selves).

The Original Position, in short, is where we all become Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s—or rather, Doctor John Watson’s—“reasoning  machine”: “All emotions,” writes the good doctor in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. . . .  Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.” 

And yet Sherlock Holmes is not lacking in cognitive empathy. His standard procedure, in fact, requires that he imagine himself in the position of the culprit he’s pursuing in order to make sense of the physical clues left behind and to anticipate his quarry’s future moves. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” alas, the putative culprit is a woman who turns out to be innocent and, for the one and only time in his long and illustrious career, Homes is defeated. Having no first-hand knowledge of what women feel, let alone want, because he’s never fallen in love, he lacks the emotional empathy required to sympathize with Irene Adler’s situation and understand that she’s the victim in this case, not the criminal. He also underestimates her intellectual capabilities, to his later chagrin.

John Rawls isn’t the first philosopher to ask us to think rather than feel our way to the creation of a fair and just society. Plato was so committed to the idea that in The Republic he put the best thinkers, i.e., philosophers like him, in charge of doing so. In its later iterations, the political philosopher William Godwin extended the logic of fairness and justice for all to cover situations where the interests of society as a whole outranked those of any individual member of it. Faced with the choice of saving the life of the philosopher Fénelon or your own wife or mother in a house fire, wrote Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, you should save Fènelon, because the net benefit of his writings for society as a whole would far outweigh that of your wife or mother.

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Godwin’s Enquiry was published in February of 1793, just seven months before the French National Convention, France’s revolutionary government, passed the Law of Suspects, a decree empowering it to arrest not only the avowed enemies the French Revolution, but also anyone even suspected of harboring thoughts of opposing it. The Law of Suspects is often cited by historians as marking the formal beginning of what came to be called "The Reign of Terror." It invested absolute and summary power of detention, trial, and execution to a Committee of Public Safety under the direction of Maximillien Robespierre, leader of the radical Jacobin Party.

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Robespierre was motivated to advocate for and carry out the Law of Suspects by the strictly rational arguments of Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract held that the only legitimate form of government or “social contract” for creating and enforcing laws was a democracy whose elected leaders would carry out the General Will of the People. Because the Revolutionary government clearly represented, to Robespierre and the Jacobins, the General Will, and the General Will represented, in turn, the collective will of the People rather than that of any individual citizen or faction, Robespierre and his party felt justified in taking any and all measures deemed necessary to preserve the government that the People had legitimized. Anyone who opposed them, even in thought, were deemed “tyrants” guilty of treason and deserving death. Terror, in the form of the guillotine, became the revolutionary government’s most notorious tool for keeping these “tyrants” in line.

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In England, meanwhile, a young man who was to become one his country’s greatest poets, was tossing in his sleep. When the French Revolution began, with the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, William Wordsworth had welcomed it as a harbinger of democratic revolutions the world over, and of government reforms long overdue in his native country. A year later he and a college friend went on a walking tour of Europe that took them through a France transformed and jubilant, encountering in every village, town, and city a populace intoxicated by freedom. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he later wrote, “But to be young was very heaven!” [4] On his return home he became an avid disciple of Godwin and his school of thought.

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But as France’s revolutionary joy soured into mob violence, street massacres, and government paranoia, he came to doubt his own powers of moral reasoning,

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Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith,

Like culprits of the bar . . .

. . . till, demanding proof,

And seeking it in every thing, I lost

All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,

Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,

Yielded up moral questions in despair.

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Emotionally rudderless, Wordsworth found his faith in Reason as the ultimate and most trustworthy arbiter of moral questions increasingly challenged by the shocking events in France. The Reign of Terror dealt the coup de grace to that faith.

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[T]he old man from the chimney-nook,

The maiden from the bosom of her love,

The mother from the cradle of her babe,

The warrior from the field—all perished, all—

Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,

Head after head, and never heads enough

For those who bade them fall.

The Terror represented, not the fulfillment of Wordsworth’s dreams of democratic reform, but the nightmare of Reason unchecked by common human sympathy, which has no reasons. And Wordsworth, as Reason’s advocate, felt complicit in that outcome. “Through months, through years, long after the last beat /Of those atrocities,” wrote the poet,

I scarcely had one night of quiet sleep,

Such ghastly visions had I of despair,

And tyranny, and implements of death,

And long orations which in dreams I pleaded

Before unjust tribunals, with a voice

Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense

Of treachery and desertion in the place

The holiest that I knew of—my own soul.

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The pitiless excesses of the Reign of Terror were to be repeated during the course the next two hundred years by revolutionaries around the world who, on behalf of the marginalized, the dispossessed, the exploited, the disadvantaged, and the enslaved, sought to create a fairer and more just society. Swayed by ideas, suspicious and contemptuous of the “softer” human emotions—pity, compassion—as signs of an irrational weakness, they were willing to stop at nothing to achieve their noble aims: purges and show trials, gulags, killing fields, mass starvations.

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None of which, I’m certain, John Rawls meant to endorse when he conceived his thought experiment.

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What, then, are we to take away from Wordsworth’s experience of the French Revolution that can help us in assessing Rawls’s argument for a fair and just society for all?  

Perhaps nothing more than that the “Original Position” is an excellent spot for assessing what such a society should look like, but a very poor starting point for trying to achieve it.

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What the Reign of Terror taught the poet is that creating a fair and just society from the top down, through rational social engineering, cannot succeed by banishing the emotions, and particularly the sympathetic emotions, from any consideration in the planning of it, as Plato demanded. The citizens of the new Republic of Fairness and Justice must be capable of feeling what it’s like to be another person, a fellow citizen, whatever that person’s political position, economic status, race, color, creed, religion, or taste in movies. We have to change people’s hearts and minds, Wordsworth realized, before trying to change the society in which they, and we, are to live.

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Inculcating and cultivating and widening that capacity for sympathy, Wordsworth came to see, is a task entrusted to the poet, not the politician. It took a few years, and the help of a dear and trusted friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to arrive at this conclusion, but once he did, Wordsworth didn’t look back. His debut collection of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (published in 1800, expanded to two volumes in 1802) called attention to the homeless and impoverished, the dispossessed and despised of Britain, not as members of groups or constituencies or classes demanding redress, but as unique individuals: the shunned mother of an illegitimate child crazed by grief over its death; a wife abandoned by her husband and wasting away in their ruined cottage; a boy with what we’d now recognize as Down’s Syndrome bearing his affliction with cheer, an old man trying to survive on what he can grow on a small patch of public land, and many others.

Long before “BLM” became a rallying cry, Wordsworth was pointing to one suffering person after another and telling us, “This Life Matters!” He is our greatest poet of what he called “the domestic affections,” by which he meant not just the emotional ties that bind a person to their home and the people who live there, but a larger capacity for sympathy with people generally that flows from an expansion of that original, intimate circle of love and care and concern to the neighborhood, the nation, and the world.

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And so we come around, again, to family histories, and our interest in how each of us has become the person we’ve become. If there is an “original position” for becoming a person, it’s not to be found in some disembodied state predating our existence, as in Rawls’s thought experiment. It’s in our mother’s womb at the moment she gives birth. Or perhaps at the moment of our conception: in this female body, begotten by that male body, at this particular instant, and holding a reservation for a place in the world that may be cancelled at any time.

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Only by setting out from such an “original position” can a person eventually reach the point of imagining how it feels to be another person, not just how they see the world. The Golden Rule requires a transposition of affect, not just perspective.

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Among the many relics of my wife’s dead relatives that have outlasted their owners is a vintage stereoscope dating from the late 19th century, along with a stack of photographic “stereo cards” designed to be used with it. Each card presents two photographs side by side showing the same scene, person, or object, but taken from slightly different angles to mimic the parallactic offset of binocular vision that creates depth perception. The stereoscope sends one image to the viewer’s left eye and the other, taken in the same moment but at a slightly different angle, to the right, forcing the brain to fuse two otherwise flat scenes into a single, startingly three-dimensional picture.

The stereoscope seems to me as good a symbol as any of the way empathy works. Whether we have one eye or two, we all see things from just one point of view, and when we imagine the way another person experiences the world, we never leave that solitary, monocular view of the world entirely behind. How could we, without actually becoming the person we are imagining, heart, soul, and mind?  Empathy represents a momentary fusion of distinct perspectives, not beings, and each of these must remain itself if, together, they are to achieve any real depth of understanding, or of feeling.

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In “Reading What’s There” (accessible on this website through the “Archives” tab or directly at https://www.romansympos.com/vicarity), I made the same argument regarding literature’s infinite capacity to excite in its readers vicarious experiences of other people’s feelings and views of the world. It’s been said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. But he’s also incapable of seeing in depth. It’s only when we begin to exchange, share, and compare our experiences of the world that binocularity becomes a possibility, and multiple “ocularites” as well. Literature—and poetry especially—is sympathy’s stereoscope.  

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