View from the Precipice
July-August 2026
Every month Professor Sympos offers another view from the clifftop of septuagenarian and Anthropocene existence. He is not long for this life, and neither, apparently, is anyone who might survive him, whatever their age.
Before he died, Moses had his "Pisgah moment," beholding, from the mountain-top of that name, the Promised Land--a land he would never enter. What Professor Sympos beholds isn't the land he was promised, but he's not too worried: from what he can see of it, he's not sure he'll be missing much.
With nowhere to go but over the edge, Professor Sympos finds much to distract him here: a hawk soaring by, the bluettes at his feet. A gnarled pine hanging on. Scat. He'll let you know.
He can also, from the escarpment he's arrived at, look back at the dark valleys from which he and his antecedents emerged. Hindsight is not wisdom, but he cannot help feeling, comparatively speaking, enlightened.
FAMILY HISTORIES
by Roman Sympos
To jump to Part 2, click here.
Part 1
Like Nature, retirement abhors a vacuum. Among the many things rushing to fill the spaces left by a vanished work-life—Medicare red-tape, RMD tax-withholding, failing infrastructures (body, mind, residence), postponed travel—there’s the family history. The closer we get to the end of our lives, my wife and I find, the more we feel the urge, if not the urgency, to preserve, perpetuate, and contribute to what we know of our ancestries.
My wife feels more urgency than I do, perhaps because she’s got way more ancestry to deal with. I’ve got only a thin network of connections going back maybe three generations and disappearing, like a frail cobweb, once it jumps the pond, to Poland.
Hers extends three centuries back on this continent, well beyond her great-great-grandfather’s Lake Erie fishery, on both her father’s and her mother’s side, and she knows the English villages from which they migrated (though not on the Mayflower). Geographically, we’re talking about a swath of American real estate stretching from Massachusetts to Ohio before it achieved statehood (when it was known as “The Western Reserve”). These folks left enough letters, diaries, and artifacts—photos, postcards, clocks, jewelry, silverware, books and prints, even two busted tombstones!—to fill a museum, and I have, only half-jokingly, suggested that she and her siblings pool their resources to create one.
She seemed like the perfect person, therefore, to ask a question that’s rushed into my retirement vacuum along with all the other swirling dust motes of concern: Why?
Why do we care about family history? I mean aside from the obvious reasons, like medical and financial (genetic diseases, lines of inheritance). I used to think it was pride. There are whole industries based on this assumption. You can find coats of arms online (or make your own!) and biographies of famous (or semi-famous) people sharing your father’s last name or that of someone in your maternal line, where there are many more to choose from.
But my wife, speaking for herself, said no. Pride didn’t enter into it. She was curious, yes, and found the material she was compiling and transcribing and copying fascinating, a “slice of life” portrait of bygone eras of American and even European history. A doll belonging to her great-great-grandmother, for example, and made in Paris a century and a half ago, came with holes in its scalp to accommodate the clipped tresses of its young owner. Blonde and silky, they’re still there.
When pressed, my wife pointed out the obvious. “Knowing where you come from is important for knowing who you are.”
She has a point. Why should we take the least bit of pride in actions or accomplishments in which we had no part whatsoever? But ask any orphan, or anyone deprived of access to records of their ancestry, including much of this country’s Black population, how it feels, and you’ll soon realize that having a family history of any sort, however meager, is itself a privilege.
My wife’s reply put me in mind of Ross Macdonald’s detective novel, The Galton Case. In it, a rootless, fatherless young man raised in poverty comes forward claiming to be the long-lost grandson of a wealthy widow. Macdonald’s series PI, Lew Archer, who’s been hired by the widow to find her missing descendent, ends up accusing him of fraudulently playing on the old woman’s hopes just to get his hands on her money. To which the young man replies, “There’s more than money to a man’s inheritance. Above everything else, I wanted to be sure of my identity.”[1]
Turns out he’s right, and the rightful heir as well.
Looking into your family history isn’t always a gratifying experience, however. That’s a recurring lesson in Ross Macdonald’s oeuvre, beginning with The Galton Case, where the baneful consequences of one or another parent’s original sin are passed along unto the third generation, destroying the lives of the generation caught between. Typically, it’s Lew Archer’s job to bring these sins to light and help their surviving, third-generation victims heal, while making sure the guilty are, if not always punished (sometimes they’re dead), at least identified and, in a plot twist unusual in detective fiction, sometimes even forgiven. For Macdonld, who was abandoned by his father as a toddler and by his mother when he was five, forgiveness was crucial to the healing process.
So was revealing the truth.
A colleague of my wife’s—let’s call him Michael—with an ancient New World pedigree similar to hers, took it upon himself to look into his family history and found what many White descendants of our first settlers and colonists (but not my wife, thankfully, at least thus far!) have found in recent years: records of his ancestors’ ownership of enslaved people.
Michael’s story is not unusual these days. The story of Tom DeWolf, author, public speaker, workshop facilitator, and former Director/Manager for Coming to the Table, a non-profit dedicated to healing America’s racial wounds, is another case in point.
In 2001 DeWolf, then forty-seven, learned that his direct ancestor, antebellum U.S. Senator James DeWolf, not only had enslaved people working in his Rhode Island household, but also owned several plantations in Cuba where they toiled to enrich his family. He’d bought the plantations with the enormous fortune he’d amassed from the slave trade, continuing the traffic long after Rhode Island had declared it illegal. When he died in 1837, he was the second richest man in the United States.[2]
How do you come back from a discovery like this? It’s on the same scale as finding out your great grandfather helped run Auschwitz. Tom, like Michael, did the right thing. He sought to make amends: to work for reparations; to uncover and disseminate the hidden as well as better known history of slavery in the U.S., especially in the northern states; to contact descendants of these enslaved people in order to understand the full consequences of slavery better; and to help other White Americans understand and, more importantly, acknowledge them.
But why should Michael or Tom or anyone with a similar family history have felt personally responsible for cruelties and crimes perpetrated long before they were born and in which they had no part? If we’re not entitled to take pride in what our ancestors achieved, why should their sins be visited upon their children and their children’s children to the umpteenth generation?
They shouldn’t—at least, not on anyone in particular. Michael and Tom are, however, White Americans, and there is a good case to be made for seeking amends, monetary or otherwise, from the members of America’s White population generally, which has, historically and as a group, benefited from the steep rise in standards of living, especially compared to that of non-Whites, that were the direct result of the expropriated labor of enslaved Black people. These benefits were compounded over many generations by the Jim Crow laws and de facto discrimination that followed immediately in the wake of Black slavery.
Bottom line: whether or not your forebears owned or trafficked in enslaved people, if you were born White in America, before or after Emancipation, or just came over on the boat, you were automatically given a leg up. Not because “life’s not fair,” but because so much of the nation’s wealth has flowed, undeservedly, into the pockets of the White citizens who preceded you, whether or not they were your direct ancestors, creating a class that had the means to look out for its own at the expense of those not like them.
And by God, they did.
In A Theory of Justice, philosopher John Rawls put forth what is perhaps the most often cited argument for the justice of group reparations, direct or indirect, and of special accommodations, such as affirmative action, as means to compensate for the injustices of the past by equilibrating their outcomes in the present. The case he makes depends on a fundamental notion of justice as fairness—a definition on which everyone will agree, I think—and it goes like this.
Fairness is, to put it simply, the Golden Rule: doing unto another what you would have them do unto you if your positions were reversed. It’s what we mean by “putting yourself in another’s shoes.”
The Golden Rule or something very like it has been endorsed by every major world religion[3], and it makes so much intuitive sense that we could call it axiomatic, that is, in need of no argument to support it. However, it does have one big flaw if, like Rawls, you’re using it to make a case for building a just and fair society, not just to figure out how individuals living in that society should behave.
Reparative justice, for instance, is doing what’s fair if I injure another, or what’s fair to their survivors if I kill that person. I’d want to be treated the same way if I were in my victim’s shoes or their family's. In practice, this usually takes the form of monetary compensation. As cumbersome as such calculations may be, it's difficult to think of any viable alternatives. Few of us are competent to re-set a broken tibia and no one can bring a dead person back to life. Imprisonment or execution might be gratifying to the victim or their survivors, but punishment alone is not reparative and we’re well beyond the days of eye-for-eye retribution, though not, in this country unfortunately, a life for a life.
By extending the logic of reparative justice, we reach the conclusion that White Americans owe Black Americans monetary compensation because the wealth of today’s White Americans is, in large part, the product of expropriated Black labor multiplied over many generations—in short, a form of inherited theft.
Distributive justice works in much the same way. If I were born in poverty, or with a severe physical or mental handicap, with few or no opportunities to get an education or accumulate wealth no matter how hard I tried, I would want someone to extend a helping hand. Thus, reasoning from the Golden Rule, I should extend a hand to people who were born disadvantaged by physical or mental impairments or by the current distribution of wealth in American society. By extension, therefore, a fair and just society would require all its better-off citizens to allow a portion of their tax dollars to be used to even out the relative shortfalls in other citizens’ opportunities and incomes. They would also support the passage of laws that would favor the less advantaged in hiring and in securing loans, at least until the day arrives when they will have achieved equity with their more fortunate fellow citizens.
The glaring problem with both of these arguments is that they seek to apply a rule of individual moral behavior and responsibility to society as a whole, present as well as past, regarding unfair actions for which no living individual can be held personally responsible. Am I my brother’s keeper? Did I have any share in the wrongs done him by other people, whether related to me or not? Am I somehow to blame for the unfortunate circumstances of his birth or upbringing, or the sub-par body or mind he was born with?
Clearly (unless he really is my brother, where family obligations come into play) the answer is “no.”
How, then, can we make the Golden Rule applicable to groups in such a way as to insure agreement on what constitutes a fair and just society, not just what counts as fair and just treatment of others in our personal behavior?
Rawls has an answer, and it involves a thought experiment.
First, you have to imagine yourself occupying what he calls “The Original Position.” This is a vantage point for deciding what constitutes a fair and just society that lies entirely outside your given life situation. Otherwise, you run the risk of individual bias in your judgment.
For example, having achieved a high income through hard work, you may think that only the working poor deserve a helping hand. Or, priding yourself on the accomplishments of your own race or nation, you may believe that people of a different race or nation don’t merit the same treatment as you and others like you. And, of course, if you occupy a lower position on the economic ladder or belong to a race or nation subject to discrimination, you’d probably feel the opposite.
The only possible vantage point that corresponds to a truly “Original Position,” as Rawls defines it, is the imaginary position of someone who has yet to be born.
Now, in addition to occupying such a position, suppose you have no idea of the life situation into which you will be born? That you are denied any knowledge of your future parents or their ancestry or their family income or race or where they live, or your future earnings or accomplishments or natural endowments or opportunities, by what Rawls terms “The Veil of Ignorance.” Your situation when you begin your life will be the result of what amounts to a throw of the dice, a “natural lottery.” This means you might have a father who rapes you repeatedly beginning at the age of eight, or you might spend your childhood living in a garbage dump, or both. It also means you would have no knowledge of the kind of body and brain you’d be born with. You could have the body of a future gold medal Olympian or an infant with spina fibida, a brain like Einstein’s or neurodivergent to the point of catatonia. In short, you could need a lot of help to survive, or even want to.
From an Original Position located, in this way, behind an absolute Veil of Ignorance regarding your real situation in society, a situation that would, in turn, be subject to the vagaries of a natural lottery, Rawls argues that any rational being, given the choice, will favor being born into a society that insures equality of opportunity and access to public benefits like education and healthcare, as well as equal treatment before the law. They will also favor tax and welfare systems that improve or ameliorate the starting position in life for anyone who has, as it were, “lost” the natural lottery of birth, whether physically, mentally, economically, racially, geographically, or in their family situation.
The Original Position, in short, puts everyone exactly in the same position. No need to imagine yourself in another’s shoes. All of you are wearing the same shoes. Or rather, having not yet been born, no shoes at all.
For Rawls, only a welfare state designed to even out, as far as is practicable, the natural inequalities of birth, counts as truly—which is to say, rationally—fair and just. Societies predicated on ideas like “life isn’t fair” or “devil take the hindmost” or “I’ve got mine, pull up the ladder,” including raw, unmodified laisse faire capitalism, are, viewed from the Original Position, inherently unfair and unjust.
What strikes me immediately about Rawls’s brilliant thought experiment is how it hinges, crucially, on an act of trans-positional imagination, like the Golden Rule itself. Rawls asks me to imagine myself in “The Original Position.” The Golden Rule asks me to imagine myself in the position of a person whom I’ve wronged or who’s disadvantaged by poverty or illness or the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The difference lies in that word, “person.”
Rawls’s “Original Position” has no room for persons. Anyone seeking access to it is required to check their name, rank, and serial number at the door, along with all the other items required to define an individual human being distinct from any and all others—traits of character, habits, idiosyncrasies, tastes and preferences, height, weight, gender, sex, inherited genome, family connections, body, life situation and experiences. Check your shoes, too. You won’t be needing them without feet. All these qualities, including shoe size, that define you as a distinct person depend on your having been born into the world as we know it. Take them all away and what’s left? A purely rational being, yes, but not a human being.
The most important thing Rawls is asking us to check at the door is human emotions, which are foundational to all our biases and, therefore, verboten in the Original Position. The most important of these, for the purposes of this discussion, is empathy.
I have a dear friend who has corrected me on my understanding of empathy, which is basically the ability to put yourself in another’s place. So I hasten to add that I’m talking about the emotional or affective variety, what’s also called “sympathy,” where you feel what another person is feeling, as distinct from the merely intellectual or cognitive or perspectival variety, where you imagine the world as they experience and understand it without necessarily feeling the corresponding emotions.
These two forms of empathy, emotional and cognitive, usually go hand in hand, but not always. For while you can’t feel what another person is feeling without, to some degree, imagining the world as they experience it, you can imagine the world as they experience it without feeling what they must be feeling. And I’m not talking about seeing the world the way Hitler saw it, either. We perform feats of cognitive empathy every time we approach a four-way stop sign. Our decision on when to enter the intersection depends crucially on our ability to see it from the perspective of the other people waiting to enter it, pedestrians as well as drivers.
This sort of empathy, empathy without sympathy, is the only sort welcome in Rawls’s Original Position: the Golden Rule reduced to a kind of emotionless moral geometry.
Well, ok, if that’s what’s required to imagine and come to agreement on a fair and just society, so be it. No sympathy allowed.
But wait. Even cognitive empathy is imperiled in Rawls’s thought experiment. For when we arrive at its conclusion in total agreement with his findings, it’s not because we’ve put ourselves, intellectually or emotionally, in the position of another human being. As just noted, there are no human beings in the Original Position for the simple reason that no human beings have yet come into existence. Moreover, the only human being that I’m being asked to imagine coming into existence, the only one whose fate in the natural lottery is of any concern to me, is . . . oh.
It’s me.
Even cognitive empathy can’t survive in the human vacuum of the Original Position. It’s a hall of mirrors reflecting an empty center that sees its own reflection in the one mirror positioned outside the hall, in the world as I know it and experience it every day: a world full of living human beings, including, inevitably, me, whatever hand the natural lottery of life deals me.
Beginning in the Original Position and viewing society from behind the Veil of Ignorance, we arrive at agreement with Rawls, ironically, out of pure self-interest.
Part 2
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
[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.
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.
None of which, I’m certain, John Rawls meant to endorse when he conceived his thought experiment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
. . .
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.
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.
Notes:
1. Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, Tom Nolan, editor. New York: Library of America, 2015. p.853
2. See https://www.uua.org/ga/past/2008/slave-traders and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_DeWolf. Edward Ball’s National Book Award winning Slaves in the Family (Ballantine Books, 1998),which seems to have given the trend toward autobiographical accounts of slavery’s intimate family history its first big push, fundamentally reshaped how genealogies and family histories address slave ownership, using extensive archives and oral histories from both White and Black descendants to expose the brutal, systemic reality of generational slavery.
3. You'll find a complete list at https://medium.com/universal-enlightenment-forum/8-quotes-on-the-golden-rule-from-across-religions-bc4ac545b1c
4. This and the following quotations are drawn from Book X of Wordsworth’s autobiograpical poem, The Prelude, the 1805 version.