Novelist Rachel Kadish tells her creative-writing students to write a first-person monologue by a character with "abhorrent" views that includes "an instant in which we can feel empathy for the speaker."
"Done right, the exercise delivers a one-two punch: repugnance for a behavior or worldview coupled with recognition of shared humanity," she writes in the New York Times.
She's taught versions of the exercise for 20 years with students of all ages, writes Kadish. "In recent years openness to this exercise, and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach, has narrowed to a pinprick." It doesn't matter "whether students lean right or left . . . A leap into someone else’s perspective feels impossible."
I was a creative writing major a half-century ago. We were told to "write what you know," but not to populate our fiction with a cast of right-thinking clones and bad-thinking villains. Leaping into other people's perspectives was essential. If all you can write is Sensitive College Student Meets Snidely Whiplash . . . Well, it won't be worth reading.
Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management is creating a Center for Enlightened Disagreement to study and teach how to "engage across difference and harness the power of diverse perspectives," writes Johnny Jackson on Diverse.
“Our nation is threatened today by the politics of identity and persistent divisions based on region, class, religion and educational attainment,” said Northwestern President Michael H. Schill. “We increasingly lack the capacity to understand each other and to empathize with people who seem not to be like us.”
Creating a center to teach people how to disagree without bashing each other over the head . . . It seems sad.