On Empathy and Perspective

When people ask what I do, and I tell them that I'm majoring in ancient history, they tend to look at me funny. They tend to sport an expression that might best be described as a curious mix of disbelief and pity. Some of them even ask how I ended up there - like something must have gone really wrong for me to land in what they consider to be some form of purgatory. But if I'm really being honest, I would probably have had a similar reaction - were history classes from school my point of reference, that is.

Curiously though, history in school was worlds away from the way we approach it at university now. Back then it was a very simplistic picture. A string of dates and facts. Knowledge neatly packed into little labeled boxes, ready to be checked of on formulaic tests. History fell into the category of memorization subjects.

No one ever mentioned that dates particularly in antiquity are often anything but certain, that what was sold to us as facts might still have been up for debate, and that sometimes in view of recent studies those 'facts' become outdated. Because in reality history as it is studied and reviewed is actually a quite fluid concept and it revolves a lot around empathy and perspective.

My parents used to allude to that when they told us that what they had learned in their history classes differed quiet considerably from what we learned - or from what our grand parents had learned for that matter. That is because perspectives tend to change over time. And not to burst your bubble, but none of these perspectives were ever objective, nor are they ever going to be. Some tried more to be objective than others, but I don't think there even is such a thing. Our zeitgeist influences our view of historical events as much as new discoveries do.

Look at the world today. The very same events are experienced in such a variety of different ways. There never is only one truth. Do you really think that looking back from the future is gonna change anything about that? If you tell only one story you're telling the truth as much as you're telling a lie. That, by the way, should also answer those pesky questions about whether or not there are still new things to discover in the study of history or any academic field for that matter.

Anyway, many people instinctively use empathy when they try to understand the lives and experiences of other people and so do historians. Admittedly that can get you a long way, but you'll have to ask yourself, if sometimes you're not too much of a child of your own time and place to really relate. The question is, how much of our nature and experience is fundamentally human and therefore translatable and how much of a role does our culture play in that. In order to answer that, you need to take a step back from your own perspective and that's the hard part. Unfortunately a lot of people can't really do that.

But I don't think you're doing those people from the past justice, if you don't at least try to take into account the full spectrum of their experience and assume that they felt just like you do. An awareness of the flexibility of the human mind and the resulting multitude of perspectives is what will take you to a whole new level of understanding, not just of past cultures but present ones as well.