When I was at school, History class often used to rely on a technique known as empathy. This was an attempt by teachers to get teenagers - who were pretty bad at empathising with each other, let alone people who’d lived in a different century – to imagine that they were
a. A sailor in the Napoleonic Wars
b. A cloth maker in medieval York
c. A pre-colonisation Australian aborigine
d. The Duke of Gloucester
e. A potato experiencing Elizabethan England
f. Samuel Johnson’s lip
It’s a lovely idea in principle, but I’ve never decided whether trying to get society’s least empathetic age group to engage in putting themselves inside the heads of others is a noble and potentially life-changing tactic that will open their minds and establish a Utopia of people who can think themselves into the lives of people and appreciate their motivations, needs and taste in socks, or about as much use as giving a book of brain teasers to a jellyfish.
I quite enjoyed it. I liked writing stories. At age 13 I overreacted to the specification of “empathising” with a young Koori on walkabout, and ended up writing a 25 page story about inter-tribe warfare in the Australian desert. This got me a “see me”. So the next time, when I was supposed to be a 14th century peasant, I merely wrote a list of all the things that would have made me miserable, ending with:
“They also didn’t have slip-on shoes”.
See? Empathy coming out of my arse, mate.
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