Grace Berler
Violence and Comedy: Spring 2009
23 February 2009
Empathy for the Devil
Human nature is a strange thing. It seems that the deeper we delve into the various and vastly dynamic curriculum of our own behavior, the more contradictory the study of it becomes. On one warm hand, humans are empathetic creatures who, through the aches and pains of their own lives, feel for other lives and understand their struggles no matter the scale of their differences. On the other, colder hand, humans are just another species in the animal kingdom with a will to survive that can crush any empathy felt for one of its own kind, especially if the other one is weaker, or better, a threat. What has stricken me with curiosity is our ability, as these creatures that possess such polarities in behavior, to empathize with others of our kind that behave horrifically by anyone’s standards. How we can understand why, say, a person might kill another person if he had enough reason behind him or enough hardship upon him, and how we can actually feel bad for this killer and stand beside him, hypothetically. But how far would our empathy reach if that killer were out to kill you? Would our natural instincts to survive subside if we knew we deserved it? Using art as a mediator between our world- where the fragility of our existence is usually forgotten until vulnerable- and a fictional world- where the blood of men exists only in the dark regions of our mind- I am interested in the way in which our real life morals shift back and forth between these worlds.
23 February 2009
Empathy for the Devil
Human nature is a strange thing. It seems that the deeper we delve into the various and vastly dynamic curriculum of our own behavior, the more contradictory the study of it becomes. On one warm hand, humans are empathetic creatures who, through the aches and pains of their own lives, feel for other lives and understand their struggles no matter the scale of their differences. On the other, colder hand, humans are just another species in the animal kingdom with a will to survive that can crush any empathy felt for one of its own kind, especially if the other one is weaker, or better, a threat. What has stricken me with curiosity is our ability, as these creatures that possess such polarities in behavior, to empathize with others of our kind that behave horrifically by anyone’s standards. How we can understand why, say, a person might kill another person if he had enough reason behind him or enough hardship upon him, and how we can actually feel bad for this killer and stand beside him, hypothetically. But how far would our empathy reach if that killer were out to kill you? Would our natural instincts to survive subside if we knew we deserved it? Using art as a mediator between our world- where the fragility of our existence is usually forgotten until vulnerable- and a fictional world- where the blood of men exists only in the dark regions of our mind- I am interested in the way in which our real life morals shift back and forth between these worlds.
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