Cris Beam's I Feel You is a surprising examination of the science of empathy
SOCIETY
I Feel You
Cris Beam
Scribe, $32.99
Empathy has been weaponised. This is a claim Cris Beam makes in the introduction to her fascinating book, I Feel You: A Journey to the Far Reaches of Empathy. She goes on to describe how, in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, some progressives regretted the empathy deficit that had left them blindsided, while others warned against empathy for the empathy-deficient Trump supporters.
We know this. What we may not know is that it's not just activists and politicians claiming empathy for their own. The corporate world is doing it too, with initiatives such as empathic marketing and empathic branding. For these reasons, Beam approaches her subject with a great deal of suspicion – if not of the concept itself, then of how the concept has been commodified. She shows us that for many, empathy is just another skill to be mastered, another tick on the shopping list for emotional success, rather than a way of living and being.
If you're looking for a self-help book, I Feel You is not the book for you. You won't find any easy answers or road maps to happiness within its pages. Instead, you will find an exploration of the grey, murky spaces of uncertainty. You will be forced to confront human beings' hypocrisies, such as the way we conduct cruel experiments on macaque monkeys in order to investigate the neuroscience behind empathy, and how we seem incapable of extending our empathy to psychopaths – a group of people who lack the capacity to feel empathy at all.
But Beam doesn't just interrogate the ideas and the motivations of the experts she interviews, she also examines her own emotional and psychological responses to their ideas. More often than not this leads Beam to profound conclusions: "we are all a blur of our illness and wellness, of our synaptic maps and our unfortunate genes, and locating a discrete moral core untouched by these things is impossible because there isn't one."
Like much contemporary non-fiction, the book is part memoir; it could easily have been subtitled "A Journey to the Far Reaches of Cris Beam". She examines her past but also her future as, during the writing of the book, her marriage falls apart. This enhances rather than distracts from our understanding of the subject matter.
Perhaps the most powerful chapter in the book is Courting Empathy, in which Beam divulges her personal experiences of a hate crime and subsequent wish to "empathise with my own attackers, to resonate with some strand of their lives so I could live in the world of humans like me and not monsters".
This alternating focus between the personal and the global is effective. When Beam travels to South Africa to interview victims and perpetrators from the apartheid era, she is in awe of Candice Mama's capacity to empathise with Eugene de Kock – the man who murdered Mama's father – but she is not completely surprised by it, having felt a longing to understand, forgive and move on from her own experiences of a hate crime.
The book is not without its flaws – some of the weaker moments occur during Beam's lengthy descriptions of performance art and improvised theatre that have their roots in empathy. Just as a description of a painting will always be a poor substitute for seeing the painting in real life, so a description of improvised theatre will always feel like a clumsy approximation of the real thing. But perhaps this is beside the point, because I Feel You is not a book about being or striving to be perfect. If anything it is a reminder of our and others' imperfections and an examination of our willingness to understand them.
The subtitle of the book is a bold call, and yet reading it did feel like a journey – not in the shallow sense of a reality television show but in the true sense of a maritime exploration, with moments of violence and turbulence, followed by moments of great clarity and wonder.
Melanie Cheng is a GP and author of Australia Day (Text), which won the Victorian Premier's Award for fiction.