Rachel Kadish is an award-winning writer and teacher. In her fiction classes, she asks her students to “write down a phrase you find abhorrent—something you yourself would never say.” Then, after students nervously comply, she asks them to take 10 minutes to write “a first-person monologue spoken by a fictitious character that makes the upsetting statement.” Apart from this prompt, she gives her students very little direction. “The troubling statement … must appear in the monologue, and it shouldn’t be minimized, nor should students feel the need to forgive or account for it. What’s required is simply that somewhere in the monologue there be an instant — even a fleeting phrase — in which we can feel empathy for the speaker.”
Kadish described the exercise earlier this year in a column for the New York Times, under the appropriate headline, The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned. But why is this exercise so important? True, seeing the world through the eyes of another is essential to good writing, but if that were the only goal, she could have asked her students to put themselves in the mud-stained sneakers of a ten-year-old boy or the urine-soaked wheelchair of a 96-year-old woman. To describe the smell and the feel and the joy and the sadness.
As Kadish understands, it is one thing to imagine you are what you are not, but something altogether different to imagine you are what you abhor. “Unflinching empathy, which is the muscle the lesson is designed to exercise, is a prerequisite for literature strong enough to wrestle with the real world. On the page it allows us to spot signs of humanity; off the page it can teach us to start a conversation with the strangest of strangers, to thrive alongside difference. It can even affect those life-or-death choices we make instinctively in a crisis. This kind of empathy has nothing to do with being nice, and it’s not for the faint of heart.” This is the most important writing exercise because it’s not about becoming a better writer; it’s about becoming a better person.
Still, what is this bizarre alchemy? What is it that allows a student to be an imaginary racist on Monday, and “thrive alongside” the real thing on Tuesday? Kadish cannot lay all this out in the 700 words of a Times column, but conscientiously conjuring the world of another—not just the physical world, but the moral and the cultural; the psychological and the emotional—is a radically transformative act, as irreversible as shattering a mirror. If you genuinely immerse yourself in the world of another—if you truly struggle to understand, as every writer must and all of us can—you will see something of yourself in them, and of them in you. Kadish calls it a “small, sturdy magic trick,” but it’s not small and it’s not magic. It is the discovery, sometimes unwelcome, of shared humanity.
Kadish came to this discovery through her fiction; I came to it through my work. Immersing oneself in the world of someone who has done a horrible thing, in order to reveal the humanity that would otherwise go unseen, is a perfectly serviceable definition of a death penalty defense lawyer. As a society, we do not cast out those in whom we see ourselves. We do not kill our own. As I have said again and again in these pages, these truths are the foundation of my moral philosophy: there is no Other.
As a rule, I do not waste time trying to explain why I think this philosophy matters, figuring if I have to explain it, I’ve already lost. But recently, former President Barack Obama told a small crowd in Chicago that our climate of divisive polarization was “one of the greatest challenges of our time,” and I agree. The thought is hardly new; poll after poll shows that Americans are united about nothing except the belief that we are badly divided, and that it is a terrible thing. More than 9 in 10 Americans say it is important to reduce this divisiveness, but aside from anodyne bromides about building bridges, lowering the temperature, and reaching across the aisle, they do not see how we might get the job done. Organizations dedicated to this goal point out that we have far more in common than we think, but most Americans already intuit that. The problem is that they cannot translate that intuition into action. And of course, the task is made much more difficult by our cultural obsession with demonizing binaries. Many of us delight not only in poking the bear, but in urging the rest of us to grab a stick.
It is in this climate that I developed my philosophy, which I hope I have distilled in the title of the book I am finishing (and which I have never put in print before): Let judgment wait. For me, the most important social act is the struggle to understand the behavior of another, and nowhere is it more important than when the behavior is abhorrent. But note what I have written. What matters is not that I agree with or accept what another has said or done. What matters is that I try conscientiously to understand it, and that judgment waits until I have made that attempt. That act—that struggle to understand another in all their complexity—allows me to see their words and deeds as they saw them, and to recognize myself in their actions. Once I am at that place, I judge them as one of us because I see myself in them and see them in me, which is the same as saying, there is no Them.
I don’t know if this sounds easy or difficult to you. I have practiced this philosophy for so long that it has become second nature, so it is no longer difficult for me. But it is extremely difficult for my students. They all want to believe there is no Them, until I mention Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, and then they are not so sure. As Rachel Kadish wrote in her column, unflinching empathy is not for the faint of heart. But I have come to see that there is no alternative. Oh sure, I have also removed myself from nearly all social media, since I’d just as soon not be around a mob of bear-pokers. But closing your Instagram account will not get us where we want to be. If we want to end the divisiveness, we have to let judgment wait.
As always, and in the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at jm347@cornell.edu.
