On Misreading A Point Made By Jonathan Gottschall

 Jonathan Gotschall: “In the very act of generating empathy for protagonists and victims, storytellers simultaneously produce an extreme dulling of empathy that allows us to revel in the suffering of villains.”

I misread this point.

My mistake was to think that…1 

…we dull our empathy by sympathizing with villains, thereby losing our sympathy for their victims.

This seemed acute to me as I’m in the midst of re-watching The Sopranos for the first time since originally seeing them so many years ago. 2 

In depicting Tony’s complexity, partly homicidally horrid, partly touching and vulnerable, in getting inside his head and the heads of his fellow thugs, in putting Tony on the “couch,” in humanizing them all, even in showing certain entertaining aspects of the thugs’ lives…3 

our sympathies, along with other emotions, can’t help but be aroused. And this, I think, perforce tends to blunt or at least complicate our sympathy for various victims. 

The Sopranos’ theme in one way of putting it is that gangsters are people too. 4 

I thought this an acute insight, one which works, that such aroused sympathies blunt our compassion for the victims. 

But that’s not want he means. 

Art depicting rounded villains, whom we’re led to feel something for in complex response to them, subsumes Gottschall’s point. 5 

Consider the classic example of Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice and our bifurcated responses to him, to his daughter Jessica, to Antonio, even to Portia.

They seem to make Gottschall’s specific point, which I’d misunderstood, wanting much fuller and deeper exploration. 6/6