My Teenage Reading Shaped My Understanding of Government-Led Disappearances

We should keep reading fiction

Dear Friend,

Here's an interesting article from Discover Magazine about how reading literary fiction engenders empathy.

The topic has been on my mind because I've been thinking about Isabel Allende's book, The House of the Spirits, which is where I first encountered the term "desaparecido," or "the disappeared." Before reading The House of the Spirits, it had never occurred to me that a state could systematically "disappear" people, leaving their friends and family with no information and no recourse – only the fear that their vanished loved ones were being tortured or killed.

The book was published in 1982. I probably found it at the library a few years later, at age thirteen or fourteen.

My memory of any specific characters or plot has faded, but I recall the disappearances and realizing that these were based on actual events that happened to real people under Pinochet's regime in Chile. I was chilled by the thought of unjust abduction, imprisonment, and torture, and the calculated absence of information provided to those left behind.

I wondered then, why that extra cruelty of no information and no closure, on top of everything else?

I've come to understand that the unnecessary cruelty has its own purpose—to make people uneasy and fearful. Fear is what keeps people in line. Fear shifts our preoccupation from what is just to what is safe. Fear narrows our area of concern for others, whittling away our definition of who we are, teaching us that subjective survival trumps objective truth.

When recent news stories refer to people being "disappeared" here in the United States, I wonder what context others bring to these reports. I happened to read a book and my empathy for the book's characters extended to real victims. What if I hadn’t had that experience? I’d likely be familiar with the practice from news reports or spy shows that depict people get abducted by the KGB in Russia. Certainly there’s no shortage of examples, in other countries and our own. But I think reading a book, with its exploration of people's inner lives, might be the primary source of my visceral reaction to abductions and deportations, and my opinions about administrations that endorse and promote such practices.

I’ve mentioned that my fiction-reading habit can feel frivolous or like a waste of time, but the Discover Magazine article notes that it's specifically literary fiction that builds empathy and that non-fiction and genre fiction don't do the trick (though I’d argue that what constitutes “genre” and what is “literary” for these purposes is a whole other conversation).

This makes me wonder about what our leaders and politicians are reading. The list of books Donald Trump claims to have read aren’t generally empathy-enhancing. Elon Musk is known to read voraciously, but prefers non-fiction and science fiction. In a recent conversation between NYT Opinion writers, David French observed:

"You've seen Elon Musk and members of the tech bro world taking on the concept of empathy, saying empathy is inherently toxic and that empathy warps your decision making. So anytime there is an appeal to a person's decency and humanity — which by the way is what our fundamental rights are based on — anytime you appeal to this sort of inherent dignity of human beings and this idea that human beings should not be treated like this, then that's toxic empathy.

In the face of an anti-empathy movement, it might be more important than ever that our friends, neighbors, kids, and total strangers read some fiction. A friend recently described people's literary empathy as a form of civic protection—a collective insurance policy against authoritarian impulses. She mentioned that the determination to protect our rights stems from the ability to imagine their absence, and that is the kind of moral imagination that literary fiction fosters.

Defunding our public libraries, banning books, hamstringing educators, and deporting scholars erodes our knowledge of history. These same actions take aim at our empathy. Right now, public opinion is still an impediment for those who want to "disappear" people. Ensuring the next generation can access (and can see the value in reading) a diversity of literary voices may be one of the most important civic investments we can fight for, if we want to preserve the way of life we have known.

Do you have books or media that have shaped your understanding of human rights or expanded your capacity for empathy?

I hope you are finding time to read.

xo

B