This isn’t a full-blown post. Instead, I just want to point you to this essay in The Guardian by one of my favorite authors, George Saunders, about how the act of writing and reading fiction might help us better understand the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
Saunders isn’t interested in justifying the insurrectionists, but he isn’t into “othering” them either.
Now, so as not to get too dreamy about this: the guy who charges into a school and kills a bunch of kids – he’s also on a continuum with me. And with, you know, Gandhi. This idea of existing on a continuum doesn’t mean, “We are all good,” or “We are all, brothers and sisters, exactly the same,” or “All is forgiven, no matter what you do,” but, rather, something like: “Wherever you are on the human continuum, I can know you, approximately. I’m going to proceed on that basis: whatever tendencies are large in you, must be here somewhere, perhaps smaller and/or nascent, in or me.”
Could I, approximately, know the people in that crowd that rushed into the Capitol? Of course. Does that tendency – to fail to know propaganda when I see it, and react to it with violence – exist in me too? I know for a fact that it does. Why is this more comforting than terrifying? Well, because it implies that these people are not beyond my understanding, nor your understanding, and that no one is.
“This is not a form of enabling,” Saunders adds, but “rather, as a form of empowerment: armed with a fuller picture, I’ll know better when to act, and how. I’ll also know when to sit still and do nothing.” The empathetic imagination doesn’t demand squishiness of us, or a failure to call right right and wrong wrong. But it does help us understand better what we’re looking at — and, perhaps, the possibility that we’re prone to falling into the same bad habits and actions we despise in others.