the first steps are made

John Berger: ... we are today less familiar than most men and women in other centuries with this emotion of pity.

Eleanor Wachtel: Given that we probably live in a time when it's perhaps most called for, why?

Berger: I think that's very complicated and something that is changing. I think the banishment of that emotion - if one can call it that - which dominated perhaps two centuries of European thought, is now over. The problem with pity as it is something understood, is that, okay, so you feel pity, and that means, having felt pity, you can sit back and do nothing. So it becomes a kind of cop-out. But that's a defamation of the idea, not of the idea, but of the faculty, because it is a part of what constitutes human nature. It is maybe the first action of the imagination, and is something that is extremely basic to human nature. One sees it in all children, everywhere. Children identify with those around them, with animals, even with their toys, with the characters in their stories, completely. This is the first act of imagination, to at least make the steps towards getting into somebody else's skin. It is not achievable, of course; it would be very sentimental to say that. But the first steps are made. In my opinion this is where not only ethics begins but also art.

 

- John Berger, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. As published in More Writers & Company: New Conversations with CBC Radio's Eleanor Wachtel.