Hitler was a vegetarian and a painter. I could just leave it here. I’m very tempted to.
But think of every movie villain that loves classical music and fine clothes. This never strikes us as odd. We intuitively know this can be the case. But there is a small subset of people, of whom I was once one, who truly do believe that art enhances us not simply in our ability to wring more pleasure out of life, but that it also enhances us morally.
There is an old line I first heard in conservatory during a talk back that I then repeated for over a decade. It’s that the Theater allows us to empathize better with others and better enables us to walk a mile in their shoes. I would then add, years later, that if we had simply seen Othello’s story in the headlines it would just read “Black man kills White wife.” But having watched Othello we could see beyond this simplistic default moral state. Being artists, and appreciators of the arts, gave us a hand, a boost, a leg up, at viewing the world in a more moral light.
The first point, about viewing Othello in a more empathetic understanding way, holds true. My mistake, and the mistake of many boosters of the arts as a tool towards moral improvement, is to think that this transfers to the rest of the world.
It does not.
Understanding the aesthetics of a Rothko, the lilt of Debussy, or the prose of Austen does not aid us in the expansion of our circle of moral concern. I regret to inform you, it’s simply not that easy. And it is that ease, by the way, that makes the idea popular. “All I have to do is like this thing I already like, and I’m also a better person?! Sign me up!” Imagine how popular I’d be if I made a convincing argument for the moral benefits of eating ice cream.
But does the theater not make us more empathetic to Othello? As I said, yes it does. But to him only. You could hear of a man who murdered his wife as soon as you leave the theater. You may think to yourself “There could be more to this story.” But your assumption is going to lean toward “murdering your wife is bad, odds are this guy is not a good guy.” And you wouldn’t be wrong. Those are indeed the odds.
Empathy is also a terrible tool for moral improvement. This may sound counterintuitive so allow this little thought experiment. You see a small child, starving and impoverished. You are told that less than a dollar a day could save their life. Easy decision. Now this child has a sister. Ok. Two bucks. No problem. Now they have ten siblings. Ok, 10 bucks still ain’t a lot, but you’re not going to do it. And it has nothing to do with the money. The money was never the issue. It was always about what tugged at your sense of empathy most. You actually care less about 10 kids than 1, where if empathy were the tool we thought it were we’d presumably care 10 times more! The fact that we don’t should give us pause as to how important being “more empathetic” should be. Like energy, like money, like hours in a day, empathy is a finite thing. It diminishes with use, it does not increase.
Perhaps empathy, like a muscle, can be increased so as to take on more? I certainly believe this is true. But also like a muscle, it will still have its limits no matter how much training you give it.
This brings us back to the original claim that the theater makes us more moral because it makes us more empathetic. Unless everyone gets 3 hours for a genius like Shakespeare to write our story for us to maximize the empathy of all viewers, I’m afraid it simply doesn’t translate to the real world.
Only systematic thinking about morality, in the abstract, with our frontal lobes, as opposed to emotional limbic system thinking, is what makes us more moral people in the only way it matters: our actions.
So by all means enjoy that play, that painting, that ballet. It is enough to simply do that. And when you leave that space and go out into the world, be kind. They are two separate things after all.