UFRGS 2022

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The human capacity for compassion is not a
reflex that is triggered automatically by the
presence of another living thing. Though
people in all cultures can react sympathetically
[5] to kin, friends, and babies, they tend to hold
back when it comes to larger circles of
neighbors, strangers, foreigners, and other
sentient beings. Philosopher Peter Singer has
argued that over the course of history, people
[10] have enlarged the range of beings ........
interests they value as they value their own. An
interesting question is what inflated the
empathy circle. And a good candidate is the
expansion of literacy.
[15] Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.
When someone else’s thoughts are in your
head, you are observing the world from that
person’s vantage point. Not only are you taking
in sights and sounds that you could not
[20] experience firsthand, but you have stepped
inside that person’s mind and are temporarily
sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.
Adopting someone’s viewpoint is not the same
as feeling compassion toward the person, but
[25] the first can lead to the second by a natural
route. It’s not a big leap to suppose that the
habit of reading other people’s words could put
one in the habit of entering other people’s
minds.
[30] The power of literacy to lift readers out of their
parochial stations is not confined to factual
writing. Satirical fiction, ........ transports
readers into a hypothetical world from which
they can observe the follies of their own, may
[35] be an effective way to change people’s
sensibilities without haranguing or
sermonizing. Realistic fiction, for its part, may
expand readers’ circle of empathy by seducing
them into thinking and feeling like people very
[40] different from themselves. In the 18th century
the novel became a form of mass
entertainment, and unlike earlier epics which
recounted the exploits of heroes, aristocrats, or
saints, the novels brought to life the aspirations
[45] and losses of ordinary people.
That century was also the heyday of the
epistolary novel, in which the story unfolds in a
character’s own words, exposing the
character’s thoughts and feelings in real time
[50] rather than describing them from the
distancing perspective of a disembodied

narrator. Melodramatic novels named after
female protagonists became unlikely
bestsellers. Grown men burst into tears while
[55] experiencing the forbidden loves, intolerable
arranged marriages, and cruel twists of fate in
the lives of undistinguished women (including
servants) with ........ they had nothing in
common.
[60] The phenomenon suggests a causal chain:
reading novels about characters unlike oneself
exercises the ability to put oneself in other
people’s shoes, which turns one against cruel
punishments and other abuses of human
[65] rights. As usual, it is hard to rule out alternative
explanations for the correlation. Perhaps
people became more empathic for other
reasons, which simultaneously made them
receptive to novels and concerned with others’
[70] mistreatment.
Whether or not novels were critical in
expanding empathy, the explosion of reading
may have contributed to the Humanitarian
Revolution by getting people into the habit of
[75] straying from their parochial vantage points.
And it may have also contributed by creating a
hothouse for new ideas about moral values and
the social order.

Adapted from: PINKER, S. The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined. London: Viking Penguin, 2011.