Krznaric R. Empathy - Why It Matters, and How to Get It

A PERIGEE BOOK Published by the Penguin Group. — NY. — 2014. — 196 p. ISBN: 978-0-698-17604-1.Roman Krznaric is a cultural thinker and writer on the art of living. He is a founding faculty member of the School of Life in London and has been named by The Observer as one of Britain’s leading popular philosophers. He is an internationally recognized expert on empathy and advises organizations, including Oxfam and the United Nations, on using empathy and conversation to create social change. His RSA Animate video on empathy, The Power of Outrospection, has been watched by over half a million people.
After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, he studied at the universities of Oxford, London, and Essex, where he gained his Ph.D.. He has taught sociology and politics at Cambridge University, Essex University, and City University, London, and has done human rights work in Central America with refugees and indigenous people. For several years he was project director at the Oxford Muse, the avant-garde foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional, and cultural life.His books include How Should We Live? Great Ideas from the Past for Everyday Life, How to Find Fulfilling Work, The First Beautiful Game: Stories of Obsession in Real Tennis, and (with Theodore Zeldin) Guide to an Unknown University. Roman’s books have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes a blog dedicated to empathy and the art of living, at www.outrospection.org.Roman is a fanatical real tennis player, has worked as a gardener, and has a passion for furniture making. He is now working on his ambition to found the world’s first empathy museum.How to live? What to do? Every culture has offered schemes and solutions for the art of living. The ancient Greeks extolled the virtues of courage, wisdom, and temperance. Early Christianity urged believers to imitate the life of Christ in order to achieve communion with God. In the Enlightenment we were advised to sublimate our passions to the dictates of reason. Since the end of World War II, the dominant message has been to pursue our personal desires and self-interest, based on the assumption that we are in essence selfish creatures and that the good life lies in consumer pleasures and material wealth.We now have an alternative within our grasps: empathy. There may be no more powerful way to escape the boundary of our egos and to gain fresh perspectives on how to live, than by looking at life through the eyes of others. Just think how much empathy changed the lives of people like George Orwell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oskar Schindler, and Patricia Moore. We need a better balance between gazing inward and looking outward, between introspection and outrospection. As Goethe said, we should seek to understand who we are by stepping outside ourselves and discovering the
world.The future of empathy lies not just in the choices we make as individuals to
transform our own lives. If we aspire for empathy to fulfill its revolutionary potential as a force for social change, we must generate a deep cultural shift so that looking at the world through other people’s eyes becomes as common as looking both ways when we cross the road. This shift is already under way thanks to the third wave of empathy and the activists behind it. But there is so much more we can do to expand its reach. So here are three ideas that can help ignite our collective imaginations and launch us into a new empathic era.