Empathy and our homeless project

Posted on | March 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was too populist: as people have said, he can be critiqued for not really having much critique.

Then I was bought his Heathrow Book (A Week at the Airport) for Christmas, and I rather liked it. He was brave. He went and talked to people. He was perceptive, clever, and thoughtful (and yes in pay to BAA, but fine, we have to live). That is, he worked like a literary journalist. So, I realised, I was just jealous all along. (I loved this review/muse on the book and the airport from CitySound.)

And so I thought, perhaps I should review the writing of other people I’ve been wrong about. The first place I turned, then, was to some of de Botton’s colleagues at the School of Life, the London-based philosophical approach to evening classes for the new millennium.

One of these people is Roman Krznaric, whose major research and writing is around work and the extreme sport of empathy. And so I downloaded his Empathy and the Art of Living, not least because I thought—well, maybe I could learn something—and because my own research is into emotion. I also felt it would be useful for me in terms of a project I am working on with some other writers here in the North East.

My part in the project at the moment is to help build the confidence of writers, who may never have worked as journalists, in approaching, engaging with and interviewing/recording the stories of homeless people, or of victims of torture. It’s for a project that will, loosely, be inspired by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which Krznaric in his essay as one of his the examples, along with Gandhi’s autobiography, of a way to learn and experience empathy with the other. Krznaric’s involvement in the Oxford Muse Project also has interesting things to offer this project.

Although I agree with a friend who says Krznaric’s article can read a bit like a mechanic’s guide to empathy, I enjoyed reading this piece and thought I could take some lessons from it. Krznaric writes about his time spent with a homeless/destitute man called Alan Human, who graduated from Oxford and has a background and an academic before his mental health led him to his current situation. The approach Krznaric took with Alan, in preparing a piece for the Oxford Muse Project, took a couple of interesting guidelines I thought I might adopt for my session:

• The conversation was not a one-way interrogation, but a ‘mutual sharing of our approaches to the art of living’
• Transcripts were edited into a portrait of Alan talking about his own life in his own words
• The author Krznaric asked Alan to agree the text before it was finalised

In another section of the article, at dinner parties Krznaric talks about cutting headlines out of papers and putting them in a bowl and then asking people to relate them to an aspect of their life, which gets past the superficial or the need to ‘warm up’ to talking.

So, I thought I would do a couple of things.

1. Get people in pairs to pick a couple of headlines and take the approach of talking about them, relating them to an aspect of their lives – perhaps about destitution, perhaps not, which the other person has to listen to, share, converse with, but ultimately record, write up, and then have the other person edit/agree to the final version, as an exercise in really listening and trying to write from that person’s perspective. This may take about an hour.
2. Get back together as a group to talk about the experience: good learning, things to work on. Take about 20 mins.
3. Work through a couple of tips and techniques for practical interviewing/recording that would then add to the group’s own experiential learning from the exercise about, and hopefully add to their confidence. Take about 20 mins.
4. Set people a challenge they could follow up on: to do the exercise with someone they didn’t know: perhaps someone in a homeless or destitute state; or perhaps someone not in that state, but talking to that person about their views on homelessness and destitution, if that’s an easier step to take for some

I’m hoping to get some feedback on the ideas (any?) but am excited to see how this exercise in journalism and empathy might go forward. Thanks to Roman Krznaric and Alain de Botton for some inspiration and guidance, as well as my friends N for the book, and K and E for helping me shape these ideas.

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