If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth.
If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.
The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.
We must broaden the definition of who our neighbors are, and extend the boundaries of our interest and empathy.
Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.
Like works of literature, mathematical ideas help expand our circle of empathy, liberating us from the tyranny of a single, parochial point of view. Numbers, properly considered, make us better people.
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.
