Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans
can learn and understand, without having experienced.
They can think themselves into other people"s
places. Of course, this is power that is morally neutral.
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One might use such an ability to manipulate or
control, just as much as to understand or sympathy.
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And many prefer to exercise their imaginations at all. They
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choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their
own experience, never trouble to wonder how it would
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feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse
to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can open their
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minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them
personally; they can refuse to know. I might be attempted
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to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not
think they have any fewer nightmares than I did. Choosing
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to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia,
and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully
imaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
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What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable
real monsters. For without ever committing to an act of
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outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own
apathy. One of the many things I learned at the end of that
Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18,
in search of something I could not then define, was this,
written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly
will change out reality.
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