The Empathy Machine We Turned Off

We are raising a generation in a country that can no longer disagree without trying to destroy someone.

You can hear it in the way ordinary conflict now escalates—how quickly a debate becomes a moral inquest, how readily a person is reduced to a label, how easily the language of “harm” and “safety” is recruited to justify punishment rather than persuasion. Once that frame takes hold, restraint starts to look like weakness, and the slow work of argument is replaced by the faster satisfactions of denunciation and exile.

Everyone has a theory for why this civic fever has spiked. Social media turns outrage into currency and nuance into a liability. Political polarization tells us every question is existential. Economic anxiety keeps the nervous system permanently lit. Local institutions that once trained us in the boring, necessary art of living among people we did not choose have thinned, leaving us alone with our feeds and our factions.

All of that is real. But it is also incomplete, because it ignores the most stubborn fact about civilization: civility is not automatic. It is formed.

And one of the most powerful instruments ever devised for forming it—especially in the young—is great literature. Not because literature makes people “nice,” but because it enlarges the reader’s capacity to imagine other interior lives, to hold complexity without panic, to see a human being where a slogan would prefer an enemy. This essay is not an argument against diverse reading lists. It is an argument against something more specific and more corrosive: a pedagogical narrowing—an interpretive monoculture—that increasingly trains students to approach texts, and then people, primarily through a single template of group power dynamics. 

A society that trains the young to see only power should not be surprised when power becomes the language everyone reaches for.

Civility is learned, or it is lost

A pluralistic society is not sustained by rules alone. It depends on citizens who have learned difficult habits: to restrain retaliation when it is tempting, to interpret others charitably when it is inconvenient, to separate a bad idea from a bad person, to admit uncertainty without collapsing into cynicism, to tolerate ambiguity without demanding a scapegoat.

Those habits do not arrive by instinct at eighteen. They are learned—by families when families are strong, by communities when communities are thick, and by schools whether schools intend to teach them or not. Schools cannot neutralize every cultural force that pushes toward dehumanization, but they can strengthen a counterforce. They can create a place where the inner life is taken seriously, where mixed motives are expected, where moral growth remains imaginable, where “opponent” does not automatically mean “enemy.”

That is why the curriculum matters, not as a partisan battleground, but as a site of formation. What we repeatedly ask students to practice is what they become good at.

Literature is our most reliable training ground for the interior life

We understand training when the stakes are obvious. We put pilots in simulators because the cost of learning midair is catastrophe. We train surgeons on models because bodies are not practice material. We run case studies and controlled drills because we know that when reality carries consequences, practice matters.

But when it comes to the highest-stakes human skill of all—living among other human beings without hatred, cruelty, or the reflex to punish—we often behave as though practice is optional. We throw young people into social and political conflict and hope they’ll develop wisdom by instinct, while the surrounding culture trains the opposite: speed over patience, certainty over curiosity, denunciation over understanding.

Literature is not the only way to encounter other lives, but it remains one of the few places where you can inhabit a mind in extended time, watch motives form, see rationalizations assemble themselves like armor, feel consequences ripple outward. A video can show you what someone did; an argument can show you what someone claims; a story invites you into why someone became the kind of person who does such things and says such things.

This is not merely a poetic claim. Researchers who study social cognition have tried to measure what fiction reading can do to perspective-taking and “theory of mind.” The findings are modest and debated, but suggestive: a large pre-registered meta-analysis reported small cognitive benefits from reading fiction in experimental studies (and explicitly notes the field remains under debate. And when we zoom out beyond fiction and into empathy itself, there is robust evidence that empathy is positively associated with prosocial behavior in general populations—again, not as a magic lever, but as a meaningful relationship.

Even if you set the statistics aside, the mechanism is plain. Reading is not passive. You don’t simply receive a narrative; you collaborate with it. You build the world inside your mind. You supply tone and pace, the weight of a pause, the way a room feels at night. In that collaboration, your imagination becomes an engine of empathy. The training happens inside you precisely because you are not being commanded to sympathize—you are being invited to inhabit.

Narrative is what keeps you inside long enough to change

This is why “empathy training” so often fails. People can smell moral instruction. They resist it, or comply outwardly while remaining unchanged inwardly. A lecture tells you what to think; a checklist tells you what to say; neither reliably rewires reflex.

A strong narrative does something subtler and more powerful. It doesn’t ask your permission to form you. It lures you in through the magnets of attention—curiosity, suspense, dread, beauty, voice. It makes you care what happens next, and once you care, you remain inside another person’s world long enough for the hard work of perspective-taking to occur: you begin to understand how a choice makes sense to the chooser. Not to approve it. Not to excuse it. To understand it.

That distinction—understanding without surrendering judgment—is the foundation of adult citizenship. You cannot disagree well with someone whose mind you refuse to enter even briefly; you will argue with a caricature, and you will punish a phantom.

Literature trains the opposite posture. It gives you practice dwelling with complexity until you can no longer pretend that human beings are simple. A reader can follow Macbeth into ambition and feel its intoxicating logic even while seeing the ruin it brings. A reader can inhabit Ellison’s invisible man and feel how a society can both ignore a person and use him, all while congratulating itself on virtue. A reader can live with Okonkwo’s pride in Things Fall Apart—its dignity and terror—and recognize how a man can be destroyed by the very virtue he worships.

Without narrative, you can teach concepts. With narrative, you expand what a person can imagine. And what a person can imagine determines what kind of citizen they become.

What mercy looks like when a story earns it

Consider the scene in Les Misérables that never leaves you once you’ve read it. Jean Valjean, newly released from prison, has learned the world’s lesson: take what you can, because the world will take from you. He steals from the bishop who shelters him. He is caught. The police drag him back, expecting condemnation.

Instead, the bishop gives him the silver and tells him—quietly, firmly—that he forgot the candlesticks too. Mercy in that moment is not sentimental. It is terrifying strength. It breaks the script. It makes a new kind of life possible.

That scene doesn’t merely teach “be kind.” It shows mercy as civilization’s last line of defense against the logic of permanent condemnation. And because the story has built the moral world so completely, mercy lands not as a slogan but as a force—something weight-bearing enough to compete with shame, strong enough to turn a life.

If we want fewer enemies and more fellow citizens, we should want students to carry images like that into adult life.

This isn’t a Western canon argument; it’s a human one

If great literature forms moral imagination because it tells the truth about human beings, then the curriculum should prove that truth belongs to no single civilization. Gilgamesh wrestles with grief and the limits of power. The Bhagavad Gitastages a moral crisis so vivid it still burns: duty, fear, conscience, the agony of acting when every option carries pain. The Tale of Genji moves through longing and beauty and moral cost with unsettling precision. Chinua Achebe gives us dignity and collision, pride and tragedy, not as propaganda but as human weather.

Different worlds, different gods, different languages—yet the same civilizing work: learning to see persons, not cartoons.

So this is not “keep Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare.” It’s: keep Shakespeare because he is an anatomist of envy and guilt, tenderness and self-deception—and because those forces still blow through our lives. Keep him, and keep the others, and add more giants beyond the West, because a serious curriculum is not a museum. It is a moral and intellectual training ground.

The real problem isn’t diversity; it’s narrowing

Here intellectual generosity matters, because defenders of “anti-bias” and “social justice” frameworks are responding to real problems. Many students historically didn’t see themselves in curricula. Literature classes sometimes taught canonical works as though they floated above history, untouched by social reality. Some teachers used “universal themes” as a way to avoid discussing injustice at all. The cure was prescribed for genuine ailments.

But cures can become distortions. The danger is not that teachers acknowledge context, power, or injustice—those are often necessary. The danger is that one lens becomes the lens, a template becomes mandatory, and the student is trained to read every story primarily as a map of identity power, while other kinds of reading—moral, psychological, theological, aesthetic—are treated as secondary, suspect, or irrelevant.

And this is not a fringe phenomenon. It is visible in widely circulated, teacher-facing frameworks packaged as best practice.

Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance), for instance, publishes Social Justice Standards divided into four domains—Identity, Diversity, Justice, Action—and describes them as “a road map for anti-bias education” with a structure educators can use to guide curriculum development. Their facilitator materials explicitly train educators in integrating the standards and building implementation goals. 

You can then see these standards and related “equity framework” approaches referenced in district-level curriculum evaluation materials—such as an “Equity Framework for Adopted Curriculum Materials” that lists the Teaching Tolerance/LFJ Social Justice Standards among the resources used to inform curriculum review. You can also see the standards described in school-facing pages within major districts (for example, an LAUSD school page describing them as tools teachers can use to guide curriculum development and administrators to make schools “more just, equitable and safe”).

Meanwhile, teacher-facing publications in mainstream education media explicitly frame ELA as a vehicle for social justice instruction. Rethinking Schools features an essay in which a teacher describes making English classes “a sustained argument against inequality and injustice.” Edutopia offers guidance on developing ELA units where students read about marginalized experiences and explore “systems of oppression” through anchor texts.

None of this proves that every classroom has become a monoculture. It does show that a “power-first” interpretive approach is professionalized and widely circulated. And once it becomes default, a subtle shift follows: texts begin to function less as moral laboratories and more as evidence exhibits; the point of reading becomes less entering another mind and more unmasking a structure. That approach can yield genuine insights. But when it becomes the master lens, it trains suspicion as reflex and reduces people to positions.

A brief note about the “are classics being removed?” question: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and sometimes the change is more about fragmentation than outright disappearance. The Florida Shakespeare controversy in Hillsborough County, for instance, involved plans to teach Shakespeare largely through excerpts rather than full plays amid concerns about state rules and sexual content; subsequent reporting clarified complexities and pushback from state officials, but the episode still illustrates how politicized pressure can reshape what students actually encounter. 

Here the causal chain deserves honesty. We do not yet have clean longitudinal data that traces English-class interpretive habits directly into civic behavior years later. But the bridge is not mystical: fiction reading is linked—modestly—to social cognition; empathy is linked to prosocial behavior; and schools, through what they reward and repeat, shape habits students carry forward. If you repeatedly train students to interpret the world as a battle of domination in which the highest moral act is exposure and the highest civic act is action against enemies, you should not be surprised when that posture appears outside the classroom.

What we should do

If the problem is narrowing, the remedy is not nostalgia. It is breadth, complexity, and pluralism.

1. Re-center great literature as a core and teach whole works when possible. A training ground works only when you stay inside it long enough for it to change you. Excerpts can be useful, but a civilization that increasingly trains students on fragments should not be shocked when their thinking becomes fragmentary. And if reading stamina has declined, that is not an argument to give up; it is an argument to rebuild stamina, the way we rebuild any muscle that has atrophied.
2. Broaden the canon without replacing it with ideology. The answer to a narrow canon was never to build another narrow canon with a different political flag. A serious curriculum can include Shakespeare and Morrison, Achebe and Sophocles, Dickinson and the Gita, Ellison, and Tolstoy—not to satisfy a quota, not to perform virtue, but because the principle is moral depth, aesthetic achievement, and the capacity to tell the truth about human beings.
3. Reject DEI as the organizing ideology for the humanities and replace it with viewpoint pluralism. Keep the moral aim—human dignity, fairness, inclusion—but reject any machinery that turns identity categories into the master structure of reading. Teach multiple lenses: moral, historical, psychological, theological, aesthetic, political. Let them compete. Require evidence. Reward interpretive charity.
4. Build classroom cultures where intellectual humility is safe. “I don’t know” should be treated not as weakness but as the beginning of honest thought. Students should be allowed to revise in public, to discover that changing your mind is not a humiliation ritual but a mark of maturity. The habits we want in civic life—curiosity, restraint, principled disagreement—must be rehearsed somewhere. Schools can be that rehearsal space.
5. Teach the hard parts honestly. Classic texts contain slurs, blind spots, inherited prejudices. Pretending otherwise concedes the classroom to cynicism; preemptively condemning everything teaches students that the past is only a crime scene. The adult approach is guided confrontation—context, moral reasoning, careful discussion of the difference between depicting evil and endorsing it—because this is precisely the kind of work that forms students capable of living in a complicated world without either denial or frenzy.
6. Finally, restore the virtue question as legitimate. After analysis, ask what a story invites a reader to become. Not because schools should preach a single creed, but because every curriculum forms someone, and a civilization that stops asking what kind of people it is producing will eventually learn the answer the hard way.

The stakes are not literary; they are civic

When a culture loses the ability to see opponents as human, it begins to treat them as objects to be managed. It becomes comfortable with cruelty, with permanent condemnation, with force dressed up as righteousness.

The bishop’s gift in Les Misérables is not just a memorable scene. It is a picture of civilization itself: justice that does not forget mercy, truth that does not abandon redemption, moral clarity that still believes a person can change.

So yes—fix the algorithms, repair local institutions, address the economic pressures. But do not ignore the quieter work, the formation work, the work that makes citizens capable of living together.

Turn the empathy machine back on. Put great literature back at the center. And stop teaching our children to read one another as enemies.