To Bat Or Not To Bat
Today’s paltry words owe their existence to a chance conversation with my esteemed colleague, Dr Byers. In the few stolen moments between the rock of Year 10 marking and the hard place of the next curriculum planning meeting, we contrived to discuss Nagel, Wittgenstein, Beyoncé, and Donald Trump’s ideologue-in-chief, Stephen Miller. We were not, I should add, compiling an invitation list to the world’s oddest dinner party, but exploring something far more consequential: the limits of empathy, the boundaries of perspective, and the moral demand that emerges precisely where understanding falls short.
We began lightly enough with Thomas Nagel’s 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? As you know, Nagel’s question is not really about bats at all, but about the limits of human understanding. No matter how much neuroscience we acquire, no matter how detailed our knowledge of echolocation or bat physiology becomes, we will never know what it is like to actually be a bat unless we become one. We can know about bats, but we cannot know from the inside. There is an irreducible gap between objective explanation and subjective experience.
This, I was reminded, is not a failure of imagination so much as a fact of life. There are some perspectives we cannot occupy, no matter how hard we try. And yet, as soon as this thought crossed my mind, another voice elbowed its way into the crowded space of my thoughts (I am a bear of very little brain). Ludwig Wittgenstein, with his typical calm, once remarked that even if a lion could talk, we would not be able to understand it. Take that Doctor Dolittle.
It is an infuriating thing to say, and I suspect that’s partly why Wittgenstein said it. After all, if the lion is speaking a language we recognise, surely understanding would follow? But his point is that meaning does not float free of life. Language is embedded in what he called forms of life: habits, needs, practices, histories, ways of being in the world. Shared words do not guarantee shared understanding. Translation is not the same thing as comprehension.
So there we were: bats we cannot become and lions we cannot understand. At which point, dear reader, you may reasonably ask what on earth this has to do with the life of a school, or indeed with anything.
Perhaps it is time for another biscuit.
What struck me was that both Nagel and Wittgenstein are not actually trying to make us despair of understanding. Instead they are trying to point out an idea of restraint. They are reminding us that there are limits to what we can know of another’s inner life, and to pretend otherwise is not an act of generosity but one of overreach.
As a young Director, I very much enjoyed Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch famously tells Scout that You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. It is of course a beautiful sentiment and yet, this is precisely where the modern language of empathy sometimes gets itself into trouble. The instinct is admirable, but it carries a hidden risk: the risk of assuming that we can somehow own another person’s experience, colonise it, master it or indeed speak on its behalf.
I’m often reminded, at moments like this, of a line from the comedy writer Jack Handey: Before you criticise someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, you’ll be a mile away from them, and you’ll have their shoes.
At the risk of killing the humour, the joke exposes the quiet arrogance lurking inside some of our moral metaphors. Empathy, properly understood, is not about taking possession of another person’s perspective or indeed their shoes or skin; it is rather about recognising that it does not belong to us.
Which is when our thoughts took an unexpected detour via Beyoncé.
Her lovely song If I Were a Boy is not, of course, a philosophical treatise, but it is doing something rather subtle. Beyoncé is not claiming that she can literally know what it is like to be a boy, or a man. Perish the very thought. She is not announcing that the problem of gendered experience has been solved but rather, in the best traditions of R&B power ballads, issuing a moral challenge. The song exposes patterns of blindness and asymmetry; it asks the listener to notice what has been normalised, excused, or overlooked. Look again, it seems to say, Notice this and take responsibility for what you notice.
And that distinction matters. Because there is a world of difference between saying I know exactly what you’re going through and saying I don’t…but I am still responsible for how I respond to you.
This came sharply into focus for me when Dr Byers spoke of a brief exchange involving Stephen Miller, a political figure about whom I will say as little as possible in the interests of communal harmony and my own blood pressure. When Miller told a photographer that he had it in his power to be kind, the photographer replied simply: Yes, and so do you.
That’s it. No speech. No theory. No attempt to inhabit another’s trauma or interior life. Just the plain moral fact that kindness does not require perfect understanding. You do not need to know what it is like to be me in order to treat me with kindness.
This, it seems to me, is the crucial point. Empathy is not about stealing someone else’s shoes. It is about walking alongside them, knowing full well their shoes will never quite fit.
This is precisely the point that some of the scientific attempts to solve the riddle of human cruelty miss entirely. In Zero Degrees of Empathy, the neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen proposes replacing the concept of evil with the measurable trait: empathy erosion. He suggests that zero degrees of empathy represents the lowest end of a spectrum, where an individual treats others as objects and concludes every problem becomes soluble when immersed in empathy.
It all sounds lovely and neat but to my mind, it is woefully mistaken.
Firstly, there is a logical flaw in the objectification theory. It seems fairly clear to your Director that someone who deliberately sets out to cause suffering is demonstrating that they know very well what would cause the maximum amount of pain. They are treating the other person very much as a subject, not an object. And they are simply using that insight for harm.
Secondly, the Baron-Cohen panacea veers dangerously towards the notion that I can encompass the content and tone of another consciousness so fully that I can make their suffering mine. It suggests that the specific, unique location of a state of suffering in your history matters not at all because I can empathise it away. Scary stuff, in your Director’s humble opinion. How many of us, after sharing a painful truth, really like to be responded to with the phrase: I know how you feel..? What we mistake for empathy is often just an intense awareness of how I would feel in that situation, which is not the same thing as understanding the other at all.
Shakespeare, as I have been reminded while teaching Hamlet this term, understood this better than a whole ganglion of neuroscientists. At the moment when Hamlet confronts Guildenstern with a recorder, he is defending the sanctity of the private self. Guildenstern has been trying to probe Hamlet’s mind, and the Prince’s response is a masterpiece of moral rebuke:
‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.
Hamlet’s point is that we cannot pluck out the heart of the mystery of another person. And we certainly can’t play them.
Dear friend of the Column, Iris Murdoch rode a similar horse in her contention that moral improvement is not primarily about willpower, but about seeing rightly. The moral task is one of attention: learning to resist the distortions of selfish imaginings and to notice the independent reality of other people. We see the tragic alternative of this in King Lear. At the start of the play, Lear is blind to the reality of his daughters because he is trapped in the gravitational pull of the self. He demands performative empathy and demands his daughters speak his language. It is only when everything is stripped away that the plea of his loyal friend Kent rings true: See better, Lear. To see better here is not to claim we must peer into someone else’s soul. It is the slow training of attention away from ourselves.
Schools, of course, are extraordinary laboratories for all of this type of heady stuff. They function not because we perfectly understand one another, but because we are constantly called to act well despite misunderstanding. Truth be told, such insights have saved many a curriculum meeting from descending into all sorts of chaos. A student similarly does not need a teacher to have lived their exact life in order to be treated with fairness. Indeed, some of the most corrosive moments in school life arise when we assume too quickly that we do understand; when behaviour is explained away by a label rather than being attended to as a relationship.
Bingo cards at the ready: this is where Iain McGilchrist sits quietly in the background, nodding along. McGilchrist reminds us that our humanity is rooted not in abstraction and control, but in responsiveness and relationship. To attend properly to another person is not to dissolve difference, but to respect it.
So, we will never quite know what it is like to be the bat, the lion, or the student sitting silently at the back of the classroom. You, dear reader can at least be grateful that you do not know what it is to be your Director. But this is not a moral tragedy. It is a moral starting point. There is a temptation, particularly in our current cultural moment, to believe that moral action requires total insight; that unless we can fully inhabit another’s perspective, we are paralysed. But this is a mistake. Moral life has always been conducted under conditions of partial knowledge. What matters is not that we know everything, but that we remain answerable.
We can choose how carefully we listen. We can choose whether to respond with curiosity or certainty. And perhaps most importantly, we can choose whether to be kind even when understanding falls short.
Or, to put it another way and definitely mixing metaphors: you do not need to be a bat to know not to swing the stick. Walking in someone’s shoes turns out not to be about trying them on and declaring them familiar. It is about recognising that they are not ours and adjusting how we walk as a result.
That, I suspect, is quite enough to be going on with for now.
Until next time: Happy Reading / walking in them there shoes!
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
Q: What makes this number unique: 8,549,176,320?
A: All the numbers appear in alphabetical order.
This week’s fun question to answer:
What common word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?