A Reminder From the Outgoing President About the Power of Books and Literature in Cultivating Empathy and Much More
by Michael Zakaras
In case you missed it, I highly recommend reading Michiko Kakatuni’s terrific piece last week in the New York Times, “Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books.”
In it Kakatuni highlights just how central books were during Obama’s presidency — and frankly, across his whole life — as a source of inspiration and of historical perspective. Whether it’s the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi or the tragedies of Shakespeare, Obama was drawn to books for the window they provide into the human condition.
Of course, reading a good novel or a memoir or even a short play takes time, something that is in short supply for a President of the United States. But for Obama that’s partly the point:
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
It’s important to note here that Obama is not talking about books as some kind of escape from reality or a pause button from the never-ending list of consequential decisions he faced each day. Rather, he’s saying that reading books and stories were indispensable for his ability to do his job.
Perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn here?
In the age of information technology and constant change that we’re living through, books (and literature in particular) can sometimes seem superfluous, old-fashioned, irrelevant. Why waste time reading playwrights who have been dead for centuries when you can take that business incubator seminar instead? Why read when you could be out there doing, building, creating?
And yet here you have Obama testifying that it was books that enabled him to survive arguably the most difficult job in the world.
At Ashoka and Start Empathy, we’ve been working for more than five years to shift the conversation about the central importance of empathy, and we know from extensive research that storytelling is one of the most powerful vehicles for cultivating empathy from the earliest ages.
But it’s easy for us to also get caught up in the latest hoopla about throwing our entire education model out the window, encouraging kids to get out there and start businesses and act like mini adults to get a head start and to gain an edge. The question is: Are we doing so at the expense of seeding in them a lifelong habit of reading that may be the most reliable source of empathy and imagination that we have?
Obama even suggested that it is via our shared stories, more even than our stance on specific political issues, that people come together as changemakers and gain ‘the courage to take action of behalf of their lives.’ And this at a time when coming together and working on behalf of each other feels especially urgent:
“At a time,” Obama says, “when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify — as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize — is more important than ever.”
So as we consider what our children need most to thrive in the world, and as we think about crafting a new narrative in America that is more optimistic and inclusive, rooted in empathy and a commitment to others, perhaps it’s time we all start revisiting those timeless stories that remind us just how much we have in common after all.
Read the full NYTimes piece here.
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Michael Zakaras is the Strategy and Partnerships Director for Ashoka United States and was a founding member of the Start Empathy initiative. He is admittedly the son of two literature professors, though not coerced by either parent to write this piece. Michael is also a new father as of October 2016.
