Electronic Empathy and the Humanities
Fictional androids helped my students relate to essential workers
The escalating threat of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the resulting shift to online Zoom classes — hit my course on cultural eco-criticism as the students were on spring break.
We had all gone on break assuming that we’d be able to relax for a week before returning to our normal class routine.
But just a few days after the pandemic struck, our university’s leadership decided to close down campus. My students had to accept that they would not be returning to their dorms or friends for a while.
University and department leadership encouraged us to approach our online pedagogy with care and empathy.
Though I appreciated this mindset, I found it difficult to maintain empathy while I too was being forced to navigate the upheaval and anxiety of social distancing.
I felt increasingly alienated from the students with whom I had been building a relationship over the last several months.
Just as concerning, I noticed that my students were responding less and less to their peers’ comments during our sessions.
Now we could only interact through computer screens.
How could we establish the same environment of engagement and empathy that I had worked so hard to foster in the classroom?
As I wrestled with these issues, we began reading Philip K. Dick’s 1968 post-apocalyptic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The novel portrays a society in which possessing a living, breathing animal is both a status symbol and an affirmation of one’s humanity — so much so that those who cannot afford them resort to electronic imitations.
Typically, my class focuses on how the main character, Rick Deckard, strives to replace his electric sheep with a living animal in order to distance himself from the androids (“andys”) that he must destroy.
To bring the course full circle, we take the novel as imagining a world without that escape to nature — without that realm outside of the anthropocentric formations of “civilization,” “industry” and “economy.”
We did, indeed, pursue this line of thinking across multiple Zoom sessions.
Still, as our discussions progressed, I saw how this perspective contrasted with my students’ immediate lived experience.
Perhaps, I realized, this approach was far more salient in the context of the carefully sculpted and manicured landscape of the college bubble.
For my students now, nature was where they could go; animals were safe. Now they had to distance themselves from their fellow humans and from densely packed urban environments.
As the pandemic ensued, our discussions shifted more and more towards Deckard’s internal struggle to destroy androids who are nearly indistinguishable from humans.
In Deckard’s world, the dominant religion centers around a Jesus-like figure named Wilbur Mercer, who is eternally pelted by rocks as he ascends a steep hill. Individuals can experience a “physically merging” with Mercer by clutching the handles of a small device called an empathy box.
The empathy box plays a vital role in a society obsessed with policing the boundary between the human and the electronic, as androids can never achieve this fusion.
John Isidore, one of the characters in the novel, is a lonely man living in an abandoned apartment building who relies heavily on the empathy box for human contact and validation.
I did not anticipate the extent to which my students would make connections between their own situation and that of Isidore. I realized that the empathy box provided precisely what we had left back in the classroom and what we struggled to achieve through our Zoom sessions: the sense of a shared experience.
Dick’s vision of real empathy through machines and across distances thus became a central topic in our readings. Our discussions allowed my students to articulate the feelings of loss and anxiety that they were experiencing in this unprecedented situation.
Engaging with this concept of electronic empathy led us back to the novel’s androids.
In the book, as in the film, the andys are a labor force for humanity’s off-world colonies. Their labor and suffering are invisible to the remaining inhabitants of Earth, and their inability to achieve fusion through the empathy box precludes the possibility of any real rights. Their exclusion is meant to shore up the humans’ sense of self-worth.
Deckard must hunt down and retire a group of andys who killed their masters and escaped to Earth. Even as he repeats to himself again and again that the fugitives are inhuman killers, Deckard struggles to destroy them.
By the end of his story, we can see that the socially-vital boundary between the living and the electronic has finally degraded for Deckard.
The androids of the novel evoked for my students the vast number of invisible laborers who make it possible for us to shop online and have goods delivered to our doorsteps, all while maintaining the dictates of social distancing.
We discussed how these workers were risking their lives for little pay — and with limited rights — so that we could stay safe from the pandemic. These workers were largely ignored by the media, except when they spoke out about the dangers they faced, and they were usually punished for it.
My students are, by-and-large, business students, and most are sympathetic to business interests. But by reading Androids, we were able to directly confront the barriers that prevent us from empathizing with the workers who perform these important services.
Despite the fact that warehouse workers and delivery drivers are human beings — as opposed to androids made to do our bidding — the media often portrays them as the latter.
While there is nothing particularly new about this form of systemic oppression, never has our complicity in it been so central to our way of life.
Of course, the novel did not provide us any immediate solutions to the challenge of electronic empathy, but it did give us a common framework to identify and discuss the problem.
Furthermore, the novel’s narrative structure allowed students to draw direct connections between their mediated relationships with the friends they can see on the screen and with the marginalized workers who they cannot.
Through these discussions, I realized that Dick’s empathy box provided us with the perfect model for our new online course.
As with Mercer’s endless trudge up the hill, our labor in the humanities might sometimes seem inconsequential amidst a global pandemic. Yet, through our collective effort, we can perform socially and politically potent work that can, in the words of Rebecca Solnit:
make the unknown real, the invisible visible, … bring the faraway near.
The touted notion that reading literature promotes empathy has been supported by an increasing number of scientific studies in recent years.
My experience with this class showed me the power of using a work like Androids to interrogate the obstacles we all face when trying to practice empathy in this “new normal.”
My university is still weighing whether or not to reopen our campus for the fall semester. Regardless of what form my courses will take, I will be able to approach my pedagogy with a renewed confidence in the vital role of the humanities, which help us contextualize and respond to present circumstances.
In their course evaluations from the spring, several students remarked that our course made the transition to online learning easier for them.
My favorite comment came from one student who was comforted by our ability to talk through the difficulties we were facing. She appreciated that I treated my students “like humans.”
Works Cited
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Ballantine Books, 1975.
Fischer, Michael. “Literature and Empathy,” Philosophy and Literature 41, no. 2 (October 2017): 431–464.
Goodall, Jane. “COVID-19 Should Make Us Rethink Our Destructive Relationship With the Natural World.” Slate.com, April 6, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/jane-goodall-coronavirus-species.html
Hall, Emily. “Locating Empathy: Using Android Protagonists to Teach Oppression and Marginalization,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 19, no. 3 (October 2019): 551–558.
Solnit, Rebecca. The Faraway Nearby. Penguin Books, 2013.
