Culture

Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in certain circumstances, in general it is a poor moral guide. ‘It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.’ As always this depends on definitions. And as Bloom says from the outset, ‘The act of feeling what you think others are feeling —whatever one chooses to call this — is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good.

According to the author of this beautifully illustrated, hugely engaging book, if we were ever to choose a fellow mammal to serve as symbol for our time, then the polar bear would probably make any shortlist. Standing ten feet tall on their hind legs and weighing as much as a ton, the males are the world’s largest terrestrial predators and the only ones to seek human flesh actively. This extraordinary whale- and walrus-wrestling monster is proof positive that wildness persists on our planet, despite the onslaughts of the Anthropocene. For all its nightmare-haunting power, however, the aspect of the polar bear that really makes it an icon of the age is its vulnerability.

Can American publishers be dissuaded from foisting absurd, bombastic subtitles on their books as if readers are all Trumpers avid for tawdry, over-simplified stunts? Howard Bloch is a professor at Yale whose previous books have had medieval French literature, the Bayeux tapestry and medieval misogyny as their subject matter. He has taken an entertaining diversion in his career by writing a relaxed and accessible book about Mallarmé’s poem of 1897, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘One toss of the dice will never abolish chance’) and its place in belle époque Paris. The professor’s erudition and light touch need no Barnum-style booming.

This past autumn has felt more uncomfortable than usual to be a woman looking at men looking at women. From Hillary Clinton’s ‘overheating’ episode (‘Does she have Parkinson’s? Is she wearing a catheter?!’) to Donald Trump’s assessment of female limbs as if they were building materials, election season finished with the male members of our new first family peering over the voting booth to check on their wives. Siri Hustvedt has long been interested in how the way we look at the world privileges certain political, gendered, artistic and scientific agendas, while excluding others. These dynamics are at play between a reader and a writer, a doctor and a patient, a neuroscientist and the brain she studies.

What to make of this unexpectedly startling novel? Though you may be lured into a false sense of familiarity by mentions in the blurb of Trollopes J and A, and the comfortable middle-class settings (Sussex, Notting Hill), it turns out to be a diatribe against male selfishness, a meditation on approaching death, and an apologia for adultery. And that’s among other things. Set in the week beginning 6 May 2015 — the day before David Cameron’s unexpected general election triumph — it concerns three marriages well into maturity, each requiring a reappraisal of its sexual politics. Some of this, reading as a middle-aged male nearing 60, as is one of the characters, is close to the bone, if I may so put it.

This month, 30 years ago, I wrote a draft of what was to become soon afterwards the first comprehensive human rights charter for people with HIV. It was born out of an urgency to stop the global drift by governments to panic and repression. In March 1987, a handful of us founded the UK Aids Vigil Organisation to campaign for the protections set out in the charter, lobby the World Health Ministers Summit in London and host a parallel HIV human rights conference, one of the first such conferences held anywhere. Our modest efforts were a mere footnote to a much bigger and more important story, which is told by David France in How To Survive a Plague.