Annasophia Robb = S.E.Hinton = Social theory

Confession time.

Dear blog,

My first confession is that I'm writing a stupid message to a blog. My second confession is that I'm going to use a personal story in this blog, which I out not to do. Bad dark fourth.

My third confession is that...there's a girl. About a year and a half ago, I saw a movie called The Bridge to Terabithia. I was on a plane at the time, sat between two strangers. This movie, if you haven't seen it, is a soppy kids' adventure/love thing, an adaptation of a book by the same name. It was in most respects cringeworthy and silly, but the ending is soooo sad. I have only cried about three times when watching films in my whole life, and this was one of them. Or rather, I would have cried if I hadn't been wedged between people I didn't know, so instead I gulped and grimaced to stop any embarrassing sobs emerging. I got off the plane, and after about a week I never thought of the film again.

Until today. When I happened to glance at it in Borders. Whatever the hell I was doing wasting my time in there. Damn fate. I picked it up, looked at the back, found the actress' name, and have just spent a very guilty hour googling her. It's not that I think she's particularly beautiful, though any straight male would be pressed to deny it (she's a bit too close to the horrific Hillary Duffish perfect-American-teenager-adored-by-10-year-old-girls model for me), it's just her character in the film is so....charming. And innocent. And everything a nice girl should be. And she has amazing clothes.

Anyway, her name is AnnaSophia Robb, and if her website is anything to go by, she's just as charming in real life. She likes Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight and the Beatles. And she helps poor people in India.

But most important for me, she likes S.E.Hinton, author of The Outsiders and That Was Then This Is Now. These are brilliant, brilliant, brilliant books that I read ages ago but are still really powerful for me and have given me huge swathes of inspiration in the past (including Robert Frost....I think that'll be a blog post soon). So I spent the next hour thinking about S.E.Hinton, a writer who wrote startlingly empathetic stories of delinquent youths (almost all men) from broken homes in unnamed US city-ghettos, and who is in fact a woman. I will now explain one of the guiding theories of my life, which I first rationalised in reading her books.

We are destroyed by societies, everyone knows it. Gangs fighting in Chicago are just another expression of countries fighting in Europe, or religions fighting in the Middle East. It's all just society. Of course, society is what allows humans to achieve anything at all as a species, but it is the same constructive instinct that compels our obsession with being wanted and forming a group that causes its opposite: the ultra-destructive instinct to at best distrust and at worst obliterate all other societies. Social conflict binds and neutralises our capacity for empathy, which is chief among human virtues. We cannot relate to others or even recognise them as humans if they are not one of us, i.e. part of our society. It's worse if they're a society that is in long-standing conflict with our own. (To add another dimension to this: every individual is a member of dozens of societies; the more societies any given pair of individuals share, the more they will be able to empathise with each other's point of view. This is why if a WASP sees black Hindus dying in India, they care far less than if white Christians are dying in a neighboring state.)

So.

As responsible and progressive humans who are always striving to drag humanity from its animal roots, we have to remember to be empathetic, even when this does not come at all naturally. What strikes me most in this respect, as a Brit, is the willingness of otherwise very nice and normal people to talk deridingly of "chavs". Don't they see that being dismissive of a social group of which they have formed a negative image, even if this group is - for the vast majority of cases - deserving of such an image, is to reject any form of empathy with those individuals who suffer in the generalisation, in being unfairly lumped together with people with whom they have nothing in common except for living among them. This is what S.E.Hinton taught me. In her books, one or two protagonists, who are lovely, thoughtful people, happen to live in amongst the horror of gang warfare, and suffer from massive amounts of prejudice because of the gangs to which they are forced to belong. Thankfully there's no cheesy Romeo and Juliet love story rip off (unlike some similar musical adaptations of gang stories....), but the suffering is the same. If you want to hate someone, say "I hate people who act in x fashion", not "I hate people who are part of the society that, on average/in general, acts in x fashion." Or more specifically: "I hate that guy who swore at us and keyed our car last night (although his friend seemed alright, stupid hair/fashion sense though he may have)" rather than "I hate chavs - like that guy last night".

All this leads on to my grand theory of Empathy And Human Evolution, but fortunately for sanity, I will end these overlong scrawlings here - for today. I'd like to dedicate this post to AnnaSophia.