The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir by Sherry Turkle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Learning To Not Understand

None of us understands all that we need to understand until after it’s too late to matter. In this remarkable memoir Sherry Turkle shows that she has understood a great deal. Some of it even before it was too late. As for the rest, she learned something even more important: “When I consider elementary school, I think that permission to not understand was its greatest gift.”

Ms Turkle and I are contemporaries (I’m her senior by 17 months). We also spent a part of our infancy together in Bayside, Queens (who knows but that our mothers may have bumped prams). And although our upbringing diverged, hers in Jewish Brooklyn mine 15 miles away in a Catholic enclave of Nassau County (the internal dynamics of the two groups were not dissimilar), we shared in the Spirit of the Times - the educational opportunities made available through prosperity; the hope for a less misogynist, racist, violent and unjust world; the idea of personal contribution through intellect; and an unconscious confidence in the institutions of religion, education, and government.

Our mothers shopped at the same stores (Mays and A&S mostly). They had the same worries about tight money and ailing relatives. But the greatest similarity was the “magical thinking,” in which difficulties could be resolved and the future assured simply by not talking about them. Such a condition is not a state of optimism in the face of adversity, but a denial that adversity exists at all. People died without warning because terminal illness didn’t fit in with family conversation. Men, in general, were volatile, unreliable creatures who exploited women. We “should know without words what was off limits.”

As Turkle says, “The expected is invisible.” We took all this for grated. This was how the world worked. But she and I were able to learn, however belatedly, how different the world outside our insulated cultural bubbles was. And we were both fortunate to learn not through overwhelming shock but through “slight and constructive dissociation from self.” In other words, the world was kind to us.

This made our parents look naive and even embarrassing at times. Why had they never prepared us for the ‘realities’ of life? There were different ways of thinking, of dressing, of behaving that we knew nothing about. There was a class structure in America, made all the more rigid in its denial as a matter of principle. There were incomprehensibly horrid people who committed atrocious acts while waving the Bible, the Constitution, or the latest issue of the National Observer.

Of course our parents didn’t tell us about such things because to know about them would have been corrupting. Better to suffer the shock of discovery than to be damaged through premature knowing. They protected us. But it seemed as if they had misled us. Family secrecy implies to a child that its family is the only one with secrets to hide. Intense religious education becomes a kind of secretive tribal pact rather than a spiritual event. Parental love is a burden. Some reject it, some succumb to its weight, but some, like Turkle, find another way: “My parents gave me burdens in childhood that I honed into gifts.”

And this is what she passes on to her students: “I say this to my students: You are at university to understand your gifts and what you love to do. If you are lucky, they will be the same thing. If not, let’s talk and see if we can increase the overlap.” This kind of wisdom is the product of dreams - dreams discarded as well as fulfilled, but mostly dreams demolished through their fulfilment. This is ultimately why the old cannot teach much to the young until the young have failed by achieving their dreams. “Stumbling and trying again,” not pursuing the same ambitions but changing them, is our real education.

As Turkle and I entered adulthood, the differences in the initial conditions of our lives became more pronounced. She attended Radcliffe College (the ‘sister college’ to Harvard before being merged into it progressively from 1977 to 1999). My university, also in New England, was somewhat less prestigious. She then went on, through academic brilliance, immense energy, and not a little luck, to become a leading figure in the psychology and sociology of technology. Among other things, she has pursued the study of “evocative objects” and “the lies we take for truth,” a not insignificant issue in social technology.

But even then I was on the fringes of her world when I joined a consulting firm in Boston. Once again our shadows may have crossed. In any case, I got to read her marvellous insights about technology as well as herself, and for that matter about myself. In a way our lives converged as we both developed an identity as bricoleur, a sort of professional crofting which takes bits and pieces from various fields and tries to put them together with some coherence. I think it is clear Turkle has achieved her objective: “You start with self-knowledge and then you generalize what you have learned to help others.” And sometimes this means not understanding at all. But that’s OK too.

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