The human factor redux

Book review of The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

With millions of people confined to their homes today with their electronic and digital gadgets as the only means of dialogue with the outside world, one immediately thinks of Sherry Trukle and her pioneering works Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit ( 1985) and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995), which showed us how the intimacy with computers, screens and robots had a bearing on the identities that users came to acquire. As a freshly recruited faculty at a newly conceived programme in Science Technology and Society at MIT in the early seventies, Dr Turkle’s work on the computer-human relations was an extension of her doctoral work on the inner world of the psychoanalysts in France, centred on the life and thinking of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). The exploration of the inner world of those who use computers or gadgets gave Dr Turkle a rare vantage point to argue that the relationship is causing loss of empathy.

What defines humans has never been so central to a history trying to move beyond considering humans at its centre, i.e., a post-human world embracing other species and environment. Dr Turkle once thought technology was defining human subjectivities. She now offers an alternative: Human intimacies produces empathy that machines don’t, and her own story may be read as a case study.

As a doctoral student at Harvard, Dr Turkle saw Lacan and his psychoanalytic community as continuing the revolution that began in 1968 on the street. Later, she seems to sense that that revolution never took place. Instead of moaning about a god that failed, Dr Turkle looks for another faith. How did she evolve?

A brilliant description of the inner life of a second-generation, lower-income Jewish household tucked in the corner of Rockaway, eastern New York, may give the reader a clue to the answer. The experience of being part of an underclass — and a Jew to boot — appears to have defined her persona. Social isolation and marginality at the elite Radcliff, to the extent of being portrayed as a thief at one point, allowed her the unique ability of those at the margins: The art of listening and to read messages written in objects (i.e., dress, food, radio, television). The Diaries is rich with all of these experiences.

The Diaries also brings out her intimate inheritances: Doting family, unfaithful partner, an uncaring and lost father, and an ungrateful institution refusing to recognise her contribution. There is a point in all these memories: Notwithstanding her achievements, there are spaces that need to be seen and shared differently, humanly. Although her early ideas of how people look to the digital objects as their close friends seems abandoned here, the human relationship seems to trouble her now.

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir

Editors: Sherry Trukle

Publisher: Penguin Press 

Pages: 357; Price: $28

By making characters in her life central to her evolution, she presents an alternative to her theory: Subjects now replace objects as defining human sensibilities. But human subjectivity is also marked by conditions of irony. It shows in her life too. The visit of Lacan, the central pillar of her PhD research, turns out to be a flop show at MIT, prompting her colleagues to warn her that this would harm her case for a tenure. Her pioneering ethnography was judged by MIT’s age-old scientific data management standards and her tenure was refused. There was also the irony of being almost snubbed by Steve Jobs for whom she spent the whole day preparing a meal because she was told he preferred vegetarian food. Jobs not only came late and rushed out early from the dinner she hosted, he apparently did not think the delicately organised vegetarian sushi was not the right kind of vegetarian food. The irony is compoun­ded by her brilliant husband Seymour Papert being unfaithful to her. 

But the reader misses Dr Turkle’s engagements with the larger human concerns of the times. Many of her Ivy League colleagues have articulated their position on aspects of human tragedies, such as the increasing loss of human concerns by the Israeli state, an issue her Sunday school Rabbi discussed with her as a young girl. Unlike Hannah Arendt, classic Manhattan intellectual, for whom being a Holocaust survivor meant she needed to forewarn the humanity of all existing totalitarian tendencies, Dr Turkle’s Diaries provides us no such emergent desire.

The most poignant pages of the Diaries have been reserved for the women in her life: The mother, who hid her breast cancer so as to not disturb her studies; the aunt, her lifelong support giver; and her grandmother, the not-so educated daughter of a Belarusian emigrant Jew, who even in those impoverished conditions believed that opening somebody else’s letter was a “federal crime” that needed to be immediately reported. For Dr Turkle, it is such trust in the state being the protector of the rights, more so of the minorities, that made her a lifelong defender of civil liberties. In this sense, the Dairies is a reminder even at this most tragic hour that in the end it must be empathy and not machines that need to define our sense of being human.

The reviewer teaches history at the Centre for Media Studies, JNU