7
votes
Why everyone should read Harry Potter: Tales of the young wizard instill empathy, a study finds
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- Title
- Why Everyone Should Read Harry Potter
- Authors
- Bret Stetka
- Word count
- 1035 words
I've often speculated about the effect of my reading on me.
I'm an outlier in my family: I'm the only one who's not racist, not conservative, and so on. I suspect this has something to do with my experiences as a member of a minority which the rest of my family do not share.
However, I've also wondered if my reading had something to do with it. I've been reading science fiction and, to a lesser degree, fantasy, since I can remember. Some of my earliest memories involve me frequenting the library at my primary school. And, when I started high school at age 12, I got access to adult science fiction in my high school library. I've been reading about other societies and other perspectives since forever. I've often wondered if this is one reason I'm different to the rest of my family: more able to understand other people's points of view, more sympathetic to minorities, more willing to accept that there is no single right way to do things.
But I thought this was just intellectual snobbery: "I read, so that's why I'm better than them."
It's interesting to now find that there might be a scientific basis to a correlation between reading novels and empathy. This is yet another reason to encourage reading in children!
I've had the same thoughts, though I'm not the only one in my family who isn't conservative, I feel like my progressive values come from a different kind of source. Others in my family seem more motivated by a vague sense of live and let live and general human empathy, but for me I can't help but feel like it's a lot more visceral. The others in my family seem cooler and more detached by these things, but for me it's beauty/disgust reactions when I see harmony or injustice. I glommed on Steve Rogers as a role model basically as soon as I was exposed to the him.
My earliest memories of hearing stories came from the Hindu myths I absorbed at my grandmother's knee and I think that general love of myth and larger-than-life principles must have imprinted on me when I was very young, possibly far before I started having conscious thoughts. That led me to loving comics, myths of all cultures, and, very importantly, the Tolkien mythos to which I was exposed at what I think is the ideal age: 12. Tolkien was working through some anxieties around industrialism, modernism, war, and other large themes that he encoded into the mythos and his aesthetic sensibilities are all over it. The conflation of beauty as an end worth pursuing in its own right, and that beauty as being reflected in empathy, compassion, and a general love for life and art and culture stuck with me too. And so did the aesthetic revulsion to acts of destruction, to the loss of beautiful things, to the snuffing out of creative energies. These are such an intrinsic part of me that I don't even know how my personality would work if these values weren't there, but it's hard for me to believe that Tolkien or Stan Lee/Jack Kirby just happened to play the right tune to so perfectly resonate with my soul. It's far more likely that they had a big hand in tuning it so it would harmonize with these things when I grew up.