What if Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?
The historians who want to know how our ancestors experienced love, anger, fear, and sorrow
By Gal Beckerman
The historian Rob Boddice sat cross-legged on his couch in Montreal on a frigid day last winter and conjured for me the image of a medieval carpenter, hammering away in his workshop. “Imagine this guy; he’s building a table,” he said. Suddenly the carpenter misses the nail and bangs his thumb instead. “What did that feel like for him?” Boddice asked. I stared for a few seconds while Boddice smiled encouragingly, as if he’d just asked me to solve a quadratic equation in my head. “I guess it probably stung, and then his thumb throbbed?” I ventured, remembering actually banging my own thumb a few weeks back while assembling an IKEA desk. Boddice nodded, then said, “Let me ask you again. What did it feel like for him?”
Boddice is an energetic 48-year-old academic who has stormed the field of the history of emotions and senses, a specialized branch that has grown significantly over the past two decades even as most others (such as military and medieval history) have been pruned. Working for the past few years out of an institute he helped found—the Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, colloquially known as HEX, housed at Tampere University, in Finland—Boddice has tried to steer this area of study in a radical direction. “Emotions and senses” refers to history focused less on the facts of the past than on its more ineffable qualities, such as the smells of a 19th-century city filled with thousands of horses, and the quality of grief expressed in the letters of widows during World War I. Boddice is interested in a deeper, more expansive concept that encompasses everything about how reality is perceived, melding together emotions and senses and much else into an engagement with “experience.”
For starters, he has little patience for the standard (and impoverished, if you ask him) assumptions about feelings, such as the idea that they come in six basic universal flavors—happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. In the 1960s and ’70s, the psychologist Paul Ekman identified these six emotions, which he thought were hardwired into every human. This perception is still fairly embedded in our culture. Just consider the success of Pixar’s Inside Out, Boddice suggests, which anthropomorphized some of these distinct sentiments as cartoon characters (anger, for example, is squat and red, and has a head that ignites like a furnace) pulling levers behind a console inside our minds. Much of the social-skills curricula for elementary-school children are built around the same idea: choose from a list of prepackaged emoji ranging from smiley to frowny. There is nothing unusual about a desire to distill and name emotions in this way. For one thing, it might be the source of empathy. Having a shared “happy” that refers to what you are feeling and what I am feeling seems essential to relationships, and probably also to building any kind of human society.
But as a historian trying to comprehend feelings, Boddice can’t stand those cute Inside Out characters. Because not only do we imagine other people to have the exact same set of emotions that we have, but we project this thought backwards through time. Love for us can’t be that different from what it meant to Heloise and Abelard writing letters to each other in the 12th century. The laborers who hauled stones to build the pyramids in Giza felt anger that is our anger. We perform this projection on any number of human experiences: losing a child, falling ill, being bored at work. We assume that emotions in the past are accessible because we assume that at their core, people in the past were just like us, with slight tweaks for their choice of hats and standards of personal hygiene.
Boddice starts with the opposite premise, that we are not the same—that the experience of being human in another era, with all of its component feelings and perceptions, even including something as elemental as pain, is so foreign to us as to live inside a kind of sealed vault. “There is nothing about my humanness that affords me insight into humanity,” Boddice has said. Rather than being a constant—extending across space and time—human nature for Boddice is a variable and unstable category, one with infinite possible shades.
“Down with empathy,” Boddice said when we met in Montreal, the snow falling outside the window in Mount Royal Park. “I want a T-shirt with that on it.” Boddice has a slim build and a rangy restlessness. His face is boyish despite the crow’s-feet beginning to splay out from the corners of his eyes. He’s eager to show that he has a life beyond writing books—a guitar collection (including a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Les Paul) rested on stands in an otherwise spare living room, and he wore a marathoner’s bulky running watch. When he is not in Finland, he lives in Montreal with his wife, Stephanie Olsen, also a researcher at HEX (she has studied children’s dream narratives), and their 8-year-old son.
The idea of “experiential relativity,” as Boddice calls it—a recent paper also referred to his approach as “historical neurodiversity”—might seem squishy and postmodern. It’s a kind of thinking that questions whether anything is real—the sort of speculation that might emerge from a dorm room late at night. The reaction is understandable. But Boddice is interested in some very real things: the brain and the body, and the way they interact with culture to produce experience. His approach reminded me of the philosopher William James, who also didn’t believe that human emotions are “sacramental or eternally fixed,” as he wrote in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology. Whereas the prevailing thought was that an internal feeling generates outward response—I’m sad, therefore I cry—James thought the causality was all wrong. In his schema, what happens first is an external stimulus. This triggers a bodily response, and only then does an internal process of interpretation assign meaning to that response. I might see a sunset and find tears springing to my eyes, and then my mind will interpret this as missing my father, with whom I last witnessed a sunset. Because of this variability of response and interpretation, James wrote, “there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely.”
Read: Science’s struggle to define emotions
Unlike James, who was simply intuiting what happens inside our heads, Boddice is layering his own thinking on top of the most recent advances in neuroscience, which have proved just how plastic our minds really are, in much the way James assumed. How a particular brain assigns meaning has to do with a person’s prior experiences—what Lisa Feldman Barrett, the director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University and the author of How Emotions Are Made, calls its “concepts and categories.” The brain, Barrett told me, is trapped in the skull, “a dark, silent box,” so it has to make predictions by drawing on those concepts and categories, which are “very, very different by culture—even the concept of what an emotion is varies by culture.” This helps the brain predict and hone its perceptions, and these are very much related to concepts tied to a time and place. The process all leads to what the behavioral neurologist Marsel Mesulam has called our “highly edited subjective version of the world.” In other words, there is no spot in our heads where a Platonic (or emoji) version of sadness or happiness resides. Feelings are not determined; they are created. And this is true for even something as seemingly universal as pain.
Let’s return to that medieval carpenter. He has banged his thumb, triggering his nociceptors, or pain receptors—which should really be called “harm receptors,” Boddice said, because all they do is send a signal up to the brain that damage has occurred. They don’t themselves cause pain. To understand what the carpenter experiences, then, we need to begin with a series of questions that might help us reconstruct the meaning produced once the signal reaches its destination. Does this happen a lot? Is the sensation of hitting his thumb a daily or weekly occurrence—something that goes with the job? And then, if religion infused every second of his life, as might very well be true for a medieval carpenter, where would his concept of suffering come from? Does he think about Christ and perhaps feel purified? If suffering, sin, and love are conjoined in an idea of the divine in the carpenter’s brain, and these are “lived connections,” Boddice said, “and you’re surrounded by them,” how might he feel when that hammer hits his thumb?
It no longer seems so simple as just saying “pain.” We cannot put the carpenter in an MRI machine—we will never have total access to his feelings—but by building out his world in all of its dimensions, Boddice believes, we can get closer to appreciating the specificity of those feelings. This points to another radical element of Boddice’s thinking: To re-create an experience, you need to know all of the conditions that may have led the brain to originally create it, and this means bringing dozens of different academic disciplines to bear on the task, getting fields that don’t usually mingle to interact with one another.
Art history might give insight into what visual representations a person might have been surrounded by; the study of theology might help establish an ideological framework for how they understood their place in the universe; archaeology might reveal what their relationship was like to their material environment. This is the kind of imaginative work that historical novelists usually do, except Boddice wants to scrape the archives to build out a 360-degree understanding based on historical fact. If you know anything about how narrow the categories of academia can be, you can probably see why this is a little dreamy on his part, but it’s also how, he thinks, we can fully unlock the great diversity of ways in which people once moved through reality.
Pain has a particular interest for Boddice, and was the subject of his 2023 book, Knowing Pain, which he opened with his own experience of having a herniated disc when he was 17 (and his encounter with a physical therapist who kept pressing her thumbs into his neck and demanding, “Is that your pain?”). At first, it seems counterintuitive to think of pain as anything other than universal—the same everywhere, and at all times. Yet anyone who has ever been asked to describe their pain to a doctor knows that we are at the mercy of language. Is it sharp or dull? Does it pound or burn? These are metaphors, and ones that culture gives us.
There was a time in the Western world, just a few hundred years ago, when if you weren’t feeling well, you assumed that one of the four humors in your body—blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm—was out of whack. You might then say, as the 18th-century poet Thomas Gray did, that your pains were “wandering” throughout your “constitution” until “they may fix into the Gout.” One of Boddice’s HEX colleagues, Jenni Kuuliala, wrote about a Tuscan friar, Giovanni Bronsius, who in the fall of 1597 ate a plate of macaroni, soon felt sick, and knew that a witch had poisoned him. When it came to witchcraft, Kuuliala told me, people described a bubbling sensation in the body, a certain restlessness. The friar used these words too, adding other details. (His teeth felt “empty.”) Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century German Benedictine abbess, talked of the intense divine visions she was having. They appeared to her as blinding auras—a “reflection of the living Light,” she called them, something “far, far brighter than a cloud which carries the sun.” Modern scholars have assumed she was having migraines. But Boddice doesn’t accept this reasoning. “I don’t want to explain religious visions away.”
We could translate each of these experiences into the word pain. But that would conflate what Boddice insists are the unique feelings that the brain in each of these historical moments produced. In a manifesto of sorts—Emotion, Sense, Experience, co-written in 2020 with Mark Smith, a University of South Carolina historian—Boddice makes his claim with the gusto and certainty of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: “What we propose is a disruption of what it is and means to be human.”
This is the kind of provocative statement to which Boddice is prone, and his work can induce a sense of vertigo. To unmoor people from any sense of common humanity means undermining most of the political philosophies and laws that govern our world. If we abandon our sense of shared humanness with people who lived in the past, what does that mean for other people who live in different cultural contexts today—in a village in China, or just on the other side of the same city?
And yet the notion that the same inputs may create divergent experiences has some gut-level validity to it—think of how the feeling of being an American changes today whether you are wearing blue or red lenses. And then there are the dizzying advances in AI, which make Boddice’s question—what does it even mean to be human?—one that we all face as never before.
Rob Boddice was born in 1977 in a mining community near the bleak industrial English town of Burton-on-Trent. From his home, he could see a deep coal mine, Cadley Hill, which was shut down in the late ’80s. When he was a boy, everyone’s father seemed to be unemployed. “I grew up wanting to escape; it’s that simple,” Boddice said.
As he made his way into and through academia—he received all of his degrees, up to and including his Ph.D., from the University of York—Boddice tried to lose the biggest marker of class identity in England, becoming “an accent chameleon,” as he put it. He was so successful that during his postdoc years, in the early 2000s, he gave a lecture one day in London in such a flawlessly scrubbed-down, international version of English that a British woman in the audience complimented him on his mastery of the language, assuming, because he was with the Freie Universität in Berlin, that he was German. “The only accent I cannot do now is my own, really,” he told me.
It’s not surprising that someone who has had to cycle through so many versions of himself would be attuned to the way an environment can mold how you talk or walk, which can in turn change the way you think and maybe who you are. Already as a graduate student, he was drawn to the work of anthropologists, such as Clifford Geertz, who appreciated and wrote about their own distance from the lived experience of their subjects, shaped by unspannable chasms of culture. In his dissertation, Boddice stared across this divide, asking why practices such as cockfighting and bullbaiting, now considered brutal and uncivilized, once appeared totally ordinary to British minds, and why this changed in the 19th century. These were the seeds of his fascination with how variable the human experience can be. His research showed that the same kind of activity that once caused delight, or at least did not cause alarm, could elicit revulsion just a few decades later. He wanted to know how this is possible.
Before the establishment of HEX, in 2018, Boddice struggled to find his place among the stiflingly confined categories of academia. He wanted to ask “the Bill & Ted question of history—what is the meaning of life?,” and this was not the standard way for a young researcher to begin to make his career. In the history of emotions and senses, Boddice finally found a receptive field, with well-funded new institutes in Berlin and Australia, that appealed to him for its more foundational approach to the human condition. But he also saw its limitations. Researchers were jumping into the archives with their own preconceptions; they were looking, say, for love in the 16th century by highlighting the word in various texts, but taking for granted a 21st-century sense of what love meant.
In The History of Emotions (2017) and then A History of Feelings (2019), Boddice wrote of the need to “surrender,” to let go of the very human impulse to empathize with the dead, as if their feelings and perceptions had been more or less like ours. He also suggested an interdisciplinary approach that is still unusual in most of academia—the attitude is generally one of “I’m a political historian, I’m an art historian, I’m a religious historian, I’m a material historian, I’m a historian of language,” he told me. Whereas if you want to summon back to life a world in which people lived and moved—and thereby isolate and characterize specific experiences—you need all of those disciplines together.
A History of Feelings opens by looking at the first word in the Western canon, which happens to refer to an emotion. At the start of The Iliad, Achilles is described as having mênis, which is usually rendered simply as “wrath” or “anger” or “rage” by English translators. Boddice didn’t think this made sense, because, first of all, Achilles doesn’t really act enraged; he just kind of broods. It isn’t until his friend Patroclus is killed, much later in the story, that he enters battle. This might seem like pedantic textual analysis, but for Boddice it is an opening to an emotion from deep antiquity that has been lost to time. Through a close reading of ancient-Greek usages of mênis, the feeling revealed itself to Boddice as something closer to unease at cosmic disorder (or, as Boddice put it to me, a “cosmic sulk”) than anything we’d associate today with anger. If mênis wasn’t motivating Achilles after Patroclus’s death, then what was? After examining images of Achilles on Greek pottery and reading accounts of ancient funeral rites, Boddice discerned what seemed like yet another form of grief, more violent in nature, which also has no real analogue today.
A 2020 paper by the German historian Bettina Hitzer shows how this approach to history can undermine what we often take for granted—for instance, that a bad smell is always and forever a bad smell. Hitzer looked at the way Nazi politics affected how the odors of cancer patients and their advanced tumors were perceived. Whereas in the 19th century these smells were mainly described as useful for aiding in diagnosis, in the Germany of the 1920s and ’30s, they elicited extreme disgust and were characterized as repellent in the medical literature of the time. Hitzer concludes that this has to do with the Nazis’ focus on purity and use of disease metaphors and imagery (describing Jews as “cancerous tumors” and having a distinct stench); this association altered what happened after the smell of the patients reached people’s noses, with the result that those odors created a feeling of moral disgust. It is impossible to understand sense and emotion—experience—without taking in the overwhelming politics of that era. As she notes, after 1945, “【𝟰𝟵 𝗺】references to smell and disgust disappeared almost completely” from writing about cancer.
If the history of experience, as practiced and preached by Boddice, has a godmother, it is the celebrated New Zealand–born historian Joanna Bourke, now a professor emerita at Birkbeck, at the University of London, and a fellow of the British Academy. She has never deployed experience as an overarching term for describing her focus, but it captures well her approach to understanding the past, particularly in her work on how violence is felt. Her award-winning 1999 book, An Intimate History of Killing, considers how soldiers responded to violence in 20th-century warfare, including through what might seem like unexpected emotions, such as joy and catharsis. When I asked her if she’d gotten pushback earlier in her career from other historians for her focus on experience, she let out a big laugh. Recovering the feelings of historical actors was simply not done, she explained. If you wanted to understand people in the past, she said, “the emphasis was much more on what they did and what that tells us about the ways they are thinking, as opposed to what they were feeling and therefore what they did.”
I was curious specifically about Bourke’s work on the history of rape. The subject is inherently disturbing, and her treatment is itself unsettling. If we are to take seriously the idea that we cannot simply project backwards, then even those acts considered to be the gravest violations of bodily autonomy need to be understood for how they were felt in their time. How might rape have been experienced differently when it carried a societal stigma of “ruining” the woman who was attacked? And, even harder to grasp, what about what we now call marital rape? “Bodily autonomy is not what a woman in the 17th or 18th century is experiencing,” Bourke said. “She’s experiencing submission to the will of God, submission to the will of the husband.” But would the act feel different to her because the notion of bodily autonomy wasn’t part of her conceptual vocabulary, which is what I take Boddice and Bourke to be saying? She might feel a physical sensation of hurt, Bourke told me, but that is different from violence, which is the meaning one makes of hurt. At a time when there was not “any sort of idea of an emotional soul or self, or certainly not psychological self, that is being harmed,” the act would be perceived in a totally different way than in a world, like ours, with a concept like trauma, which can be physical or psychic. As strange and troubling as it may be to put aside our own moral precepts when looking at the past, this is the work of the historian, Bourke said: “to unpick the universal experience.” When she says unpick—a word Boddice also uses—I imagine the historian delicately tugging at the threads of what appears to be a smooth fabric and loosening it into a messy collection of misshapen emotions. Some will repel us, some will enlighten us, and some will remain forever impossible to grasp. photo with a double exposure, one of a man sitting in his living room next to a guitar with a hazy overlay of a 17th-century landscape painting Rob Boddice, a 48-year-old academic, has transformed the field known as the history of emotions and senses, and co-founded the discipline’s leading research institute, in Tampere, Finland. (Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The Atlantic)
Boddice’s hope was for HEX to be a center of research that would take what he saw as the incredible heterogeneity of human experience as its starting point. The institute was funded in 2018 for a period of eight years with a 10-million-euro grant from the Finnish government. A few months before the funding ran out, Boddice moved to the University of Helsinki to begin what he called “a new, multidisciplinary project on panic.” (He remains affiliated with HEX as a researcher.) In 2023, I went to Tampere for HEX’s annual conference, hoping to get a sense of how widely shared Boddice’s approach is. The town is sometimes referred to as the Manchester of Finland, a 19th-century industrial hub whose skyline is still punctuated by puffing smokestacks (and where reindeer meat appears on every menu). Even in March, the ground was covered in treacherous black ice, and the sky hung heavy and gray. The university campus is a series of modernist glass-and-concrete structures in the center of the town. Boddice stood out during the three days, partly because he was wearing a three-piece pinstripe suit and a fedora most of the time, but also because he seemed to be the clear intellectual heavyweight trying to corral a scattered group of scholars and graduate students toward his vision of what the history of experience means.
Some of those present were very much aligned with the program, such as Piroska Nagy, a Hungarian-born medievalist in cat’s-eye glasses who is a co-editor, together with Boddice and Mark Smith, of a Cambridge University Press series on the history of emotions and senses—a gatekeeper role where they can nudge the field in their direction. “I made my Ph.D. on weeping,” Nagy told me, “a thousand years ago, when nobody worked on this kind of thing.” Nagy wrote about how crying in the Middle Ages was seen as signifying closeness to God. Both men and women alike cried in public (though each had different weeping styles) as a kind of ritualized act, a way to show contrition, ecstasy, or the presence of divine love.
At the HEX conference, many of the presentations I listened to would have been at home in nearly any such gathering focused on cultural history or comparative literature, with scholars seizing on some dredged-up nugget of esoterica from the archives without much context or sense of why it mattered. This was exactly the narrow, blinkered kind of history that Boddice was trying to break with. On a few occasions, I saw him gently take issue with a speaker for using decidedly contemporary categories to comprehend the past. One Finnish researcher, peppered by Boddice with questions about how generally he was describing emotions, answered, “But I’ve read Plato and Aristotle and those guys, and they talk about anger and fear.” I already knew enough to anticipate Boddice’s response: How can we understand what they meant by anger and fear?
You can’t entirely blame the other scholars; Boddice’s standards are exacting. At the same time, they lead to a place with no boundaries at all. If we concede that the meaning of experience is not necessarily the same from past to present, doesn’t the same logic make you wonder about the meaning of experience from culture to culture in the present? In fact it does, as Boddice readily admits. He is skeptical that any kind of universal baseline can be established for capturing how humans make their way through the world.
Producing history that tries to put a finger in this swiftly moving river is not easy, but when it actually happens, the results do feel revelatory and significantly different from other encounters with the past. For a good example, a few scholars at the HEX conference pointed me to a remarkable paper by the late Jan Plamper, a professor at Goldsmiths, at the University of London.
Plamper chose as his topic the sensory experience of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and specifically the change in experience that took place between the February revolution, which led to the czar’s abdication, and the October revolution later that year, when the Bolsheviks took power. Plamper considered the sounds and smells of that period not “as spice in the narrative” but as subjects “in their own right.” Drawing on contemporaneous observations from a variety of sources, the paper is crammed with extraordinary detail—the way the smell of cigars, associated with the bourgeoisie, suddenly provoked revulsion among the revolutionaries, or how the reality of peasants and workers pouring into the cities could be felt physically because the sidewalks were covered in sunflower-seed shells, the snack of the lower classes (“Pedestrians felt like they were walking on a cushioned carpet”). Between the disappearing sound of church bells and the increasing prevalence of the color red, the sensory environment was undergoing its own revolutionary change.
You can almost imagine the brain of a Russian that year trying to make meaning out of all the new signals. In February, when the revolution began, the new sound of occasional rapid gunfire was terrifying, but soon Petrograders could distinguish between live ammunition and blanks, and by October, when shooting started up again, they were habituated to the noise—and the particular quality of silence that followed it—as part of what marked revolutionary time.
This is history as disorientation, listening for the dissonances, when the gunfire starts and stops. The sources are the existing ones, but they are being used in new ways and in new combinations to try to answer how the Russian Revolution “became known”—in Plamper’s words—to the people who lived through it. The work pushes historians to do the uncomfortable and move outside the boxes they’ve been trained to operate within.
The universalism that Boddice mistrusts is a relatively new concept in human history. It comes to us from the Enlightenment. The presumption that all people share a common nature was dreamed up by European intellectuals sitting in their salons. Plenty of critics, starting with postcolonial thinkers, now understand this to have been an ideological attempt to exert power and order over a world that had recently become bigger and stranger. But this impulse toward uniformity is not just an 18th-century one. Freudian psychology also reduced the dynamism of the human mind to a machine powered by predictable and shared drives. By the time we get to our current globalized culture, in which a Korean thriller can win Best Picture at the Oscars and Latin pop stars dominate the U.S. charts, the notion that our emotional registers are all essentially alike feels self-evident.
And for all we know, it may be true. Even some historians who are keen, like Boddice, to reconstruct experience from scratch are reluctant to take the leap he makes when he questions whether humans have anything in common. Javier Moscoso is a professor at the Spanish National Research Council, and on its face, his methodology seems very similar to Boddice’s—the two have a lot of respect for each other. Moscoso’s most recent book, Arc of Feeling, looks at the experience of swinging as it has shown up across a very long sweep of human history—yes, swinging, as in going up and down on a swing, as well as the disorientation, but also the pleasure and pain, this causes. His many data points include depictions of swings in cave paintings made in western India during the fifth century C.E.; the “witch’s cradle,” once a form of torture in England in which a woman was placed in a sack suspended from a tree; and a 17th-century erotic Chinese novel that featured a swing in a loss of virginity. Moscoso’s process, he told me, is to “pay attention to the very singular, to something which is in principle irrelevant,” and build from there. He spoke to me of discovering, for example, the record of a Roman coin minted in the time of Tiberius that depicted two men pushing a woman on a swing, part of a series of coins depicting sexual positions, perhaps used for entry into a brothel.
Moscoso spoke with me over Zoom from Madrid, his head barely visible over a fluffy white cat that had decided to recline on his keyboard. Unlike Boddice, he is searching for continuity, not dissonance. And he definitely finds it in the physical experience of oscillation, which, over millennia, in almost every human society, has had strong associations with either sex or death (or both)—the swing shows up in similar erotic scenes on ancient-Greek vases and in 18th-century French pornography, and likewise as a source of terror, whether it’s witches rising and falling in the art of Goya or the condemned swinging from the gallows.
There is a “political agenda”—his words—to Moscoso’s work, and it is to discover commonality precisely at a moment of growing fragmentation in the modern world. “In times in which we are so much focused on differences, and identities, and precisely this kind of a parcellation of reality, you find, as a matter of fact, certain common features,” he told me. If Boddice insists that it is a mistake to go looking for love in the archives based on our definition of what love feels like, Moscoso counters by bringing up how consistently similar love stories are in different cultures and time periods. For instance, he pointed out, many of them are about lovers who are unequal and whose love is forbidden—whether it’s Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid’s Metamorphoses ; or the ancient-Chinese story of the butterfly lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai; or Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For Moscoso, these “structures of repetition” give you “an account of differences, but also of similarities,” a way people relate to love in the same way despite thoroughly different circumstances.
“My research is a sort of protest,” Moscoso said. “I believe that we are connected.” What we need is a “new Enlightenment,” a reassertion of what “makes us human”: at the very least so that there is a basis for something like civil rights and all the political philosophies—such as democracy, to name a particularly endangered one—that are built on the idea that to be human is a singular thing.
Does Boddice too blithely throw out this idea? “I like the romance of it,” he said when I asked him. And for the record, he added, he is not against finding common threads that connect humanity if he happens to come across them. But that is not his agenda. The way he wants his work to affect how we think today—a mission he also believes to be “ethically urgent”—is to move us away from the universal and automatic understanding of what it is to be human. Boddice is concerned that we are flattening ourselves. By not appreciating the full range of feeling that people are capable of, we are foreclosing a deeper engagement with one another, an engagement on terms that don’t demand that everyone be the same but leave room for the great unknown of what happens in other people’s heads. In A History of Feelings, he described our diminished and too limited vocabulary for emotions as “vague, empty or else crude.” The danger is that this reduced language, this emojification of emotional life, also reduces, quite literally, how much we can feel. History, at least in the way he sees it, might help. “I was motivated to not only show the richness and the unfamiliarity of past experience, but also to try to give people the tools to interrogate the politics of feeling in their present,” Boddice told me.
There is a danger, I think, and not a small one, in letting go of the bonds that connect us—in saying “Down with empathy”—but I can’t deny that Boddice’s perspective has a strange appeal at a moment when we feel so thoroughly alienated from one another’s experience of reality. We struggle to understand how other human beings don’t feel the same things we do—and this frustration often turns into anger and resentment. Maybe we would do better to start by recognizing the mystery of other people.
Certainly when it comes to the past, Boddice is up against strong (and popular) impulses, such as the notion that by donning a Civil War uniform or throwing an ancient spear, we can know something about how our ancestors related to the world. It makes sense that he has taken a radical position, if only to loudly resist such oversimplification.
But if I can offer something of a bridge: There is a universality to the question that Boddice spends most of his waking hours posing—that is, a universality to the very act of posing it. What species besides ours demands: What did it feel like? What animal besides us stares into a stranger’s eyes, or into the eyes of their grandparents, and builds whole philosophies around this question? Whether we see our reflection in others—past and present—or, like Boddice, insist on difference, the compulsion to ask this question, again and again, marks us. Maybe to be human, at the most basic level, is to be curious about other humans.
