Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

In her evocative book Inventing Human Rights, the historian Lynn Hunt contrasts the notion of “imagined communities” with what she terms “imagined empathy,” a capacity to identify with the suffering of others that spread in the eighteenth century as novels and art awakened citizens to what they shared with people from different social backgrounds and that eventually sparked campaigns to end judicially sanctioned torture and other inhumane practices. “‘Imagined empathy’ serves as the foundation of human rights rather than of nationalism,” argues Hunt. “It is imagined, not in the sense of made up, but in the sense that empathy requires a leap of faith, of imagining that someone else is like you.” The problem with this form of imaginative bonding is that, in polarized places, people generally stop taking such leaps, particularly when they cease engaging in dialogue with their presumed enemies. “Empathy only develops through social interaction,” Hunt acknowledges. I kept wondering how a loner like Aco mustered the imaginative sympathy to take action on behalf of the prisoners in Stajićevo after spending months fearing that Croatian soldiers might find out where he was hiding and kill him—until I met Wendy and realized he had good reason to believe that, just as his mother had told him during his childhood, not all Croats were bad people.