At the climax of All-Star Superman (written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Frank Quitely, and inked/coloured by Jamie Grant), Lex Luthor manages to steal Superman’s powers. Throughout the series, Morrison has managed to find clever solutions to every question they grab; my favourite is not only the solution to the age-old question, ‘What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?’, but where Supes gets it from. But the answer fans generally love the most is their explanation for why people don’t recognise Clark Kent as Superman. In that case, they are assisted ably by Quitely and Grant’s art, showing Clark changing his posture and attitude so that nobody could confuse the two beyond them both being tall dark-haired white guys. Superman’s final victory over Luthor is similarly as clever as it is hopeful – by taking on Superman’s powers, Lex also takes on his perspective, seeing the scope of the universe and the limited amount of life within it, and is brought to tears that bring him down from his megalomaniacal worldview. He surrenders.

I think this is the biggest fantasy any Superman book has ever engaged in.

It’s very easy for me to believe Superman can fly, shoot lasers out of his eyes, take bullets, and lift cars over his head. As Morrison’s now-famous quote states explicitly, he is a fictional character, and as their quote implies, a fictional character designed specifically to entertain children. It’s also very easy for me to believe that he can fake being a shy, awkward man who nobody could mistake for a dashing hero, partly because I’ve seen enough real actors do that kind of thing and partly because it’s as explicit a part of the bargain of Superman as the flying and laser eyes. I’ll follow any set of rules as long as you’re consistent about it. And I take the idea of a nice, decent person motivated to use their power to do the right thing completely in stride; I think people who react badly to that tend to react badly to the idea of a person like that, whether it’s been having been betrayed by someone who thought of themselves as a Superman-type or disliking that as a model to live up to.

It’s the notion of someone – particularly but not exclusively someone who represents egomania to the extent of Lex Luthor – surrendering in the face of another perspective that I’m skeptical of. Empathy is something I’ve been preoccupied with for a long time (I would consider what Luthor undergoes to be a scifi exaggeration of cognitive empathy), and my big conclusion is that, for better and worse, I care about empathy for its own sake more than most people would bother. I like diving into perspectives very different to my own, even ones I would consider abhorrent, without feeling the need to use that empathy to achieve a separate goal.  Not only does this apparently make me unusual, I’ve met more than a lifetime’s worth of people who take it for granted that of course there is a limit to how far you’re willing to empathise with someone – that you have a finite amount of empathy, and if someone does something sufficiently morally objectionable, you’re given the freedom to turn it off and save the rest. Empathy is a reward you bestow upon the virtuous as opposed to a basic tool for interacting with the world.

In fact, I have reached a point where I have become… not disillusioned with the concept, but more able and willing to recognise the limitations of it. I write about it partly for my own need to process what it is and partly because I feel called upon to write about it – it comes to me so obviously and effortlessly in a world where it doesn’t seem as obvious to others that it must be my personal duty to ramble about it online. But I do see how one could lose one’s sense of identity and values in a sea of other opinions, burning up one’s own soul in the process as you bury feelings for the sake of protecting others (or rather their opinion of you). I can also see how simply understanding where another person is coming from isn’t the last step – that articulating their views and feelings back to them is simply blundering through their psyches rather than doing anything actually useful. Do you think telling Lex Luthor that he wants to be the smartest man in the room would do any good?

Most of all, I see what a tremendous difficulty it is in convincing others of its value. I no longer read much about empathy because I consider it something to practice more than theorise about at this point; lately, I’ve been more about actively understanding objective, logical, and systemic thinking that extends from my own personal values rather than fuzzy subjectivity. My early difficulties at getting my head around the concepts – both practically and emotionally – have made me realise that perhaps preaching the virtues of empathy should be left to people who really had to take that journey towards it; that my gleeful exuberance about understanding other perspectives means a gap in my ability to understand people who started off not wanting to understand other perspectives, making it more difficult to communicate my enthusiasm to them and perhaps even making my ostensible goal more difficult.

The scene of Lex seeing the beauty of the universe is a help to me here. Obviously, given everything I’ve said in this piece, I get a cathartic kick out of a self-absorbed asshole considering another person’s perspective and letting it change him – seeing someone start to do what I actively try every day. But then I think that maybe that’s not what other people get out of this scene. People are obviously drawn to Superman because they already agree with his perspective and values; they also already think of Lex as the obvious bad guy. When they read this scene, they aren’t achieving a moment of empathetic connection and identification with a perspective they otherwise don’t agree with; they’re seeing a douchebag drop his guard and identify with them. What it’s saying is ‘what you think and feel is already correct and here is someone’s journey to agreeing with you’. I see the value of that now, but it’s being the subject of empathy, not a participant in it.