How Do We Face Loss With Empathy?
About this episode
Ezra Klein interviews novelist Mohsin Hamid about his novel 'The Last White Man,' in which a white man wakes up with brown skin, and about identity, loss, and change. They discuss Hamid's post-9/11 experience of suddenly being racially marked, the idea of whiteness as an imagined fiction, and how race and nation sort people into categories that feel fixed but are contingent. The conversation widens to Hamid's view of the self as a performed fiction, the role of meditation and attention in loosening the ego, migration and the moral indefensibility of borders (drawing on 'Exit West'), and whether the future warrants optimism or pessimism. Hamid suggests change — personal and civilizational — is the one constant, and that empathy grows from recognizing our own strangeness to ourselves.