U.S. Army veteran connects service to research on empathy in ancient Greece

Malcolm Nelson has always loved history—specifically antiquity and military history. He was intrigued by how foreign and “radically different” these topics seemed from his life growing up in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Now a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Penn’s Department of Classical Studies, Nelson’s path began with a desire to understand and empathize with people from different periods. That led him to study classics in college but also to a very different environment from humanities classrooms: the military. As a recent graduate he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2009, moved by empathy for the Iraqi and Afghani people. Nelson worked in intelligence gathering in Iraq and counterintelligence in Germany until 2012.

Following his military service, he pursued a Ph.D. in ancient history at Harvard University. He says in one sense he was picking up where he left off with his undergraduate studies. In turn, Nelson found that his military service informed his doctoral and postdoctoral research about “regulating empathy,” or how a society comes up with informal rules dictating when empathy should be expressed and when it should be withheld, in ancient Greece.

His Army experience got him thinking about empathy not as a stable trait but as something that changes at the individual and societal level over time. “People can be very conflicted about how they decide to feel or not feel empathy,” says Nelson; he could see that conflict in Iraqis who had lived through decades of oppression and intercommunal violence.

On the one hand, he says he was struck by how they adapted, such as by adopting a more suspicious attitude toward other groups. But as the Iraqis adapted to their environment, Nelson also observed the acknowledgment that their reality hadn’t always been this way and a longing for mutual understanding.

Both this experience and coursework in his doctoral studies shaped his dissertation. Nelson observed early in graduate school that one body of scholars portrayed ancient Greek culture as upholding values of human rights and the rule of law, while another depicted the culture as something more alien to modern audiences—as frightening, ruthless, and pragmatic. He wanted to reconcile this contradiction.

Analyzing legal speeches, epic poetry, and philosophical writings, Nelson’s dissertation—which he is expanding on now as a postdoc—argues that ancient Greeks developed social norms around empathy but updated these norms in response to tensions and threats. A Greek city-state was likely at war in any given year, Nelson says, and Greeks adapted by adopting the norm of not experiencing empathy toward opponents. It’s a dynamic Nelson sees across modern-day cultures as well.

City-states lacked police and a permanent civil service, and so Nelson argues that establishing the norm of feeling empathy toward people considered “good citizens” while excluding “bad citizens” helped allow city-states to mobilize resources, such as military service and contributions in lieu of more formalized taxation.

Now, as a postdoc in the School of Arts & Sciences, Nelson is working with Julia Wilker, associate professor of classical studies, to revise his dissertation into a book. He also submitted an article applying his framework of “regulating empathy” to narratives of monarchy, since monarchs were sometimes portrayed as transcending the emotional limits of other people. In the future, Nelson says he hopes to research whether ancient Greece had countercultures that opposed dominant values, and to examine how social institutions responded to the demands of warfare and the trauma experienced by participants.