Compassionate Canon Project
Stories help us care. This multimedia project imagines a cultural canon built for encouraging compassion with all life on earth, whether human or nonhuman.
What if we built a canon for compassion?
Our existing cultural canon is meant to exemplify artistic greatness and creative genius: Shakespeare, da Vinci, Beethoven. Of course, it was shaped by historical forces that favoured the output of a few European men.
We want to build a new canon with the conscious aim of improving our world.
We are gathering a library of books, films, games, and other media that help us to improve our empathy with others and become more compassionate in the real world.
Our task is to identify stories that exemplify our core values of empathy, ethics, and education. We welcome suggestions from a variety of media. We are particularly interested in stories from creators who are under-represented in the existing Western canon.
The Compassionate Canon should be representative of the diversity of all life on Earth, both human and nonhuman.