In a perfect world, empathy would always be good. It would
describe our capacity to identify with the suffering of others. We would use
empathy to experience the humanity we all share and that experience would lead
us to love.
But the world is not perfect, and in a tyrant’s world,
empathy can be easily used to stir fear and hatred. The same empathy that led Mother
Teresa of Calcutta to lift lepers out of gutters in Calcutta can reinforce the
anti-immigrant hatred in Fox News viewers.
I recently tuned to the Fox News Channel several times in a week to look
for weaponized empathy. It showed up
immediately and forcefully.
Laura Ingraham (before she went on “vacation”) showed a
report of an illegal immigrant escaping custody while being deported and
another report of an illegal immigrant robbing a store. The intent of these reports on the
anti-immigrant network is to fan fear and hatred among their viewers. Ingraham is manipulating empathy to stoke fear.
On Fox News, criminals have brown skin. Fox News never referred to the Parkland mass
murderer as a terrorist, despite killing seventeen people. Fox never showed a
picture of the shooter in a #MAGA hat. The shooter in Las Vegas who killed 58
and wounded 500 was not labeled a terrorist. These killers are white, so they
are labeled as mentally ill. Even with 500 people dead and dying, the white
shooter is not labeled a terrorist. Every
Muslim killer is a terrorist on Fox News as in White House tweets. The President never labels white mass murderers
terrorists.
Every tyrant perverts empathy in this way to fan hatred in
his people against “others.” The Russian Tsars labeled Jews as “others” and
caused more than a million Jews to be killed in the late 19th and
early 20th Century in Russia.
Hitler screeched about German victims of Jewish crimes on his way to
setting up the Holocaust. Putin of
Russia, Al-Sisi of Egypt, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Rouhani of Iran, Asad of
Syria and the other tyrants in charge of a fourth of the world’s governments
all use empathy to define enemies of the people and unify hate to reinforce their
tyranny.
In his book “Against Empathy,” Paul Bloom warns of that most
of us see our capacity to experience the suffering
of others as the ultimate source of goodness.
“Many of our wisest
policy-makers, activists, scientists, and philosophers agree that the only
problem with empathy is that we don’t have enough of it,” he says.
Bloom,
in sharp contrast, says empathy is one of the leading motivators of inequality
and immorality in society. Far from helping us to improve the lives of others,
empathy is a capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow
prejudices. It muddles our judgment and, ironically, often leads to cruelty. We
are at our best when we are smart enough not to rely on it, but to draw instead
upon a more distanced compassion.
In
a talk at Franklin and Marshall College recently, Bloom told the audience that in
psychological evaluations, that scoring low score on tests of empathy predicts
nothing about behavior. Psychopaths score low on empathy, but so do those who
have Asperger’s Syndrome. There is no correlation between low empathy and
aggression.
The
best predictor of aggression:
--History
of violence
--Lack
of impulse control
--Need
for stimulation
He
joked with the audience that he would feel no danger if those in the front row
scored low on empathy tests. But if those in the front row had a history of
violence, lacked impulse control and looked bored, he would exit the stage.
After
the talk, I thought about another word that seems to define a virtue, but can
lead to tragedy in the wrong circumstances:
Loyalty. I am currently reading a
biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow. Among the
many reasons 700,000 Americans died in that most murderous of all of America’s
wars is misplaced loyalty. Every one of the senior commanders in the Southern
Army had sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United
States of America. Lee, Longstreet, Stuart, Early and all the rest of those
generals decided their loyalty lay elsewhere in defending their state or
defending their right to keep other men in bondage.
Misplaced
loyalty led to unparalleled slaughter and misery.
Honorable
men of the German Wehrmacht followed their perverse and murderous leader into
war that left a stain on their nation that can never be fully erased.
Like
loyalty, empathy needs rational thought as a guide. Empathy can lead a surgeon
who could make a million dollars a year to go to a refugee camp with “Doctors
without Borders,” and serve the most wretched among us. It can also thousands of fearful fools at
Trump Rally to chant “Build a Wall – Kill them all.” (NY Times August 3, 2016)
Empathy,
like loyalty, can make our lives richer, but neither loyalty nor empathy can be
an end in itself. Both must be kept in check by clear, rational thought.
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