Hate and the dangers of empathy
Whether or not the British rapper Bobby Vylan's call for"death to the IDF" at Glastonbury constituted hate speech, the crowd's reflexive adoption of his chant is deeply worrying.
I can’t get the images out of my mind – not the ones of Bobby Vylan chanting “death, death to the IDF” from Glastonbury’s West Holts stage on Sunday but the images of the festival goers directly in front of him.
As the rapper and grandson of a Windrush immigrant pumped his fists, the crowd of mostly white British youth mindlessly echoed his call for the death of the Israeli Defence Forces and, by extension, the Jewish and Arab servicemen, many of them conscripts, who serve in its ranks.
Don’t get me wrong. I share the crowd’s belief that some members of the IDF – or at least the politicians and generals who direct their actions – are guilty of war crimes. I am even willing to give the crowd the benefit of the doubt that when they joined in the subsequent chant of “Free, free Palestine”, it was not necessarily a call for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.
What I can’t get my mind around is how anyone can think it’s OK to call for the death of another person – and calling for the death of the IDF, Israeli’s security force, would certainly leave millions of Israelis, many of them critics of Netanyahu and his Likud party allies, defenceless in the event of further attacks from Hamas and similarly genocidal Islamist groups.
I realise we cannot “know” what was in the hearts and minds of the crowd or how they interpreted Vylan’s call. Nor can we say for certain whether Vylan’s words met the threshold of speech likely to cause a public order offence. Or whether Vylan intended to stir up racial hatred against Israelis and, by extension Jews, in calling for death to the IDF (though we can infer from Vylan’s earlier tirade against a “Zionist” music executive, who he accused of singing a petition against the Irish punk band Kneecap who followed him onto the same stage, that Vylan is most likely an antisemite).
But it was certainly a hateful thing to say and it speaks volumes about the mentality of the 30,000 fans who packed the West Holts arena that Vylan’s chant should be so readily adopted at a festival supposedly dedicated to peace, love and healing the planet.
Right-wing commentators such as Brendan O’Neill have been quick to condemn the crowd for “chanting for the death of Jews”. That is an inference too far. Perhaps in echoing Vylan, the crowd merely thought they were calling for the end to an entity implicated in war crimes against Palestinians and Israelis who benefit from the security afforded by it, not Jews per se. However, O’Neill is surely onto something when he labels the crowd’s response “Pavlovian” and argues that the “seriousness of what happened at Glastonbury cannot be overstated”. Never has a crowd at Glastonbury or, to my knowledge, any other music festival, previously called for the death of other human beings. How best to explain this moral and cognitive failure?
It is a notion often taken for granted in Western thought that there is an intimate connection between empathy and moral action. Yet in recent years, this connection has come under scrutiny. Far from empathy being a natural response to the suffering of others and the “cement of the moral universe”, Matthiesen and Klitmoller (2019) argue that empathy is a “culturally embedded norm”, and that to the extent that “those practicing empathy have a predilection for helping those who are similar to themselves” it can be biased and result in morally questionable behaviour.
It is important to realise that to consider oneself “similar” to the object of one’s empathy, you do not necessarily have to share the others’ national, religious or ethnic identity. Of course, it is possible that some of those who chanted “death to the IDF” at Glastonbury were Palestinian refugees or refugees from other conflict zones. However, there is little doubt that most of those in attendance were white British and subscribe to a progressive viewpoint according to which Gazans are being “oppressed” in similar ways that they have experienced, whether in the arenas of racism, sexism or other popular intersectional causes. Further, that this sense of similarity has been internalized to the extent that when they see images of Palestinians being bombed or killed by the IDF, they reflexively empathise with the plight of the “oppressed” and suspend other moral judgements about, for instance, the extent to which Hamas might share responsibility for the Palestinian peoples’ suffering, not to mention the murderous attacks on October 7th that sparked the war in Gaza.
It is important to realise that this notion of empathy as a guide to moral action is not the preserve of progressives but applies equally to the right, hence Trump’s empathy for white-nationalist neo-Nazi protestors in Charlottesville and the Likud party’s empathy for Israeli hostages and not Gazans. But as Hannah Arendt argues, this type of empathy can lead to over-identification with one side at the expense of the perceived other, closing the space for difference rather than allowing for it. In this way, she writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, “it will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation and compromise”.
Instead, Arendt advocates an intellectual process of “visiting” the objects of one’s compassion so as to better understand the world from their perspective while, at the same time, remaining alive to the ways in which everyone is different. Crucially, visiting does not necessarily mean adopting those perspectives as one’s own. To arrive at a correct moral judgement we must also remain cognisant of the fact that we live in a plural world and that other people may have very different perspectives to our own. In other words, we must marry emotion with thought. Thus for Arendt, Eichmann was not inherently evil and lacking in empathy. He was merely thoughtless. Equally, Arendt was wary of those who allowed their passionate intensity for a cause to guide their moral responses. Instead, she emphasized the importance of reflection and on-going moral education.
This is precisely what was missing in the crowd’s response to Vylan’s performance. No one, as far as I can tell, paused to consider the feelings of Jews who were also present at Glastonbury. Nor did they worry that in echoing Vylan’s words they might be putting Jews carrying Nova and hostage flags in imminent danger of attack.
Instead, drunk with empathy for Palestinians and convinced of the virtues of Hamas’s resistance to “genocide”, they passionately and unthinkingly adopted Vylan’s death-call as their own. In this way, they abnegated any claim to the moral high ground.
V brave of you to write this, even if all you’re expressing is commonsensical.