The Empathy Wars

How did we become so divided? For an answer, look no further than the way that empathy has been weaponized by both the left and right.

Do you remember when politicians bemoaned the “empathy deficit” and urged voters “to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes”.

Those quotes are from Barack Obama’s 2006 book The Audacity of Hope. Today, nearly twenty years on, they seem hopelessly out-of-step with our fractious and increasingly violent times.

As is evident from Trump’s crackdown on protests outside US immigration detention facilities, the present occupant of the White House has no interest in stepping into the shoes of people who do not share his world view, least of all those infected with the “woke mind virus”. Instead, in MAGA circles empathy is increasingly derided as an irrational emotion that tricks us into having compassion for the “wrong” sorts of people, whether they be Mexican immigrants, Islamist terrorists or biological women “posing” as men.

According to Gad Saad, a Canadian professor of marketing and evolutionary psychologist, such empathy is “suicidal” because it prompts us to act compassionately towards those who might do us harm. Saad’s favourite example is Karsten Nordal Hauken, a Norwegian man who was raped by a Somalian refugee and who describes himself as a feminist and anti-racist. In Saad’s telling, Hauken is now racked with guilt because his rapist is at risk of deportation to Somalia, a notoriously homophobic country. Other examples that Saad, a Jew of Syrian and Lebanese ancestry, likes to cite are Jews who make common cause with Hamas.

“That’s not an emotional system that we have evolved,” he says. “This is what happens when you have suicidal empathy.”

Saad is not the only person to put empathy in scare quotes these days. During a recent appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Elon Musk described empathy as “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”, while the Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, has described empathy as “toxic”, seeing it as a tool for manipulating Christians into adopting progressive positions.

Interestingly, when it suits them, these same critics are happy to employ the term in Obama’s sense. Thus, progressives are accused of showing insufficient empathy for white men threatened by economic insecurity and the erosion of traditional gender roles. And when Greta Thunberg’s boat carrying humanitarian aid for Palestinians trapped in Gaza was intercepted by Israel this week, right-wing commentators, such as the Spectator’s Brendan O’Neill, accused the activists of a similar lack of empathy for Israeli hostages.

The giveaway, according to O’Neill, was the apparent refusal of Thunberg and other members of her “Freedom Flotilla” to take up an Israeli offer to watch footage of Hamas’s October 7th attack.

“Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathise with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel,” O’Neill wrote.

Welcome to the empathy wars, a battle for hearts and minds that may prove every bit as a consequential as the battles being waged on the streets of Los Angeles and other US cities over the rights of asylum seekers.

“We stand together for those who cannot,” read a sign protesting the detention of 123 asylum seekers outside a federal prison in Sheridan, Oregon, this week. “We are all immigrants”, read another, opposing a bill by Tennessee legislators that would see children of undocumented immigrants banned from schools.

This invocation of empathy – or its absence – as a rhetorical tool with which to berate political opponents is a very modern phenomenon. As the historian of science Susan Lanzoni has shown, the term empathy first appeared in a 1909 lecture by the Cornell psychologist Edward B. Titchener. Inspired by the German aesthetic term Einfühlung, meaning "feeling into", Titchener compared empathy to an enlivening process whereby an art object evoked actual or incipient bodily movements and accompanying emotions in the viewer.

At this stage, empathy was about projection rather than perspective-taking. However, it was not long before writers like the Victorian novelist Vernon Lee were using Einfühlung as a synonym for “sympathy” and comparing the process to the sort of perspective-taking that occurs when ‘we “put ourselves in the place” or more vulgarly “in the skin” of a fellow creature.

At first Lee’s definition seems to recall the famous passage in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments about how even “the greatest ruffian” is capable of compassion for “the misery of others”. However, Smith thought of compassion as a feeling. By contrast, today empathy comprises both cognitive and emotional elements.

Cognitive empathy is where you actively take on someone else’s point of view and try to understand their thoughts and feelings without necessarily experiencing those feelings. By contrast, emotional, or affective empathy, is where you feel another person’s emotions and are moved by those feelings.

A good example of the latter is the Black Lives Matter protests where people from a wide range of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds identified with and felt the pain of George Floyd and were moved to action.

We can trace the modern obsession with empathy to neuroscience and a 1992 study in which researchers observed mirror neurons in macaque monkeys that fired both when the monkeys picked up a raisin and when they saw a person pick up a raisin. Soon mirror neurons were being hailed as the source of what Jeremy Rifkin in his book The Empathic Civilization called humanity’s desire for “intimate participation and companionship”.

The problem with making mirror neurons the basis of empathy, of course, is that it does not allow for situations where empathy may be switched off. As the German historian of emotions Ute Frevert puts it: “The fact that human beings are naturally equipped to feel what others feel does not mean that they always do so. They might just turn away and act indifferent.”

An horrific illustration of this was the cold-blooded shooting in 2011 of 69 Norwegian Labour activists by Anders Behring Breivik. At his trial, Breivik argued that he was fully capable of empathy but had used a “desensitivisation plan” to override his feelings. “If you are going to be capable of executing such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind, your psyche, for years,” he explained.

Nor is this tendency confined to the right. One of the most striking features of progressive movements today is their willingness to embrace acts of extreme violence. A good example is the way that Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the shooting dead of Brian Thompson, chief executive of the American health-insurance firm UnitedHealthcare, was hailed as a hero by left-leaning young men for highlighting injustices in US health insurance.

But surely it is possible to have compassion for under-insured Americans while condemning the assassination of bureaucrats for denying them life-saving medical procedures? Or to empathise with native-born Americans facing competition from immigrants while identifying with the plight of women and children being separated from their families by ICE agents?

The pity today is that we appear to have lost the ability to hold two competing thoughts in our heads at the same time. Instead, empathy has become a zero-sum game in which you cannot have empathy for one cause without having enmity for another.