Empathy is in any case bad on the margin. It is, unironically, responsible for many of the bad things in the world today. We really shouldn’t want more empathy.
I think this comment would be made way better with the inclusion of a concrete example or two. I know there’s at least one book out there that can get compressed to a sound bite like this, but a concrete example or two would help explain why.
Your comment reminded me tangentially of Mario Gabriele’s now-paywalled essay Compassion is the enemy, published in mid-2020 during the height of BLM, which had this passage I saved:
Do you remember Alan Kurdi? In September 2015, a harrowing photograph circulated. A three-year-old boy, Syrian, drowned and face down on a Turkish beach. He and his family had been trying to reach Greece.
For a brief moment, the world turned their full attention to the toddler and the atrocities he represented. Never mind that 250K had died already by then, now was the time to pay real attention and take action. The hashtag #RefugeesWelcome circulated, donations to the Red Cross spiked, and both the German and Austrian governments decided to open their borders.
And then? Then interest faded, donations dwindled, and governments turned their attention elsewhere. In short, our compassion was redirected or exhausted. The latter is almost the inevitable result of social media with its heightened emotion and endless feed. Meanwhile, bombs continued to fall on Aleppo, and Syrians continued to flee, and boats still floundered, and children drowned in the same sea. Just a year after his death, Alan’s father said, “My Alan died for nothing.”
Compassion is the enemy. In its vividness and high-color, in the delight it gives its exponent, in its brevity, compassion impedes enduring change. It is the least we should be able to provide as humans, the bare minimum, and as such, unworthy of celebration or mention.
The entirety of the corporate world was awash with sentiments of contrition… What meaning can be gleaned from such platitudes? Without accompanying action — enduring commitments that go beyond one-time donations or temporary offers to meet with black founders — this is rhetoric with the nutritional value of paper. The most charitable appraisal would be that these expressions are well-intentioned banalities. At worse, it is craven opportunism, marketing masquerading as conscience. Do we believe that capital allocators will make meaningful changes to their practices without additional pressure, without building systems that run without the intervention of compassion?
As we think of how we can move beyond empty sentiment, that, I would posit, is the true challenge. Not feeling more or undertaking some token, episodic deed, but constructing systems such that we don’t need to rely on the vagaries of compassion to do good. As the author, Chinua Achebe, said, “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
Just as technology has had a role to play in magnifying our flaws, so too should it be part of correcting them. Payment processors allow consumers to donate to charities on a recurring basis, avoiding the mental overhead required to recommit to a cause each month. Video games and virtual reality can reduce prejudice. Racist policing algorithms, like those previously used by the LAPD, can be amended or junked. Just as W.E.B Du Bois once did, data visualizations can be used to convey the scale of a problem in new, evocative ways.
Social media is a reflection of who we are, flaws included. But technology can be so much more, correcting for the bugs in our human software. My hope is that we may use it to find a road beyond compassion, eschewing the narrowness of Mother Teresa’s words. Kierkegaard described a poet as someone whose mouth was so formed that when they cried in pain, the world heard only music. We must recognize what it is to be a human: to have a pair of ears shaped such that we can hear the cries of a single person, yet be deaf to the cacophony of the many, still suffering.
Well… it’s not that any of that is exactly wrong, but… as a criticism of “compassion” (or “empathy” or whatever), this sort of thing has a “fifty Stalins” flavor. My view is that what we have (empathy-wise) is too much (specifically, too much of the wrong thing), not that it’s not enough.
You might be surprised to find that I actually agree with this take. I think that most of what people consider empathy nowadays i a performative thing to make themselves feel good, or to drop responsibility. It doesn’t really do me much good if someone sits around feeling bad for me. I don’t want them to feel bad either. I have empathy for them.
I don’t want my kids to walk round feeling bad for people and thinking that that’s some sort of noble actions. I want e them to actually look at what they can do for other people. And how they can help a situation and how, you know, sometimes when you can’t help a situation, what’s the second best the third best thing you can do. And uh, sometimes you have to act against your empathy like, you know, someone is gonna be annoyed at you for doing something, but you still think it’s the right thing to do.
( It won’t allow me to edit on my phone. And the original comment was voiced to text. So I’m going to submit this and then edit it, hoping that the interface will improve somehow in the process)
Performative ‘empathy’ can be a release valve for the pressures of conscience that might otherwise drive good actions. (And it can just be pure, empty signalling.) That doesn’t mean empathy is playing a negative role, though—the performativity is the problem. I’d be willing to bet that people who are (genuinely) more empathetic also tend to be more helpful and altruistic in practice, and that low-empathy people are massively overrepresented in the set of people who do unusually bad things.
It’s the association you note, of empathy = good, that I object to. And anyway you’re just measuring social sensitivity, no one who wants to be well liked isn’t going to pretend they’re super empathetic.
And that’s the point. It turns int pretend when it becomes its own goal.
Empathy is in any case bad on the margin. It is, unironically, responsible for many of the bad things in the world today. We really shouldn’t want more empathy.
Anyhow, excellent post.
I think this comment would be made way better with the inclusion of a concrete example or two. I know there’s at least one book out there that can get compressed to a sound bite like this, but a concrete example or two would help explain why.
Please see this discussion.
Your comment reminded me tangentially of Mario Gabriele’s now-paywalled essay Compassion is the enemy, published in mid-2020 during the height of BLM, which had this passage I saved:
Well… it’s not that any of that is exactly wrong, but… as a criticism of “compassion” (or “empathy” or whatever), this sort of thing has a “fifty Stalins” flavor. My view is that what we have (empathy-wise) is too much (specifically, too much of the wrong thing), not that it’s not enough.
You might be surprised to find that I actually agree with this take. I think that most of what people consider empathy nowadays i a performative thing to make themselves feel good, or to drop responsibility. It doesn’t really do me much good if someone sits around feeling bad for me. I don’t want them to feel bad either. I have empathy for them.
I don’t want my kids to walk round feeling bad for people and thinking that that’s some sort of noble actions. I want e them to actually look at what they can do for other people. And how they can help a situation and how, you know, sometimes when you can’t help a situation, what’s the second best the third best thing you can do. And uh, sometimes you have to act against your empathy like, you know, someone is gonna be annoyed at you for doing something, but you still think it’s the right thing to do.
( It won’t allow me to edit on my phone. And the original comment was voiced to text. So I’m going to submit this and then edit it, hoping that the interface will improve somehow in the process)
Performative ‘empathy’ can be a release valve for the pressures of conscience that might otherwise drive good actions. (And it can just be pure, empty signalling.) That doesn’t mean empathy is playing a negative role, though—the performativity is the problem. I’d be willing to bet that people who are (genuinely) more empathetic also tend to be more helpful and altruistic in practice, and that low-empathy people are massively overrepresented in the set of people who do unusually bad things.
It’s the association you note, of empathy = good, that I object to. And anyway you’re just measuring social sensitivity, no one who wants to be well liked isn’t going to pretend they’re super empathetic.
And that’s the point. It turns int pretend when it becomes its own goal.