The actual dark side of empathy
This is a follow-up to a piece I wrote for Sublation Magazine, defending, by more accurately defining, empathy. In brief, what I argued was that empathy is not actually a virtue, although it may be the source of other virtues; rather it is a foundation of how we think. As a result, it can’t go too far (or not far enough), as some people complain. Another, perhaps slightly more troubling consequence of this, is that empathy is neither good nor bad. It just is.
Empathy is usually assumed to be a good thing. Indeed, the reason Donald Trump and Elon Musk dislike empathy is that they’re evil people who just don’t believe in virtue, and they wrongly believe that empathy is a virtue. In fact, whatever they profess to believe about it, they actually rely on their own capacity for empathy to do evil.
In Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt recounts a fascinating, horrible story about an early encounter between Europeans and Americans1. To recount it briefly, Spanish raiders arrived at what we now call the Bahamas but was then known as the Lucayas. In talking to the Lucayans, via a translator, they established that the local belief was that after death, they would be taken to an island paradise, where they would find all their lost friends and family, and dance and feast for eternity. The Spanish explained that they, the Spaniards, came from those islands. They offered to take the Lucayans with them to paradise.
Of course, there is no paradise, earthly or otherwise. The Spanish took the willing Lucayans to Hispaniola, where they enslaved them and proceeded to work them to death in the gold mines.
What does this have to do with empathy? The Spanish enslavers had to understand not only what the Lucayans believed but also how they would react to being told that they could act on those beliefs and, essentially, visit Heaven while alive. This, simply put, is empathy: the capacity to put yourself in another’s place to, as Greenblatt puts it, ‘transform onself […] into another’ (p.228). The Spaniards didn’t fail to empathise with the Lucayans; they succeeded. But that it is not good that they did so is self-evident.
Greenblatt introduces this anecdote in a discussion of the Iago, the villain of Othello. Iago’s success in manipulating Othello likewise relies on empathy: he is able to identify and play upon Othello’s sexual jealousy because Iago himself suffers from the same plight, although he seems to rather enjoy it.2
Trump, too, while a despicable human being, does not lack empathy. He would not bother to lie if he did. Like the Spaniards in the anecdote, he tells people lies that he knows they wish to believe. This is not a man who reads, or studies opinion polls, or even listens carefully to people, so he could not come by the knowledge of what people wish to believe by any other means than empathy. For sure, the feelings he empathises with are not pleasant ones: envy, anger, sadism, shame (not guilt, to be clear). But these all are feelings.
As the Lucayans discovered and many of Trump and Musk’s pathetic followers are gradually coming to see, it is notoriously difficult to accurately discern whether someone is lying. This represents a true, empirical, limit to empathy. If we could unfailingly put ourselves in another’s place, we could discern the difference between the self they present to us and their ‘true’ selves. To lie to someone, however, requires not a lack of empathy, but a lack of scruple.
Culture
I was on holiday for the last couple of weeks, hence the fairly sparse culture section in this blog. I read Dante and Kant while on a beach, if that makes you feel anything.
Books
Joe Dunthorne, The Adulterants
This is similar in several ways to Rob Palk’s Animal Lovers: relationship comedy from the point of view of a nerdy middle-class London bloke. What’s odd is that the drama of both books hinges largely on the narrator losing his wife to a man who is repeatedly described in terms of being physically imposing, tall, muscular etc., as opposed to the protagonists of both books, who are variously short, skinny and/or infirm, and frequently mention these facts. This is just not an anxiety I’ve ever had3 so it strikes me as odd that these two geezers with a similar background and overall profile to mine have both written books about it.
While neither Dunthorne nor Palk, nor even their protagonists, has anything to do with the sad, dangerous internet subculture of incels, there is nevertheless the slightly alarming fact that there’s an entire subculture devoted to exactly this anxiety, that of never being sufficiently masculine. Again, this is a completely alien concept to me because I just don’t think that women generally are all that concerned about this stuff and, in any case, it doesn’t matter to me what hypothetical, general or average women think. I’m married so I’m only really concerned about one specific woman.
This illustrates one of the oddities of thinking about people en masse like this (and, again, I’m not accusing Dunthorne or Palk of believing any of this stuff): ‘what women want’ is strictly a meaningless phrase because all you can really talk about is what individual women want and, then, an average of what they want. And this average will always in fact be a range (there are, after all, three different ways of calculating averages, just to start with). Even individual women, even those with very specific tastes, will still have a range of appearances they find attractive. There’s no reason to think that range is exactly the same for all women and indeed it would be bizarre if it were.
This is symptomatic of a particular diseased way of thinking. For whatever reason, huge numbers of people are incapable of distinguishing individuals within groups. Sentences like ‘Muslims believe that…’ are of course perfectly legible and occasionally useful if you’re ending them with something like ‘… there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet’, but become increasingly weird when you instead say ‘… that homosexuals should all burn in Hell’. Of course some Muslims believe that, as do some Christians, but clearly not all of them. To try to link the two in this way is just false.
Equally, people are often very keen to group people together based on even less obvious characteristics. I once saw a cyclist jump a red light4 ahead of me while I, too, was cycling. I’d stopped at the light, as I always do, but a woman who’d witnessed the light jump looked at me and yelled ‘Bloody cyclists!’ as though I in some measure shared responsibility for the behaviour of the complete stranger who’d just done something that I, very conspicuously, had not done.
‘Cyclist’ is probably the oddest group that people try to hate because it’s not really an identity in any sense. It’s just the word for a person currently riding a bike, but it has acquired all sorts of connotations (male, middle class, angry, entitled). Call me judgmental, but I don’t think the Deliveroo guys are all that middle class or concerned about the environment.
Still odder, this character of the cyclist, whoever he is, is frequently cast as engaged in some sort of war with the motorist and the pedestrian. This is unlikely because the majority of cyclists are also sometimes motorists, a minority of motorists are (therefore) also sometimes cyclists, and literally 100% of both groups are sometimes pedestrians5. This can only mean that the cyclist is at war with himself, quite possibly on two fronts. No wonder he’s angry.
This incapacity or unwillingness to distinguish individuals within groups might be my least favourite of all possible vices, combining laziness with malice6. I’m almost tempted to suggest that this is the root of evil or perhaps of all social evils. You cannot classify groups based on the behaviour of individuals within them, and nor can you classify individuals based on the average behaviour of the group. When you do either, you’re on the path to totalitarianism.
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
There should be a word for texts like this and Paradise Lost, which have given us a whole load of things we kind of assume are in the Bible but aren’t there at all. For example, was the Serpent in Eden actually Satan? Not according to the Old Testament or the Gospels. Was Satan’s sin pride or disobedience? Or both? You won’t find out in the Bible, where it’s also not at all clear that Satan lives in or reigns over Hell. In fact, while he’s tempting Jesus (his only proper appearance7 in the Gospels), he strongly implies that he rules not Hell, but Earth. Satan in the Gospels acts pretty much as he does in the Book of Job, where he appears to be working for God in some way, rather than against him.
Between various commentaries, the medieval mystery plays, the Commedia, Paradise Lost and the general osmosis of all the above, we’ve developed a vast cultural understanding of the Bible that just isn’t in the text at all. It’s analogous to the way the Iliad doesn’t feature or even mention Achilles’ heel or the Trojan Horse. All this stuff is just assumed by readers. The difference, though, is that Homer’s first audience knew the story already (as do modern audiences). With Christianity, most of it came later.
William Blake’s view was that Dante and Milton were doing what the Biblical Prophets did and, therefore, they must’ve been inspired by God in the same way. He was exactly half right.
Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I’d only previously read the Inferno, so I went back and read the whole thing. Also like a lot of people, I found the Inferno more interesting. It increasingly becomes a poem about medieval theology, which I’m not hugely in to. Really, though, it highlights the problem with the idea of Heaven, which is that it seems super boring. In Dante’s vision, the various saintly individuals just stand in a big circle around God, forever. This is supposed to be satisfying. Okay, you can say that this would entail unimaginable bliss and that would sound pretty good if only it were the imaginable kind. But it’s asking a lot of people to devote their entire lives to something they can neither prove will happen nor even imagine.
The eternal punishment or reward of the afterlife is one of those ideas we only manage to carry around in our heads because we first hear it as children, when we weren’t capable of thinking about it in detail. When you actually examine it, it turns not only to be unexaminable8 and therefore unprovable, but also just gibberish on the face of it. What do you mean I get to live for at most 100 years9 and then spend the rest of eternity accounting for what I did, but in a place and a form that I literally cannot imagine, having been judged by a judge I also cannot imagine? Why would the universe be organised like that? Even believers admit they cannot answer this question and that seems more than enough reason for me not to believe it.
People sometimes say: ‘You’ve got to have faith!’ But, no. You’ve got to have faith, because you believe in things that aren’t real.
I also read most of Kant’s major works on ethics, but I’m going to finish The Metaphysics of Morals before I write about it.
TV: Star Trek: The Next Generation, ‘Darmok’
Sir Patrick Stewart died while I was on holiday, which put a bit of a damper on things, especially as there weren’t any other Trekkies about to commiserate. I’m not going to go on about it because lots of people, including me, already, have done so. But I loved that man as much as you can love someone you’ve never met. I used to have a photo of him (as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, of course), and at some point I scrawled ‘My hero’ on it. As I suggested in the BlueSky post linked above, I’m not sure at that age if I knew whether my hero was Picard or Stewart. I think it works either way.
Anyway, when I got back to the UK, I rewatched ‘Darmok’, my personal favourite episode of Star Trek. Not a surprising choice for me: a sci-fi episode about ancient myth and linguistics ticks a lot of boxes for me. This is a Picard-centric episode, too, hence my choice to view this im memoriam. It’s the first time he wears his alternative uniform, consisting of a special little jacket (it gets ruined quite quickly by the Beast at El-Adrel). On this rewatch I particularly enjoyed the fact that, even marooned on a planet and facing imminent death, Picard still has a big grin on his face when he realises that the Tamarians speak exclusively in metaphor (‘Sokath, his eyes uncovered!’). The man just loves understanding people and solving puzzles. A big, humanitarian10 nerd.
Film
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
As I often do when I’m on a plane, I watched a Marvel movie. This is probably the worst of the Tom Holland Spidey movies. Almost aggressively nonsensical, with cameos from Florence Pugh, Mark Ruffalo and Jon Bernthal which are mostly pointless and, in Pugh’s case, objectifying.
Honestly, the only good thing about Marvel films now is that they’re paying unholy amounts of money to fantastic actors, like those three and Zendaya, for what I assume is fairly undemanding work. Zendaya, in particular, blows away not only the other actors but all of the scenery every time she appears. It’s almost worth watching the film just to watch her taking such dull material and turning it brilliant by sheer force of talent. Unfortunately, the film is two and a half hours long and has a plot you could’ve dealt with in about forty.
- Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Chicago University Press (2005), pp.226-7. ↩︎
- Iago tells us that he believes Othello has slept with Emilia (‘it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets / [Othello] has done my office’ (Act 1, Scene III, ll.358-9); ‘I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leapt into my seat’ (Act 3, Scene I, ll.269-270)). Needless to say, Shakespeare gives us no reason to believe that Emilia has slept with Othello or anyone other than Iago. Whether Iago truly believes it himself is left to the audience to decide; I suspect he does because this is the only reason he gives more than once and also the one that makes sense thematically, for the reason I have already given: Iago empathically sees his own jealousy reflected in Othello and, as Iago suggests with inadvertent prophesy, jealousy will consume itself (Act 3, Scene III, ll.162-3) — as it does consume them both. ↩︎
- In the interests of full disclosure, I should maybe add that while I’m not tall (at 1.75cm (5’9″), I am slightly below average height for a British man (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-height-by-country)), I am currently pretty stacked. But I haven’t always been and becoming so has in no way changed my anxiety levels about my wife running off with a different, larger man, in that my anxiety levels are and always have been zero. ↩︎
- Well, not just once, obviously, but you know what I mean. ↩︎
- This warfare must also be highly assymetric: no cyclist or pedestrian has ever killed a motorist by crashing into them at high speed, whereas the numbers of cyclists or pedestrians killed by motorists numbers in the tens or hundreds of millions. Note that, despite this, adherents to this war believe that cyclists are the bad guys. One is forced to conclude that the people involved are not terribly clear thinkers. ↩︎
- Even when it’s apparently benign, as when people pretend to think that all their coreligionists, comrades, compatriots, fellow fans and so on possess a particular virtue, it’s still a manifestation of a belief in an in-group which must necessarily have an out-group (implicitly one that does not possess that virtue, or not universally, unlike my fellow fellows). ↩︎
- Speaking of ‘appearances’, what does he look like? A faun-like half-goat, half-man? A fallen angel? The Bible doesn’t say this, either. ↩︎
- ‘First, imagine a universe without entropy.’ ↩︎
- Thirty-three of which I’ll be asleep for, so actually a mere sixtyisx years if I’m doing really well and I’m not that sleepy. ↩︎
- A weird thing Trek writers have never solved: what to say instead of ‘humanitarian’, ‘human rights’ etc., when there are lots of sapient non-human species knocking about. Most obviously when Kirk eulogises Spock by saying his ‘soul’ was the ‘most… human‘. This seems kind of racist, like saying of a multiracial person, ‘Oh, they were basically white, weren’t they?’ ↩︎