April 18, 2025
Sometimes it seems that everything that the right despises can be summed up in the word “empathy.” This is not a development of the Trump era: for all of my lifetime, the term “bleeding heart liberal” has been a term of contempt. It is why the right so easily comes to terms with capitalism, which is based on the principle of “enlightened self-interest,” in other words, a supposedly rational selfishness. The most famous capitalist of the present moment, Elon Musk, recently said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” To be strictly accurate, he said that he believes in empathy but that “you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole.” That is doublespeak. What it really says is that we should not have empathy for certain people whom Elon, who is smarter than everyone else, has decided are expendable. They are to be sacrificed for the welfare of certain others who are, in his judgment, not so expendable. But it is liberalism whose heart bleeds for civilization as a whole. It wants to empathize with more and more groups that have been traditionally excluded from compassion, and therefore from the community.
Musk’s kind of rhetoric is familiar to those of us who grew up loving superhero comics, for it is the language of a typical type of supervillain, the kind who wants to “save” the world by destroying it, killing most of the people in it, and rebuilding it from the ground up according to a plan more to his liking. But the first superhero was imagined right here in my home city of Cleveland by two Jewish teenagers in the 1930’s, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster, and it is no accident that Superman, born under the rising shadow of Nazism and fascism, remains the noblest model of empathy. He is not even human, not even a native to this world—he is that deeply suspect thing, an immigrant, an illegal alien in a supreme sense. Yet he dedicates himself selflessly to helping everyone, without exception. Some people have always found him too noble to be believable. We can more easily relate to those superheroes driven by anger, like Batman and the Phantom, or those who had to deal with their self-centered baggage before they were capable of a more selfless dedication, like Peter Parker, Tony Stark, and Dr. Stephen Strange. But superheroes are, even in this age of ironic revisionism, still basically models of empathetic service to humanity. In this way, they are valuable in educating the imaginations of children, and it is children on which this newsletter (and the next) will repeatedly come to focus. J.K. Rowling understood this. Her hero began as a child himself, but it was always Harry Potter’s unselfish nature that made him a hero, not his magical powers—a hero who eventually passes the ultimate test of sacrificing himself for others. The criticism of fantasy is sometimes muddled about the sub-genre called high or heroic fantasy, which is sometimes dismissed as power fantasies for emotionally arrested teenage boys. While this may be true of Conan the Barbarian, it is not at all true of the line of high fantasy that descends from Tolkien, whose hobbit protagonists seem to be modeled on guinea pigs—short, fat, furry, peaceable creatures who like to eat. Yet it is Frodo who has to accomplish, alone, what the Aragorns, Gandalfs, and Galadriels cannot. It costs him all he has, and he is never the same afterward. But he does it. Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy also has youthful protagonists and also critiques conventional heroics.
However, it isn’t just Social Darwinistic capitalist sociopaths who are attacking empathy. There is an increasing backlash against it in right-wing Christianity, which is the only kind, with the shining exception of the Pope, that gets any media attention. My quotations from Elon Musk are drawn from an article in The Guardian, "Loathe Thy Neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian Right Are Waging War on Empathy" by Julia Carrie Wong. It is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the way in which various Christian nationalists pastors and writers are preaching that empathy is not only not a virtue—it is a particularly dangerous kind of sin. The Christian nationalists are Protestant fundamentalists, but they are allied with the right-wing of Catholicism. JD Vance, a Catholic convert, leaped into the fray resulting from Musk’s remarks. Being smart and educated in a way that Trump and Musk are not, he cited a Catholic theory—not doctrine—called ordo amoris, the order of love: “There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.” This is an accurate enough summary of an argument that was formulated by Augustine and refined by Thomas Aquinas. That did not keep Vance from being rebuked by Pope Francis, who said, ““Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” The Good Samaritan is the most central of all Jesus’ parables. When Jesus says, quoting Leviticus 19, to love thy neighbor as thyself, he is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” The answer is the stranger robbed, beaten, and left by the roadside, in need of help. The help is unconditional, with no consideration on the Samaritan’s part of how much care he “owed” the stranger.
But some conservative sources have sided with Vance, and their arguments are, to use the right word, in good faith, not mere excuses for fascism. Anthony McCarthy, in the Catholic Herald, writes, speaking of the Samaritan:
But what if his own son had also been a victim of robbers, and was lying next to the stranger, in the same dire condition? If my son is injured, should I not prioritise taking him to A&E as soon as possible? The answer seems obvious: of course I should – what kind of father wouldn’t? Yet if I take him to A&E and the doctor treats him, the doctor will delay treating the person next in line who has his own family and is also in dire need of help. Should I therefore sacrifice my parental responsibilities to some “wider duty” concerning someone else’s child?
In our limited and imperfect world, nothing is commoner than an agonizing conflict of duties of this sort. Isn’t this conditional kind of empathy actually more compassionate than the unrealistic blanket universalism of Jesus’ parable? Is the parable naïve? A first response might be to distinguish between what Northrop Frye called primary and secondary concern. Primary concerns are universal to the human race, without regard to race, gender, class, or culture. His list varied, but commonly included freedom, love, food and drink—things quite close to Abraham Maslow’s basic needs, which start with the bodily physiological and safety needs and climb to more emotional needs such as love and self-esteem. Every human being needs certain things to survive and thrive. The real intent behind the opening to the Declaration of Independence might be to say that we hold it to be self-evident that all human beings have a right to primary concerns, unconditionally.
Secondary concern, however, is what is called ideology. An ideology is a value system embodied in a society’s structure of power. Ideologies vary according to how much, or how little, they subordinate the society’s power and systems of control to the task of realizing primary concerns. But ideologies belong to the earthly kingdoms that Jesus was tempted by and rejected. They tend to start from the assumption that primary concern cannot be realized—to think so is unrealistic idealism—so there must be various forms of compromise. This is the beginning of legalism. You are obligated to help a roadside stranger if, and only if, conditions 1a through 1e in section 2 of the recently updated guidelines are met, unless you live in Alaska or the District of Columbia. The exceptions and conditions begin to sound like a contract—and in come the lawyers and the insurance companies who decide on the right to deny care. And by the way, you may want to be careful—I remember when states began passing “Good Samaritan laws” to protect people who stopped at an accident from lawsuits claiming that their intervention caused harm.
Likewise, the Ten Commandments that Christian nationalists want to hang in schools say, “Thou shalt not kill.” But there have to be exemptions for wars of defense and holy wars, and the right of every citizen to sport a gun that can have no other purpose than to kill people. The Augustines and Aquinases were good at creating structures of language that sometimes shed light on the great mysteries—but they were at the same time apologists for a system that had no qualms about setting aside “Thou shalt not kill” in order to torture and burn heretics at the stake. They actually called it whatever “tough love” was in Latin: we are torturing your body to save your immortal soul. No false empathy there. To the extent that intellectuals rationalize things like that, they are the scribes and Pharisees of their age.
Jesus spoke in the uncompromising language of primary concern. Your neighbor is both your son and the stranger, and you should try to care for both rather than looking for exceptions that amount to “How little can I get away with?” To the response that this world has limitations, the correct reply might be, “No, this hospital and insurance system have limitations, most of them going back to capitalism and profits. Why does that doctor have to budget and prioritize care? Let us refuse to accept a system in which this happens, in which somebody has to die because of the lie that we cannot help everyone.” About immigration, especially the case of people fleeing terrible conditions, we could say, “You claim we cannot let in everyone without causing harm to American citizens. We are the richest country in the world. Let us keep the sign on the Statue of Liberty and let in people without causing job losses. At least that should be our ideal, a both/and rather than the zero sum game of either/or. Legalism always speaks of either/or and rejects both/and as unrealistic. Usually that means it is inconvenient to somebody, or a limit on their profits. Or, worse, an excuse to hate and persecute various groups of people. Also: what if, to save my son’s life, I had to allow a bomb to be detonated that would kill 10 million people. Does the ordo amoris say that is justified? Rather, it is a legal loophole trying to get me out of the terrifying responsibility for absolutely everyone. But it is false. On the other hand, in Dickens’ Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby neglects her own children because she is absorbed in her charity work for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha. Yet she does not really care for the natives at all: this is not agape but mere virtue-signaling.
The truly revolutionary thing about Christianity was in fact its universalism. The word “Catholic” means, or should mean, more than merely the attempt to force the whole world to accept the authority of a single church, although that is what it became in practice. But the real universalism was Christianity’s extension of God’s empathy—the Christian love called agape—to all, not just to a special group. We should give Judaism credit for originating this sentiment—after all, “love thy neighbor as thyself” comes from Jewish Scripture. But the rift between Peter and Paul recorded in the Acts of the Apostles was over Paul’s insistence on a mission to the gentiles, not content with a church limited to Jewish Christians, to a “chosen people.” This changes agape from rational to irrational. Preaching love to an in-group is perfectly rational. Richard Dawkins even rationalized it on evolutionary grounds in The Selfish Gene (1976). His problem was, if natural selection is true, then self-preservation is the only true mandate, and a general altruism ought to be either impossible or mistaken and neurotic. His answer was that it is the genes that are selfish and driven by survival. In order to survive, they have to be passed on, however, and that means that individuals are impelled by their genes towards altruistic behavior that will increase the genes’ chances of being passed on. That is why parents sacrifice for their children, even sometimes sacrifice their lives. It is not necessary that they survive so long as the genes can use their offspring as a vehicle.
One hardly needs Darwinism for this theory, which is just window dressing. It is simply common observation that human beings often extend their empathy in an expanding series of circles, in a fashion rationalized as “common sense”: from family (especially children), then to clan or tribe, then to a larger community. Non-members outside these circles don’t count, do not even exist as human beings. They are “other.” Early humanity didn’t know about genetics, but they knew that human beings are interdependent and need to be able to count on a circle of support and protection. Such love is rational, and based on self-interest. That is not necessarily a condemnation. Rational love based on a calculation of benefits is both necessary for survival and often very moving. But in the end it is still a form of “enlightened” self-interest. It has a tendency to be not just indifferent but hostile to those outside the in-group, and reacts with fury at the “betrayal” of any “fraternization with the enemy,” as Romeo and Juliet learned to their cost, as did couples in interracial marriages when I was young.
The kind of Christian love that Jesus preached is irrational, in the sense that there is no answer to the question, “What’s in it for me and mine?” Again and again, in fact, he both preached and demonstrated the necessity for breaking the bonds and obligations of family and social class in order to commit oneself to a higher kind of love. He said that he came to turn people against their mothers and fathers. When still a child, he ran away from home to dispute with the scholars, and when his parents upbraided him for worrying them, he asked them if they didn’t know he had to be about his Father’s business—his true Father’s (Luke 2:49). At the wedding in Cana, he said to his mother, “Woman, what have I do with thee?” (John 2:4).
The idea that there is a love higher than that of ordinary family love is typically symbolized, in the Bible and elsewhere, by the sacrifice of a child. When child sacrifice is for selfish purposes, it is demonic, as when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the gods merely to get wind to fill the sails of his thousand ships in order to go to Troy. There is an entire Wikipedia article on “Child sacrifice,” and it goes on and on, listing culture after culture in which sacrifice of children, especially of the firstborn, was regarded as pleasing to the gods because it represented willingness to give up that which is of greatest value. In the Old Testament, the heathen god Moloch acquired a particularly foul reputation because of his worshippers’ practice of sacrificing children in furnaces.
But when the true God commands it, the willingness to sacrifice one’s own child is the ultimate test. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, not for reward but simply because God commanded it, made him a “knight of faith” in the eyes of Kierkegaard, who wrote a whole book on it, Fear and Trembling (1843). Kierkegaard’s one worry was about how Abraham could know that the voice that spoke to him was really God, as opposed to the voice of a devil impersonator, or a psychotic episode. Turns out it was the real God, and this was just a loyalty test—would you do something unspeakably evil at the command of God? We are presently being given a master class in such loyalty tests by Donald Trump. Not all Jewish people are onboard with this, as Leonard Cohen’s “Song of Isaac” makes clear:
You who build the altars now To sacrifice these children You must not do it anymore A scheme is not a vision And you never have been tempted By a demon or a god
But Abraham’s would-be sacrifice was a “type,” a prefiguration, of God’s willingness to sacrifice his own son for a humanity that was not worth it. His Son at least volunteered: no one asked Isaac what he felt. What kind of God demands a human sacrifice to pay a “debt”? The doctrine of the Atonement is a legalistic distortion of what Jesus really preached, which is that there is a kind of love that exceeds the relatively selfish love of family. Family are “me and mine,” and there are plenty of parents willing to do anything out of “love” to advance their children at the expense of other children, including breaking the law to get their offspring into elite schools.
But the question is whether empathy, and the compassionate altruism that stems from it, is truly part of human nature. Is it a universal capacity, so that selfish behavior is a corruption of our true identity, a pathology born of deprivation of the basic needs from an early age? That is what Abraham Maslow felt, and his humanistic psychology is in a lineage of idealistic thought that goes back to Rousseau in the 18th century, who said that human nature is basically good but corrupted by society. But Maslow was aware that he was opposing the traditional Christian view expressed in the doctrine of original sin. The human will was corrupted by the sin of Adam and Eve and remains evil, innately selfish and incapable of good. A deprived or harsh environment does not turn people evil. They are evil from birth. The most influential exponent of this view was Augustine, who said quite bluntly in his Confessions that there is no such thing as an innocent child. Speaking to God, he says, “For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth” (27). However, it is difficult to dismiss Augustine as a sin-obsessed fanatic, because his evidence is familiar to anyone who has ever raised a child:
It can hardly be right for a child, even at that age, to cry for everything, including things that would harm him; to work himself into a tantrum against people older than himself and not required to obey him; and to try his best to strike and hurt others who know better than he does, including his own parents, when they do not give in to him and refuse to pander to whims which would only do harm. This shows that, if babies are innocent, it is not for lack of will to do harm, but for lack of strength. | I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy. This much is common knowledge. (27-28)
Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is about the implications of such a view for the theory of law. If humanity is basically selfish, only coercive threats and harsh punishments will keep it in line. This begins in childhood: spare the rod and spoil the child. But laws for adults also need to be strict. Duke Vincentio says, “We have strict statutes and most biting laws, / The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds” (1.3.19-20, Bevington edition).
The debate about human nature in the 18th century turned upon the nature of the “natural man,” man in the state of nature, before civilization. Rousseau believed that nature was good, a line of thought that led to the concept of the “noble savage.” This view was opposed by the Marquis de Sade, who anticipated Social Darwinism by insisting that human nature was selfish and predatory, while denying that there was a God to restrain it through punishment and threats. The kind of Social Darwinism espoused by Ayn Rand and her libertarian followers likewise speaks of the virtue of selfishness. In this “philosophy,” empathy is the sound of losers consoling themselves for being losers.
The Augustinian view that human nature, because of original sin, is essentially evil, and redeemed only by the condescension of divine grace, became Christian doctrine as a result of Augustine’s fierce attacks on the opposite point of view, which is called Pelagianism after a British monk named Pelagius who held that human nature was not corrupted after the Fall, and therefore retained the capacity to freely choose the good. Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy, and Christianity has been given credit ever after for having a profounder view of evil than that of Plato and Socrates, for whom evil was a rational error, a mistaken calculus. People only do evil things because they think mistakenly that they are good in the sense of benefiting them. This view is held to be naïve, an unwillingness to acknowledge the irrationality of the human race, which is ruled not by reason but by the corrupted will. Folk wisdom knows better when it talks about cutting off your nose to spite your face. About 40% of the American people these days repeatedly cut off their noses, voting against their own best interests in order to have the greater satisfaction of “triggering the libs.” In the Romantic period, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience superficially seem to dramatize a point of view close to Rousseau’s. One of the Songs of Innocence, “The Lamb,” is the sweet monologue of an innocent child, giving his beloved pet lamb a Sunday-school lesson about God:
He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb: He is meet & he is mild, He became a little child…
Is this endearing, or is it sentimentality, the kind of sentimentality that caused half of England to weep at the death of Little Nell in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop? Is this what children really are? In “The Gold Wheel,” Loren Eiseley recounts how, as a boy, he came upon a pack of boys stoning a turtle: “They pounded him to death with stones on the other side of the pool while I looked on in stupefied horror” (6). Then one of them “looked at me, and around that group some curious evil impulse passed like a wave. I felt it and drew back. I was alone there. They were not human.” Then they began throwing stones at him, in the frenzy of “the pack impulse toward the outsider that had swept over them” (6). Eiseley concludes: “I had discovered evil. It was a monstrous and corroding knowledge. It could not be told to adults because it was the evil of childhood in which no one believes” (6). William Golding believed in it, however, and taught the world about it in Lord of the Flies (1954).
I learned what Pelagianism was when I was a teenager by reading Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel The Wanting Seed (1962). In the same year, he published a more famous novel, A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a Roman Catholic, and the horrific gang rape scene in the Stanley Kubrick film version of that novel is another dramatization of original sin, inherent evil. Given these examples, we may infer that the salient characteristic of original sin is a lack of empathy. Modern psychology sees lack of empathy as a symptom of sociopathic narcissism, but the depth psychology of Freud and Jung could be said to define original sin in a way that does not depend on a supernatural explanation. It is a latent tendency in all of us, and as the “pack impulse” in all these examples shows, it is highly contagious. A narcissistic sociopath draws vulnerable, predisposed people into his own illness, submerging them into a collective state in which they are indeed “not human.” This happened with Hitler, and it is happening with Trump right now.
The Augustinian view does see something about evil clearly. It is not just a Catholic view: Calvinism, influenced by Augustine, spoke of humankind’s “innate depravity.” Jungian psychology speaks of the “shadow,” our repressed dark side which it is not only our psychological but also our moral duty to become conscious of and responsible for. Confrontation with the shadow may be shattering: the protagonist of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness leaves behind a message: “The horror! The horror!” The tale does indeed follow the pattern of Lovecraftian horror stories, which typically end with an anagnorisis, or recognition scene, in which the unspeakable horror beneath the façade of everyday life is revealed. Thereupon the narrator either goes mad or is devoured. Or both. The difference in Heart of Darkness is that the evil is not supernatural. As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
But I think there is a tendency for this dark vision to become one-sided and reductive, to become obsessed with “the reality of evil” and pride itself on its hardheaded realism. Admittedly, when a child is being a brat throwing a temper tantrum it can be highly unlovable, especially when it is at the next table at a restaurant. But a child can be truly innocent, sweet and affectionate, and in fact that is their true nature, or Jesus would never have said that we have to become as little children. Augustine was wise in observing that the Fall happens all over again in every human life, and it happens from the beginning, from infancy. But the right inference is that we have two natures, a better and a worse, and the good one is who we really are, the bad one a false identity that we are repeatedly in danger of falling into. Blake’s Songs of Innocence are not naïve. They are paired with Songs of Experience, which show the oppression of Innocence by the adult world of Experience, including child labor (“The Chimney Sweep”). Innocence oppressed may turn evil, go over to the dark side. But what put those oppressive social institutions in place? The central Song of Experience, “London,” speaks of “the mind forg’d manacles.” Thus, the world cannot be redeemed simply by a social revolution that sweeps away oppressive institutions and builds a utopia. Blake was writing within a few years of the storming of the Bastille, the beginning of the French Revolution. But the Revolution failed because you first have to break the mental chains, or else people will simply invent a new way to imprison themselves. That means an inward revolution. The idea of two human natures is in fact Christian: Paul spoke of the “natural man” and the “spiritual man.” The former is the product of original sin, and is thus innately selfish. It is the spiritual self, into which we must be “born again,” that is capable of agape, that type of love that is compassion based on empathy. Blake went one step further and identified that spiritual self with imagination. Empathy is a leap of the imagination uniting self with other.
Christianity has always had a tendency to think in terms of redemption in terms of a sudden “conversion,” for which the Biblical type is the Resurrection: the bursting of the spiritual self out of the tomb of the natural self. Another image is the curing of blindness: “I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind but now I see,” says the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Northrop Frye has observed that these conversions resemble the sudden twist that turns a traditional comedy around into a happy ending—an ending which may include the conversion or change of heart of some of the characters. But Shakespeare at the end of his career seems to have become dissatisfied with this pattern of sudden reversal after which everyone lives happily ever after. In his final four romances, also significantly called “tragicomedies,” the redemptive ending is the result of a long process of personal change, involving loss, suffering, endurance, and the slow acquisition of hard-won insight. In order to fit this long process into a three-hour drama, each of the four plays jumps over a large gap of time. In The Winter’s Tale, 16 years pass between Acts 2 and 3. The characters by Act 5 have aged. They have made mistakes, paid the price for them, and look back with remorse. But they have grown from their mistakes and their guilt in a personal version of the Fortunate Fall. The mood is bittersweet, but all the more moving for that.
Sudden conversions or awakenings, individual and collective, do happen. But there is also a progressive aspect to the imagination as it works slowly to awaken our better selves over the span of history. Myths of progress are highly suspect in our skeptical time, but both the capitalist view of progress as new and improved iPhones every few years and the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism are parodies of the real thing. I think the imagination is working towards a progressive expansion of empathy over time. I am well aware of the danger of falling into a smug self-righteousness in judging earlier societies by my own “enlightened” standards. But I was pained and baffled even at a young age at how lacking in empathy earlier societies could often be while being seemingly unaware of the fact. It was upsetting to learn when I was young that animals, including my pets, could not go to heaven because they did not have souls. Yet adults did not seem bothered by this at all. Then I grew up and read philosophy and learned that Descartes insisted that animals did not really have emotions or feel pain. How could such a genius blind himself in that way? I am a vegetarian not just because animals are killed but because they are treated in ways that I know I would not even be able to look upon in person in the large factory farms. George Bernard Shaw, one of my heroes, fought against vivisection, yet animals are still used in labs in experiments that may save human lives but which trouble me deeply. I have known students who were wonderful, sensitive human beings, but who loved to go hunting. People weep over the death of Bambi’s mom, but support the semi-annual “culling” of deer in the semi-rural communities in which I have lived. Yes, there is a deer population problem. There are also other ways of dealing with it—but those are dismissed as too expensive. Easier just to shoot them.
As for human beings, the clause in the Constitution forbidding “cruel and unusual punishment” is a mark of progress, of a new sensitivity to the inhuman practices that were simply a matter of course in ages whose cultural accomplishments were as great or arguably greater than our own. The Roman Empire, epitome of civilization, gave us the most infamous punishment of all, crucifixion—and most of those executed hung for days, not three hours. Christ said to love your enemies, but the tortures of hell in the Divine Comedy are both savagely cruel and sometimes highly unusual. The Elizabethan age was not bothered by punishments such as drawing and quartering, cutting off the hands of thieves, and so on. Flogging was a typical punishment in various navies. It stuns me that people did not, so far as I know, question these practices. Public hangings took place in England until 1868, and were discontinued in part because they had become public entertainments that, it was felt, people were enjoying too much. They were England’s version of watching gladiators kill each other and lions eat Christians in the Roman circuses. They were the hunger games. Ending such practices, and increasingly ending capital punishment itself, is an achievement of our civilization greater than the iPhone or the automobile.
Acceptance of these brutal practices cannot accurately be called callous or indifferent. What is astonishing and disheartening is how previous ages did not even see that there was a problem at all. Even if evil people “deserve” to suffer for what they have done, how can people witness such pain as burning at the stake without recoiling in empathetic trauma, imagining how it must feel? My point is not at all the self-righteous accusation of others from some superior standpoint. But I feel impelled to ask what it is that causes people to repress, not the intellectual awareness of other people’s pain, but the leap of imaginative empathy that may cause us to feel that pain ourselves.
There are implications beyond the relatively limited context of the punishment of criminals. Slavery was abolished in the United States a little over a century and a half ago. The accounts of the brutal treatment of enslaved peoples are appalling, as are the narratives of how Native Americans were treated during the same time. Europe has an even longer period of anti-Semitism. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice caters to the anti-Semitic stereotype of the hardhearted Jewish moneylender, but Shakespeare understands why Shylock is driven by hatred. The Christians in the play who fall all over themselves empathetically helping each other have no empathy for the Jew, as he says in his famous speech:
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. (3.1.56-64, Bevington edition).
When Southern slaveowners denied that Black people were “equal to” white people, it was a coded way of saying that they were not really human, and therefore that their suffering did not count. Economic interest drove their inhumanity, but a large segment of the American population still sees any people who are not white as parasites and criminals, whether they are citizens or immigrants. Trump does his best to demonize immigrants in order to prevent any sort of empathy for their plight—and by doing so he got the vote not only of rabid MAGA losers but also of good grandmas and grandpas and salt-of-the-earth people who would give another white person the shirt off their back. They have empathy for their kind, and it is admirable and moving, but it is not the universal compassion that Jesus preached.
It seems to be no coincidence that an attempt to expand empathetic understanding and respectful, humane treatment began exploding in all directions around the time of the Romantic movement, the turn of the 19th century. As I have said before (preceded by Northrop Frye), Romanticism, using the term very loosely, can be defined as the creation of modern mythology, the inauguration of a new perspective. It was an age of revolution against tradition and established authority, and we are living in its aftermath. The upheavals were fueled by an expansion of consciousness that took the form of attempts to include various groups and human types that had been excluded and oppressed. Sympathy for suffering is part of empathy, but such humanitarianism is catalyzed by the attempt to understand others who are different—not just to analyze them with intellectual detachment but to see and feel as they do, to walk in their shoes. There is, as many will tell you, a risk involved in attempting to understand the other from within—the risk of being wrong, and, worse, of complacently assuming that we are right, at which point those we think we understand may angrily and rightly denounce us for our arrogance. But it is a risk worth taking.
Opposition to slavery emerged from the Romantic revolution. Britain abolished it in 1833. The beginnings of feminism coincide with this era: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women dates from 1792. Before it becomes political activism, feminism is empathetic understanding of women and women’s plight. Women were excluded from politics, from the arts, really from full human status: they were (and of course to many still are) other. The cause of women’s rights had to begin with exposing a blindness. A famous feminist science fiction story by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree) was titled “The Women Men Don’t See.” Basically, that means all of them. The cause of the poor and the working classes was also inaugurated in the post-Romantic era, leading to Marxism and the labor union movement. The arts contributed to opening not just people’s eyes but their hearts to the hardships of laborers, in fiction through novels like Zola’s Germinal about coal miners (children labored in the mines for the same reason they were formerly chimney sweeps, their small size) and the novels of Dickens.
But it is within a remarkably short time—coinciding with my (admittedly long) lifetime that the spread of empathetic activism entered a new phase. I have not read anyone who ponders how extraordinary this metamorphosis really is, although it is the reason for the fearful, angry culture wars backlash we have been undergoing since the 1980’s. In the 1960’s, the civil rights movement followed up on the end of slavery by achieving the end of segregation. Feminism transformed the situation of women, however imperfectly. Momentum built for a universal recreation of society on the basis of a total inclusiveness—which is exactly what the backlash means by “woke.” Once the principle became better known that there are whole groups of people that we are not so much prejudiced against as simply blind to, people began looking for the blind spots in the social system, and progressively found them. Gay rights stemmed from empathetic insight that homosexuality was not a pathology, and that movement has expanded into an increasingly inclusive alphabet of letters that no one can keep up with: LBGTQIA+ is at the moment a kind of minimum. Society has tried, always imperfectly, to be more mindful of people with disabilities and people who are neurodivergent, people who struggle with weight and with alcohol. The efforts to be more understanding and respectful have led to rapid and non-stop changes in labels and terminology—it is no longer acceptable to refer to “cripples,” “retards,” “faggots,” and the like, to say nothing of the n-word. It is also no longer acceptable to laugh at those who are different in any way. These new strictures make people feel insecure and defensive.
This revolutionary movement, for that is what it is, has been an amazing attempt. It is not unique to America, but America has played a prominent role. There is still something about this country that is worth being proud of. Yes, it is easy to sentimentalize this empathy business. What it does not mean is that we would create utopia if we all just felt lovey-dovey about everyone. In “A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” Martin Luther King said he was glad that “love thy neighbor” was not the same as “like thy neighbor” because he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to like the Southern sheriff with his attack dogs. On a more sophisticated level, some intellectuals have claimed that such “conversions” as Scrooge’s change of heart in A Christmas Carol are a bourgeois evasion of the hard facts of power systems and class struggle. But that is just academic chatter. The superhero comics had a wiser view than that of some intellectuals, medieval or modern. The self-sacrificing dedication of the superheroes remains an inspiring model, despite the “winter soldier” ironic revisionism going on in the recent Captain America movies.
During the period of the first superheroes in the 1940’s, there were young GI’s, still in their 20’s, my father among them, who did exactly what Jesus counseled. They not only served the common good but put it before the wives and young children they left behind. In the view of JD Vance, that is theologically incorrect. In the view of Trump, servicepeople are losers exactly because they are not out for themselves, as he is. When I taught the myth of the hero years ago, and asked students who the real heroes are, they named the rescuers of 9/11 who ran into the burning buildings. In his Power of Myth interviews, Joseph Campbell tells the story of a young policeman in Hawaii who saw a man about to commit suicide by jumping off a mountain. He grabbed the man, but was being slowly pulled over the edge by his weight, and yet refused to let go. Luckily, his partner ran up in time to pull both back from the edge. When a journalist asked the police officer, “Why didn’t you let go? You have a wife and family that would have been bereft if you had died for the sake of this stranger?” The officer replied, “I don’t know. But I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had done that.” Original sin, innate selfishness, is all too real. But something else is real too.
References
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin, 1961.
Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.