Too much of this Golden-Rule-Do-Unto-Others stuff is destroying our society. You can care too much. Or at least that is what conservatives increasingly maintain. For example, Elon Musk said on a Joe Rogan podcast, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy (sic) exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” Musk continued, “So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.” The concern is that empathy may lead to policies that conservatives don’t like concerning abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration, foreign aid, or helping countries attacked by others. Musk has promoted the book by the Canadian marketing professor Gad Saad, Suicidal Empathy, a term which Saad defines as a form of empathy that has a destructive potential. Saad’s seemingly serious book, along with writings of others, provides an intellectual framework for conservatives to be able to claim that their wish lists are not just about greed or self-interest. Instead, conservatives are heroically trying to preserve a culture that will be destroyed without their efforts.
Empathy, it now turns out, can be a sin because it can lead into accepting various other sins including abortion, LGBT+ rights, racial preferences, and illegal immigration, as Allie Beth Stuckey maintains in Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion. (Illegal immigration may be harmful to the United States, but I don’t understand how immigration, whether lawful or not, is “sinful.” I haven’t found any mention of illegal immigrants in my Bibles.)
Sometimes the anti-empathy movement takes on misogynistic tinges. For example, after Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde urged President Trump at a church service to “have mercy” on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people and other disfavored groups, professor and pastor (yes, pastor) Joe Rigney, the author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and its Counterfeits, wrote, “Budde’s attempt to ‘speak truth to power’ is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation.” In addition, Christian nationalists have swung on to the anti-empathy bandwagon in their efforts to have a country dominated by white, straight “Christian” men.
Reading and hearing about the anti-empathic lead me, in a strange twist of mind, to thinking about how these conservatives are like Iranian censors, whom, presumably, these Americans abhor. Or at least that is what Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi demonstrates. This bestseller, published in 2003, is about the author’s experiences during the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath. The book is interlaced with stories from a group of seven women reading and discussing banned Western literary works led by Professor Nafisi.
Nafisi says about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “You don’t read Gatsby to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” That, of course, frightens those anti-empathetic American conservatives. They don’t want their rigid categories of right and wrong questioned.
Nafisi says that perhaps most worrying for the Iranian censors, similar to the concerns of the anti-empathy Americans, is that books might lead to a sympathy and understanding of those whom the Islamic officials despise and fear. Nafisi writes, “The respect for others, empathy, . . .is the quality that links Austen to Flaubert and James to Nabokov and Bellow.” Children with empathy are a threat; they may reject the rigidity of self-righteous adults. Nafisi writes, “This, I believe, is how the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy.” Elsewhere she says, “Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to ‘see’ others, hence, to empathize with them.”
The censors wish to stifle the natural curiosity of children and others, afraid of the possible empathetic results that could lead to questioning the censors’ moral authority. And the conservatives wish to squelch empathy for similar reasons. But, as Nafisi says in Reading Lolita, “Humbert [Humbert] was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives, even about the person he loved most, Lolita. Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.”
It is not really the specifics of the books that animates the censors’ actions. Instead, their fundamental concern is to prevent challenges to their rigid, authoritarian world view. And American conservatives opposing empathy similarly want to prevent challenges to their world view. It is in their view more important to accept conservative policies than to have empathy that can lead to questioning and challenging.
However, if empathy is now the new deadly sin as conservatives maintain, I want to adopt the words of the Reverend Micah Bucey of Greenwich Village’s Judson Memorial Church: “If empathy is a sin, sin boldly.”
