We're About to Watch Billions Die. Where Does "Empathy" Fit Here?

Maybe it doesn't.

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I used to think empathy was a good thing.

Now, not so much.

A long time ago, an obscure article made it pretty clear. Empathy wasn’t going to save the world. Neither were book clubs or English seminars. As the author of that article explained, “People who feel deep sympathy for characters can be indifferent and even cruel to real people who are suffering.”

Boy, have we seen that in action or what?

As a former academic, I’ve lost count of the times a full professor, a department chair, a dean, or a vice chancellor denied someone a raise or destroyed their career and then went into a meeting to talk about how to teach moral reasoning to students. And now here we are, as education dissolves, watching universities give awards to white supremacists and defend it with warnings about “viewpoint discrimination,” while arresting students for supporting Palestinians, banning masks at commencement ceremonies, and stomping down protests. It seems to me like they’re very much engaged in viewpoint discrimination.

About that article I mentioned…

It referenced a philosopher named Robert Solomon, who described “Nazi executioners shedding tears for characters portrayed by Jewish actors who were on their way to the gas chambers.” Solomon seems to be talking about the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp in Terezin, where prisoners did, in fact, perform for Nazi audiences. It didn’t matter how well they did or what tears of sympathy they elicited from their captors, though.

Out of 143,000 prisoners at Theresienstadt, only 6,000 survived.

That fact has wedged deep into my mind. Artists, actors, and musicians could move Nazis to tears with their work. They could make them feel deep pangs of longing and sorrow for the suffering of fictional characters.

The Nazis killed them anyway.

How is that even possible?

Even more importantly, as collapse accelerates, what role is empathy going to play, and how should we be thinking about it? According to the latest climate science, we’re about to witness the deaths of billions over the next two decades. (That’s assuming we’re not among the first billion to perish.) It’s going to make any genocide in history look mild by comparison. We’re going to feel a lot of emotions about that, so we’d better talk about it.

Here’s my first shot.

For nearly a hundred years, philosophers from Richard Rorty to Martha Nussbaum have argued and debated a central question:

How do you teach someone empathy?

Or compassion?

That question feels especially relevant now, as the world gives up on its climate targets and submits to fascism while pretending otherwise, and two years of excusing and defending genocide as “war” leads us into WWIII, a conflict that’s either about to begin or already well underway, depending on who you talk to. Everywhere you look, you find profound deficits in perspective-taking.

The painful lesson keeps resurfacing:

You can’t teach empathy or compassion, at least not indirectly with works of art and literature—or even movies. They’re great at simulating the sensation of empathy, but the feelings that people develop for the lives and worlds of these characters rarely transfer into concrete action. In fact, these performative displays of sentiment can do damage to activism in the real world, because they trick everyone into thinking they’re very good moral people. They make it look and feel easy to see from someone else’s perspective—and that’s dangerous.

Readers, including teachers, often preselect the books and characters they’re going to engage in exercises of empathy and compassion toward. The same thing happens on Netflix. Even though they don’t realize it, viewers unconsciously choose titles with people they already identify with one way or another, increasing the chances they’ll feel connected. Look around, and you’ll find no shortage of Americans who think they’re demonstrating empathy when they won’t even offer an unpopular opinion or wear a piece of cloth to stop spreading disease.

As Lynn Hunt explains in Inventing Human Rights, the concept of empathy didn’t really exist until around the turn of the 19th century. Neither did the concept of the individual, not like we have it today. Back then, if you tried to explain to anyone that they, as a unique person, deserved anything or were entitled to anything, they would laugh at you or just stand there staring like you were insane. For most of human history, unless you were nobility or somehow seen as divine, you got what you got and that was it. So it makes sense that documents like the American Constitution would sound radical by articulating any notion of individual rights.

Before then, everyone “empathized with those close to them and with those most obviously like them—their immediate families, their relatives, the people of their parish, in general their customary social equals.” You weren’t expected to feel the suffering of strangers. The logic went like this: If you tried to care for too many people, it would short out your brain.

How did simply existing entitle you to anything? For thousands of years, that notion didn’t exist—and we seem to be heading back to that worldview. It’s going to be really hard for a lot of us to watch it happen.

We know one thing:

Fifty or 60 years of teaching works like The Crucible or The Scarlet Letter in our schools have produced generations of sheltered, privileged white adults who think they’re capable of great acts of empathy and compassion, even when they’re funding genocide and endorsing men like Andrew Cuomo for public office with 13 counts of sexual discrimination and harassment, including retaliation against those women. It’s hard to believe, until you look at history and see time and again that humans practice empathy and compassion in the most selective ways.

Science tells us empathy is selective by nature.

According to a 2022 article in Affective Science, decades of research in psychology have confirmed that people engage in selective empathy and compassion on a regular basis. As academics have observed, “the tendency of western societies towards individualism and competitiveness” contributes to a “gradual loss of empathy.” From an early age, we’re conditioned to view each other as opponents. This combative, competitive view tends to suppress empathy.

A 2019 study in Social Neuroscience confirms this disheartening truth. As much as we’ve tried to fight human nature, it looks like humans are wired to feel the most sympathy toward their ingroup—the ones they identify with. This study asked participants to rate the pain of someone else, who was either part of their ingroup or a member or two different outgroups. One outgroup was more competitive than the other. According to the results, participants “reported feeling more empathy” toward members of their ingroup, and brain scans showed stronger empathetic activity toward those members, as well as members of the less competitive outgroup. So the more you see someone as an adversary, the less you’re inclined to feel bad for them when bad things happen to them.

It gets more interesting.

A 2023 article in Behavioral Research Methods covers research in psychology and sociology on what’s called the “empathy selection task.” Basically, research has confirmed for years now that “people prefer to avoid empathy when some other activity is available.” In fact, decades of studies have shown that when someone is stressed or tired, they’re less likely to engage in empathetic actions, like helping strangers suffering medical emergencies.

Narcissists engage in the most selective empathy, and it’s often extremely confusing for the rest of us. As Seth Meyers explains here, narcissists predictably show empathy toward the vulnerable, but only if they’re not seen as a threat to narcissists’ ego.” They often do it in the most superficial sense, and it’s temporary. Narcissists also show empathy toward those they find useful. Meanwhile, narcissists will withhold empathy from anyone who achieves any recognition or poses a threat to their egos. You might be wondering, can an entire culture become narcissistic?

Yes, it can.

Research on cultural narcissism explored in a 2022 article in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences confirms: cultures that value and foster individualism and competition “report higher levels of narcissism.” They studied hundreds of university students and adults to find that social values oriented toward personal success and motivation fostered more narcissistic traits. So it makes perfect sense that American culture, with its emphasis on personal goals and dreams, which increasingly demonizes the idea of sharing and helping, would start to see not only more narcissists but more narcissistic worldviews and biases portrayed in their news, their entertainment, their media, and their politics.

Look around, narcissism is everywhere.

Americans thrive on the idea that they should be able to do whatever they want, and they can’t be bothered to think about how their actions impact someone else. At the same time, they want credit for being a kind and caring person, but they only want to do it on their own terms. Right now, on all sides, we’re seeing some of the most egregious displays of selective empathy in generations.

Is empathy even a good thing?

Not always…

According to Fritz Breitaupt, author of The Dark Sides of Empathy, you can easily make someone disregard or withhold empathy from entire groups by conditioning them to see those populations as enemies. You can also corrupt empathy into a kind of selfish ritual that only glorifies the observer of suffering.

It explains why the mainstream media has gone so hard on influencers like Rachel Griffin-Accurso, Ms. Rachel, for introducing children to real Palestinians and talking about their problems. They don’t want her to promote empathy toward Palestinian children, which is exactly what she does:

“I have a 3-month-old. I have a 7-year-old. As a mom, just the daily things I do with them thinking, 'Moms in Gaza can't do this right now.'

"My little one is hungry, and I feed her right away, and she's crying, and I'm able to comfort her and we have a peaceful environment. And it just shakes me to my core that I’ve met two mothers that weren't able to help their little ones. And I think it's just putting myself in that position over and over."

Ms. Rachel isn’t doing selective or performative empathy. She’s doing the real thing, and the real thing often comes with a lot of risks if you’re promoting empathy for a group we’ve been conditioned to see as adversaries.

In the most basic, pure sense, intellectual empathy or rational compassion simply means regarding everyone as an equal and thinking about their needs as your needs. It also carries a certain understanding that we’re all better off when we create a world where nobody can kill, bomb, exploit, starve, or enslave someone else. It’s just wrong. Nobody should be doing it to anyone. From that perspective, empathy is just a big circle jerk that misses the point. You don’t have to feel sad for someone to recognize that we shouldn’t be murdering their children.

Here’s something interesting:

James Baldwin couldn’t stand Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

He declared that book and other “sentimental protest novels” practically useless because they functioned as “fantasies connecting nowhere with reality” that mainly perpetuate status quo attitudes by “providing complacent readers with the thrill of virtue from the fact that they are reading such a book at all.” And so, even the biggest fans of reading have to admit that it “results in no obvious increase in altruistic behavior,” but they still tried to make it work.

More from Baldwin:

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart, and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

Damn, go on…

The protest novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene…

This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvation, and “As long as such books are being published,” an American liberal once said to me, “everything will be all right.”

Baldwin’s criticisms resonate pretty widely. His words apply to just about every problem from the last hundred years. Politicians, influencers, corporations, and media outlets assure us that as long as everyone keeps pretending to feel empathy and compassion for the oppressed, largely through performative acts and consumption, everything will be okay.

Fritz Breithaupt calls all this “filtered empathy.” Basically, the book or film (or neatly packaged consumer product) doesn’t promote direct empathy for the main targets of abuse. Instead, they promote empathy for heroes, saviors, and observers. This runs the risk of compelling the people in question into victimhood and removing their agency. They’re not supposed to help themselves, and only an approved hero with the right status can intervene. That kind of empathy does a lot of damage.

Like Baldwin, Breithaupt describes the kind of filtered or humanitarian empathy we often see coming from large nations, corporations, and nonprofits as “astonishingly self-serving, given its orientation around the self of the observer,” and he goes on to say it can “even be seen as a kind of narcissism.”

So it makes total sense that American culture, given over to narcissism, would increasingly engage in acts of filtered empathy.

It’s what narcissists do best.

So if you wanted to gag a few months ago when Gavin Newsom posted photos of himself with a stack of novels like Beloved, your initial reaction was spot on. You were reacting to a self-serving act of filtered empathy.

It’s a major red flag.

To really dumb down Baldwin’s ideas, he’s saying that it doesn’t matter how much you cry over the suffering of fictional characters. Updated for the 21st century, it doesn’t matter how much we cry in front of a screen or what big speeches we give about democracy, human rights, saving the planet, or anything else. The only thing that matters is what you do, and you can only learn to care about other people by…

Doing it.

So if you know all this, why do you feel like shit?

Well, we’re living in collapse.

You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel like shit. You’re supposed to feel like shit sometimes (but not all the time). As the experts I’m reading would say, it’s entirely the failed enterprise of humanitarian empathy, trying to alleviate our own bad feelings by erasing suffering, that got us here in the first place.

Breithaupt talks about one other kind of empathy:

Sadistic empathy.

Here, you find a certain type of narcissistic sadist deliberately punishing and torturing someone or an entire group, precisely to connect to them through their suffering. Or if they didn’t directly cause the suffering, they perpetuate it because they get off on sharing their sadness. It’s a weird thing.

But it happens all the time.

So, what’s the point?

We’re living through the collapse of everything. We’re going to see a lot of suffering. As the climate science predicts, we’re about to witness the death of 4-6 billion people over the next couple of decades.

There’s going to be a lot of emotion. There’s going to be an intense desire to do something about it, but we’re also going to know that the time to do something to stop it was decades ago, not now.

It’s going to be rough.

So, we need to get our heads on straight about the flood of emotions we’re going to feel and how to process them without going nuts.

It’s the trap of filtered empathy to feel guilty because you’re not a hero with millions of followers or billions of dollars at your disposal to single-handedly stop genocide or the destruction of the planet. I think Ms. Rachel and Greta have the right idea. If all you have is one little boat, or twenty bucks, or an account with a few hundred followers, and you feel the need to call out injustice, for its own sake, not because you empathize with victims, then you should do that.

It’s the only thing you can do.

Real acts of justice, or whatever you want to call it, often feel uncomfortable. They don’t often bring warm cozy feelings of self-satisfaction, and they often leave you feeling like you haven’t done nearly enough.

And if you’re feeling like that, at the risk of speaking for James Baldwin, I think he would say you’re on the right track. If you’re the member of an oppressor class, you’re not supposed to ever feel good or like you’ve done enough. You just reach the point where you can’t do anymore for a given day, and you live with some of the pain and discomfort that you’re trying to alleviate.

It’s arrogant to script ourselves into the hero’s role when it comes to forces so far beyond our control. It’s not pessimistic or defeatist to think about yourself as you really are, a supporting character, an extra.

The same principle applies to collapse and doom on a broader level. Those of us who tried to steer everyone onto a better course, we live with the reality that we failed. A lot of the wishful thinking out there, which has made things even worse in many ways, is simply an attempt to escape that.

Now, we’re just trying to do what we can to make the end of the world a little more fair, a little less painful for those we can.

Maybe it’s not enough.

It’s all we got.