Alastair's Adversaria - On 'Empathy'

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

The following was first published on my Substack: https://argosy.substack.com/i/138965068/on-empathy. Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (bit.ly/2RLaUcB), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection is entitled on Empathy, and it was first published on The Anchored Argosy. Over the past several years, in part through the influence of Edwin Friedman's book, A Failure of Nerve, Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Some conservative Christian writers have written a lot about the dangers of an unchecked empathy. Their arguments have excited considerable controversy, chiefly on account of the way they routinely speak of empathy in ways that carry negative connotations, ways that their analyses are employed in culture war and other related antagonisms. I have long recommended the work of Friedman, which has influenced my own thought and practice in several

respects. While Friedman has insightful things to say about empathy, the heart of his work for me has always been his treatment of self-definition. Where his analysis of the dysfunctional ways that empathy can operate within societies and communities is detached from this, his critique of dysfunctional empathy can easily come to function in a reactive manner. The strength of Friedman's work, in my estimation, is his emphasis upon self-mastery over reactive antagonism. The transposition of his empathy critique into a more polemical form can easily undermine this fundamental posture. You or they are weaponising empathy can take the place of the self-discipline of practicing compassion for people and being sympathetically attentive to the ways that others see and experience the world,

while resisting any tyranny of others' emotional demands upon us. Talking fruitfully about the limitations of empathy is challenging, as the term carries very different, yet typically strong connotations and associations for different people. It can be highly theoretically freighted in various systems of thought, with contrasting stipulated meaning. This would be challenging enough to negotiate. However, the situation is made more complex by virtue of the fact that the term has radically contrasting valence within different systems and frameworks, for instance, Brunney Brown, Edwin Friedman or Paul Bloom.

In order to navigate this, some of the critics of empathy have qualified their terminology in various ways, speaking of, for instance, untethered empathy. However, although such terminology may be meaningful in the stipulated sense the critics employ, It isn't always so effective at communicating with those accustomed to a general and non-theorized use of the term empathy, and perhaps even less so with those operating within alternative theoretical frameworks. In no small measure in consequence of the equivocal use of key terminology, empathy debates tend to be heated and fruitless. They are incendiary and divisive on social media, yet seldom result in substantive and illuminating engagement. Where debates increasingly stumble over terminology, it might be worth considering whether we would be better off removing certain terms from our active vocabulary for a while, at least in more general contexts.

Temporarily dropping terms from general circulation prioritises the task of effective communication over polemics. Tabooing charged terms for a time also encourages us to consider different ways of saying the same thing, by disallowing theoretically phrased. and emotionally charged terms in our vocabulary, it can encourage clearer and more careful thought, which isn't allowing either dominating ideological frameworks or the emotive valence of vague terms to do our thinking for us. This keeps our imaginations limber, challenging us to think about how the world appears to other people and how to communicate beyond our preferred theoretical and ideological frameworks. It also helps us to consider the logic of systems and ideas from within and without, reducing the likelihood that our imaginations will be constricted by them.

While it may not be timed to boo the term empathy, I would encourage those engaged in these debates to be more circumspect in their choice of terminology and to think of ways to reduce the conceptual freight that such a divisive term is bearing. If you read the material some have written on untethered empathy calmly and carefully, there are important points being made. Our feelings of empathy are most definitely not

North Star for moral action. Indeed, they can often distort our vision. Rather than putting empathy in the driving seat, we ought to be people of responsible moral judgment, not simply swayed by the partiality of feeling, nor sucked without resistance into the gravity well of other people's demanding emotions. It should be recognised that many of the people who are most gung-ho about the positive character of empathy have ways of talking about some of these issues. For instance, they will emphasize the necessity of boundaries. This said, while their treatment of empathy may be one that aspires to extensive application, due to the nature of the empathy they are championing, it tends to make moral judgment very difficult, so strict boundaries can be emphasized

when it comes to evil or toxic people. As such, empathy tends to dampen moral judgment. There can be a trade-off between the two. Classes of persons that are more likely to excite empathy as perceived victims or underdogs, for instance, are much more likely, practically, to be exempted from clear moral judgments. Due to the interference between empathy and moral judgment and the trade-offs between them, where moral judgments are deemed necessary, empathy can be almost completely removed. Persons or groups can be demonised and a sort of callousness developed towards them. Empathy, critics like Paul Bloom, have argued, is a focusing and excluding emotion, Our empathy towards one group easily makes us very callous towards others.

It also lacks perspective that suffering of one loved party can eclipse all else. This dynamic is very evident during wartime. It is a reason why, for instance, posters of Israeli hostages have proven threatening to many supporters of the cause of Palestinians. As a focusing emotion, many instinctively register appeals to empathy as a zero-sum game. Any empathy with Israelis weakens the Palestinian cause. This sense is not entirely irrational. The callousness with which so much war is waged can counter-intuitively often require elevated levels of empathy.

When one group's suffering becomes all-consuming for you, it can be very easy to wish extreme suffering upon their adversaries. When empathy dominates your moral and emotional repertoire in responding to the suffering of others, things can go very badly wrong in such situations. Empathy has its under-considered shadow side. Bloom, for instance, highlights the differences between empathy and what he terms compassion. A key difference is that compassion, as Bloom defines it, feels and takes concern for others,

while maintaining emotional and other boundaries. That compassion can do this without so identifying with, or being sucked into the narrow and exclusionary frame of another suffering, expands its possibilities. It greatly weakens the zero-sum dynamic of empathy, again as Bloom defines it, as compassion for one party need not prevent one feeling compassion for their adversaries. It also makes it entirely possible to feel compassion for people while making firm negative moral judgments concerning their behaviour. All this is possible while maintaining an essentially positive assessment of empathy in its own place too,

while boundaries can be very important in broader relations and in relation to dysfunctional people nearer to us, lowered or more porous boundaries are very good and important things in their profits, a place. Such focusing empathy really is a key part of what finds us to children, to family, and to those closest to us. It is a facet of the specific forms of love that belong to and can be exclusive to such relationships. Without such empathy, the world would be a much colder place. It is also worth recognising such empathy is commonly found in its most pronounced narcuital forms in women. This, for instance, is a key dimension of the love a mother has for her infant. This should be born in mind when

considering the consequences of giving empathy a negative valence. We clearly recognise ways empathy can hamper a mother's ability clearly to perceive the character of her child, he could do no wrong in her eyes, or to judge even handedly between her child and another child who is in conflict with him. Empathy is good, but needs to be tempered and can compromise our capacity in certain important tasks. There are undoubtedly ways in which a sort of maternal empathy has been made a guiding and moralised emotion in wider realms of human society and relationships, in ways that prove very damaging,

setting up perverse structures of partiality and dulling capacity for moral judgment. Empathy for victim and marginal classes, for instance, has often had the effect of dulling moral clarity in our social capacity for impartial justice and judgment. The critics of so-called untethered empathy have addressed some of the ways empathy can go wrong well. However, there may be a much weaker account of the good of healthy

empathy in their work. Perhaps on occasions this has been related to a characteristic failure adequately to valorise traits perceived to be more feminine in character. While their work can be a needed corrective for some, it may be more effective at identifying dysfunctions than in encouraging healthy function. It is more medicine than solid food, and where such medicine is mostly being consumed by people other than those that most need it, the effects may even prove damaging, hardening some people who might be more in need of increasing their capacity for compassion. The focus tends to be on dangers of empathy untethered from reality and truth and resistant to moral judgment. The analysis and practice too easily stools in a negative

moment, focusing upon resistance to empathy, rather than cultivating and practicing healthy compassion. Where a correspondingly robust, positive movement in the direction of compassion is lacking, empathy critiques can remain locked in zero-sum-game trade-offs between empathy and judgment, discouraging loving concern for any for whom such feeling might threaten our moral judgments. With a weaker understanding and analysis of the nature of empathy and lacking a catholicity of compassion, such positions are too easily reactively drawn into the gravity wells of alternative empathetic attachments, commonly those are white, middle American Christian males. Among other things, as Christians, we have a duty to practice moral and loving emotional concern for oppressors,

wrongdoers, and our enemies. This is especially important to remember, as the empathy critique so often gets employed to serve culture war antagonism. The alternative to being tyrannized by other people's feelings and having our moral judgments disabled by them need not be that of of cutting off loving feeling and concern for them, or acting as if moral judgment alone is sufficient to constitute such concern and feeling. A further benefit of tabooing or reducing the conceptual freight of terms like empathy and our vocabulary may be that of greater openness to the insights of other frameworks, which use the same term in different ways.

For instance, many have used the language of empathy to speak of the capacity of imaginatively and sympathetically entering into other people's ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. Such a capacity will make us considerably more effective at bridging the divides between our conceptual and perceptual worlds and those of others. Empathy so defined doesn't really fall under the criticisms typically raised against empathy, but honing our capacity for it could really help in our empathy debates. This and many other reflections like it are found on the substack, the anchored Agarcy, which I share with my wife, Susanna. If you would like to support my work here, there, and elsewhere, please consider doing so using my Patreon or PayPal accounts. The links to

those are below. God bless, and thank you for listening.