End Right’s war on empathy
WHEN British entertainer, Billy Bragg, was interviewed on The Project a few weeks ago, he lamented how there appears to be a “war on empathy”.
He said if you show compassion towards others, care about the planet or animals, you’re described as “virtue signalling” and denigrated.
We don’t have to look very far or hard to come up with examples.
If it’s not our Prime Minister and other politicians degrading schoolchildren for wanting functional policies and action to address climate change, or doctors, groups of journalists and the public calling for something to be done about the refugees on Nauru and Manus Island, or folk calling out sexism, ageism, homophobia and desiring a country and culture that’s inclusive as opposed to exclusive, then it’s conservative commentators levelling the term, or President Donald Trump and other right-wing leaders doing the same.
How has it come to this? Since when did empathy become not only so politicised (apparently, it’s only something Lefty-tree-hugging Greenies do) but a trait that deserves scorn?
And, if those doing the caring are not being called names or abused, their intentions are being misconstrued, dismissed as somehow “PC” and therefore not worth spitting on.
Somehow, in the conservative mindset, as George Lakoff argues in his book The Political Mind, empathy, the quality that underpins democracy and makes us a civil society, has been redefined as an “irrational and idiosyncratic personal feeling”.
Going overboard in the empathy stakes, however, can have its downsides. Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion writes: “but doing actual good, instead of doing what feels good, requires coping with the problems of unintended consequences and being mindful of exploitation from competing, sometimes malicious and greedy interests. To do so, you need to be careful to avoid empathy traps.”
Sure. But it also means you don’t outright reject it as not worth the risk.
Yet so potent has the anti-empathy message become that any expression of reasonableness, kindness or compassion is also copping flak.
In fact, in this war on empathy, kindness and compassion have become collateral damage.
Empathy is the capacity to walk in others’ shoes — not just individuals, but entire groups, communities and species and see the world through their eyes, especially, as Lakoff notes, those who are “in some way oppressed, threatened or harmed”. It can and does make us kinder. Pascal Molenberghs is a lecturer in neuroscience at Monash University, and his writing in The Conversation argues we need empathy because “it helps us understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately to the situation”. As Bragg says, compassion and empathy equal activism. In the conservative mind, this type of approach is considered weak. But if it’s so weak, why are the attacks against it so virulent and personal?
Isn’t it ironic that the qualities we generally search for and rate highly in our prospective partners, foster in children and seek in our friends if not our employers, are regarded as somehow “feeble”, negative and to be belittled when it comes to social issues and politics?
Reaffirming an “us” and “them” mindset, polarising community groups, attitudes and debates and thus simplifying them, the government and its various mouthpieces manage to divide (and conquer) the nation, promoting fear and then deriding anyone who calls them out on such obvious strategies.
When The Spectator journalist, James Bartholomew, used “virtue signalling” in 2015 to describe public, empty gestures intended to convey socially-approved attitudes without peril or sacrifice (for example, altering Facebook profiles to support a cause, or the “Ice Bucket Challenge”), conservatives were given the lexical weapon they needed to shoot down anyone who asked for compassion and kindness when dealing with weighty and complex moral issues.
Since then, as The Guardian’s writer David Shariatmadari has said it has become overused during political debate, to the point it’s now a meaningless ad hominem attack.
Wouldn’t 2019 be a better year if we ended this war and laid down our abusive weapons?