THE RIGHT WAY TO FEEL SOMEONE’S PAIN
‘Against Empathy’ is an invigorating, relevant and often very funny re-evaluation of one of culture’s most ubiquitous sacred cows
Paul Bloom’s new book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, is too highbrow to be a self-help or parenting manual, but parts of it could be. Its wingspan is too wide to be a simple guide to philanthropy, but parts of it could be that as well. And it’s a bit too clotted with caveats to be a seamless read, which is a shame, because it could have been, with more shaping.
Look past the book’s occasional loop-theloops and intellectual fillips. Against Empathy is an invigorating, relevant and often very funny reevaluation of empathy, one of our culture’s most ubiquitous sacred cows, which in Bloom’s view should be gently led to the abattoir. He notes that there are no less than 1,500 books listed on Amazon with “empathy” in the title or subtitle.
In politics, practically no higher value exists than being empathetic. Think of the words “I feel your pain” coming from Bill Clinton through a strategically gnawed lip. Empathy is what is invoked, on both sides, in confrontations between the police and African-Americans. (Imagine how it feels to live in a universe of systematic and serial injustice directed at you; imagine how it feels to work in a profession that continually puts you in harm’s way.)
Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, is having none of it. Empathy, he argues, is “a poor moral guide” in almost all realms of life, whether it’s public policy, private charity or interpersonal relationships. “Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism,” he writes. Offended? He’s just warming up. “It is innumerate,” he continues, “favouring the one over the many. It can spark violence; our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity towards others.”
It turns out that Bloom’s view is far more nuanced than the provocative declaration above. (There are moments when he fireproofs his arguments with so many qualifications that they are hardly inflammatory by the time he’s done.) And he is by no means making the case for heartlessness. His point, rather, is that empathy is untempered by reason, emanating from the murky bayou of the gut. He prefers a kind of rational compassion — a mixture of caring and detached cost-benefit analysis. His book is a systematic attempt to show why this is so.
To those who say empathy is essential to morality, he would reply that morality has many sources. “Many wrongs” — like littering or cheating on your taxes — “have no distinct victims to empathise with.” Nor does it appear that the most empathetic people behave the most ethically. “There have been hundreds of studies, with children and adults,” he writes, “and overall the results are: meh.”
To those who say empathy motivates philanthropy, Bloom wouldn’t dispute it. He personally is not immune, having given money for years to a child — and then the child’s family — in Indonesia. But he’d say that empathy is generally a bad tool to use for allocating resources. We have a limited capacity for feeling the pain of others, and we tend to identify with those who remind us of ourselves. “This perverse moral mathematics,” he explains, “is part of the reason why governments and individuals care more about a little girl stuck in a well than about events that will affect millions.”
Against Empathy covers a great deal of ticklish turf, from neuroscience to political science, from Jesus Christ to Adolf Hitler. But the most emotionally resonant for me was his chapter about empathy in intimate relationships.
Consider parenting. Almost all mothers and fathers have a terrible time tolerating the discomfort of their children. Yet it’s often essential. If parents allowed their children’s pain to overwhelm them, how would they make their kids go to the dentist, do their algebra, or spend their first night away from home? “Good parenting involves coping with the short-term suffering of your child — actually, sometimes causing the short-term suffering of your child,” he writes.
If you live in a state of hypercommunion with others, you run the risk of emotional depletion — or “empathetic distress” as a psychologist might say. It’s useless in the face of suffering. Better to answer with compassion, which doesn’t totally subsume the self.
In this same chapter, however, I also found myself at my most disoriented — possibly because Bloom is at his loosest and most discursive, and possibly because it seems to be the one place where he is most amenable to empathy’s charms. He seems to understand why people who have been wronged would want an empathetic apology. And he writes approvingly of Adam Smith’s observation that we should generally keep our good fortune to ourselves because it will most likely excite envy rather than shared elation in our friends. But that’s an empathetic reaction, is it not? Anticipating our friends’ envy? So maybe empathy still has a place to stave it off?
More than any book I’ve read this year,
Against Empathy is an overt, joyful conversation with readers. In his prologue, Bloom notes that sections of the book initially appeared as essays in a variety of publications, but have since been modified, in part because of reader responses. (Some more constructive than others. “Possibly the dumbest thing I ever read,” was one of the first tweeted comments.) Much later, he admits he’s no longer certain he believes evidence of empathy in infants he cited in his 2013 book
Just Babies.
It all makes you long — in a good way — for a comments section after the endnotes. Bloom has a nice feel for the untidiness of ethical thought.
I would be particularly interested in hearing Bloom weigh in on this year’s presidential election. He has so much faith in reason. Yet “post-truth” was named Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 international word of the year, and an aide to Donald Trump, our president-elect, recently declared on NPR: “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, any more, of facts.” (Or grammar, apparently.)
Towards the end of Against Empathy, Bloom concedes that “rationality in political domains often does seem to be in short supply”. He theorises that this is because people treat politics like sports — their opinions are based on team loyalty, not objective merit. “Political views share an interesting property with views about sports teams — they don’t really matter,” he writes, then further explains: “Unless I’m a member of a tiny powerful community, my beliefs have no effect on the world.”
But of course political beliefs matter. Every four years, they matter a lot. This year they mattered especially. If you believe the worst, the next four years will be low on both empathy and rational compassion. If so, our world won’t be simply be post-truth. It will be post-moral.