Elizabeth Bruenig writes:
A crusade against empathy is sweeping through the right. In sometimes apocalyptic terms, prominent conservatives are denouncing that feeble human capacity to understand the feelings of others….
Barron calmly explained that love, far from mandating kindness, can and often should be harsh. This is a classic right-wing talking point: Conservatives have long argued that refusing to offer social-welfare programs, for example, is a way of teaching the dignity of self-reliance. To sideline traditionally conservative values in favor of allegedly empathy-driven liberal causes is, in Barron’s view, to “undermine the foundations of the West.”
Although I have heard versions of this before, I was still surprised to hear a prelate of the Catholic Church arguing that people should not be empathetic if doing so could come at considerable personal or societal cost. Barron has more than 3.6 million YouTube subscribers, 675,000 Instagram followers, and—as of last week—a presidential appointment to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. His Christian commitments and considerable influence make his interest in these ideas notable.
But his reasoning seems more political than spiritual. Suicidal Empathy and books like it are aimed not at liberals, but at conservatives who may be struggling with a conflict between their politics and their conscience. Arguments about the harms of empathy help justify personal and political behavior that might otherwise seem wrong or feel bad, such as cutting food-stamp benefits for poor people or tearing immigrant mothers away from their children. By claiming that an excess of compassion is in fact a social blight, Saad’s book and others offer a theoretical framework for selfishness….
Saad’s examples include lax immigration laws; high taxes; mandatory sensitivity training; universal health care; “the diversity, inclusion, and equity cult”; every manifestation of anti-Zionism; “twerking drag queens during kindergarten reading hour”; and “communism, socialism, and the welfare and nanny states.” He also offers anecdotes about people who suffered for their empathy, such as the researchers Zaida Catalan and Michael Sharp, who were killed by locals in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were on a mission to investigate human-rights violations there. Saad offers up this case study with a haughty tone and the following observation: “At times, people place themselves in harm’s way in their noble desire to help others.”
I had to pause and read that sentence twice. What Saad meant as a warning against empathy struck me as evidence that human beings are capable of great acts of heroic moral character. In my religious tradition—Catholicism, just like Bishop Barron’s—self-sacrifice represents the apex of love and humility, epitomized by the Crucifixion of Jesus and the lives of many saints. The concept of forgiving those who have wronged us is essential in Christianity, which led me to wonder what Barron and other prominent Christians see in a theory like Saad’s….
Saad and his ideological colleagues may be helping conservatives resolve the tension between their political positions and their moral values, but only by compromising the religious principles at the heart of the Western civilization they purport to defend. And unlike the exhortation to love thy neighbor, this kind of thinking merely reinforces the idea that might makes right.
