It is quite remarkable that at this moment of history when more than a billion of people live in dire poverty and hunger, tens of thousands are dying in ugly wars over money and power, there are a hundred million refugees, and, even in peaceful and affluent countries, thousands are losing their jobs for purely political reasons - that at this moment Mr. Elon Musk should decide to announce on social media that we, as a civilization, have too much empathy.
Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others. It’s purely an inner emotional thing, it doesn’t necessarily lead to any action, and it’s often painful. When we see pictures of refugees, or victims of natural disasters, or the victims of our home-made political disasters, most of us feel the pang of sadness. But not Mr. Musk, apparently. The argument that empathy is feeble and somehow feminine is part and parcel of a regressive nostalgia for the old days of toxic masculinity. Real gun-toting, loud-talking tough guys are never troubled by empathy.
History is full of these tough guys, the whole ghastly parade of Roman emperors and European Kings, for a start, and all the way down to Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the “strong men” the President so much admires. There’s nothing new about the assumption that empathy is a dangerous weakness. Sir Edward Gibbon, who wrote the magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was of this opinion. He blamed Christianity for introducing softness into the Roman character and thus making it vulnerable to the barbarians. Some modern Evangelical Christians have apparently taken note of this and decided that loving thy neighbor is no longer the way to go. Only losers love their neighbor.
The trouble with empathy is that it makes life more difficult. It gets in the way of things that tough guys need to do, like bullying. It creates complications, it forces us think about things we might prefer not to think about, like other people’s feelings, and it makes us sad sometimes. Empathy is also a risky strategy. When we try to see the other’s point of view we are in danger of being squashed like a bug by those who have only one point of view.
We see how this plays out in politics, in the fake toughness of prominent men who have perfected the sour, hostile, swaggering adolescent pose, a toxic mixture of fear and aggression. We see it on our TV screens all the time, and it’s a sad spectacle to see men in their sixties and seventies wearing expensive suits but still acting like resentful teenagers, refusing to take responsibility, spitting out childish insults, and choosing sides as if this were a game.
But the adults looked the other way and let the bad boys take over the playground. Nobody stopped them because bad boys can turn nasty.
Perhaps we can no longer afford to feel sorry for all the suffering creatures on the planet, or indeed for the planet itself. We may need to save whatever empathy we have for ourselves.
